Alna Facilities Planning Committee

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Date: March 04,2008

Time: 07:00 PM - 09:00 PM

Location: Fire House

Meeting Minutes:

Alna Facilities Planning Committee Meeting, March 4, 2008, held at the Firehouse at 7 p.m.

Present: Tom Albee (TA), Nick Caristo (NC), Gordon Davis (GD), John Green (JG), Fred Gumkowski (FG), Kathy Pendleton (KP) and Cliff Russell (CR)

Absent: Brian Lawrence

Also present:   Mike Trask, Roger Whitney and Paul Ouellette from the AVFD.

The first item on the agenda was the question of how to interest Alna citizens in the facilities decisions they will face at the Town Meeting at the end of this month.   NC has written a letter to the few non-VFD attendees at the public information meeting in February asking them to talk with their friends and neighbors.   He will also submit to the Lincoln Co. News and the Wiscasset newspaper the brief AFPC report prepared for the Town’s Annual Report.   The VFD distributed to the committee copies of its efforts along these lines: a brochure with cover picture of the department personnel followed by six pages of text by Chris Cooper describing their duties and philosophy and discussing the importance of the coming decision.

Turning to matters related to the Town Meeting itself the committee made several decisions (all unanimously):

·         To put off until the June Town Meeting a Warrant article dealing with the existing Town Office building;   (Because of the connections between the fate of this building and the possible decisions on the future of VFD facilities, its presence on the March Warrant seemed to make an already complex decision more so.)

·         To eliminate the part of the article authorizing construction of a new, free-standing firehouse that would have directed the Selectmen to “consider” selling the existing firehouse if the new building were to be built;

·         That NC and JG will discuss the structure of the remaining two Warrant articles with the town’s attorney within the week;

·         That the committee will commission the preparation of elevations of the renovated firehouse so that symmetric visual information is available for the two firehouse options.

After these decisions, the committee returned to what has proved to be a difficult issue, the current ownership of the existing firehouse and its future ownership if the town chooses the renovation and enlargement option.   After a lively discussion, the VFD representatives agreed that the department would vote at its next meeting on the proposition that, if option B (renovation and enlargement) is chosen by the town, the ownership of the building will be formally transferred from the VFD to the town for a token payment.

NC then told the committee that he had received an appraisal of the existing Town Office building commissioned by the committee.   It valued the building at $205,000 assuming: (1) the installation of a full kitchen;   (2) that the building would be sold with the full 12 acres of land it was bought with.   Because a new firehouse, if it were to be built, would require approximately 10 acres, and because a sale of the Webster House would probably depend on the construction of such a new alternative to the existing firehouse, the appraiser provided a value “correction factor”: subtraction of $1000 per acre for any reduction in the land area to be sold.

GD volunteered to explore the current situation where construction loans and mortgages are concerned.   He will call the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture to find out if it still has mortgage loans available for rural community firehouses and check on interest rates and terms if it does.   He will also talk with one or more local banks to see about availability and terms for construction loans as well as mortgages.   (It was noted that the town currently banks with Bath Savings).

The committee agreed to meet again on the 10^th of March and to work toward a second public information meeting on the 27^th, two days before the town Meeting.