Poland Select Board approves Camp Connor payback cut, library shelving RFP

[8:41] Chair (Select Board Chair): Thank you for joining us on our select board select board of select persons meeting tonight. It's Tuesday, October 6 2026 We are live in hybrid and zoom Our agenda today tonight will be managers report our financial reports The seat new business will be the CDC BHA funding the camp counter payback library furniture and bookshelves and then any other business we may have at the end of the meeting and right now I'd like to rise for our National Pledge of Allegiance I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all [9:38] Speaker B (unidentified): right go to our manager's report on page two manager report for [9:44] Town Manager: six october for the library we hosted the usda main director gave a tour usda is the federal agency that oversees the grant that we got and they've been extremely helpful at all levels gave update brief and tour the library all the concrete's poured now the external walls are up the elevator shaft is complete the exterior walkway roof is up we're waiting for trusses to go over the new area and the expanded lobby but that's moving along on the park we received an extension on the grant until next september and that was no problem there the airport we gave a tour and airport briefing to the lewiston auburn chamber of commerce ceo and chair of the Lewiston Auburn Economic Growth Committee. The reason that's important is those folks deal with economic development and even though the airport is in Auburn Lewiston, the airport director, Jonathan Labonte, he does a great job, but it's not just the airport. The airport owns land that's adjacent to it and Auburn owns property that's adjacent to the airport land. There's a There's the propane area there, the CMP has their telephone poles, there's all kinds of other stuff, there's the Lewiston-Auburn Railroad Corporation, they have a short line that comes down there and goes right into Lewiston, so it's a lot more than just the airport, and it was really instructive to see how Jonathan Labonte ties that all together. Other, I attended the main Municipal Association legislative policy committee reviewed current positions in a number of areas, and the main things that we were looking at were property tax relief and getting that through additional revenue from the state. So there are a number of things that were being floated, and I supported all of them, from increased revenue sharing, more share of the state park fees, a higher school subsidy, all that stuff. I don't think all of those things are gonna make it through. It's just too many of them, but I think that we'll send the message to the legislature that there's got to be more coming to various towns and cities in Maine. The other thing that I think folks should realize, just because State says they're going to give us this money, a, they have to give it to us, but b, it comes from somewhere. Something else is not going to be done. Either the state has to generate a different additional revenue or they cut their budget in another area, but a lot of people are thinking about how we might address property tax relief and subject to questions, that's the manager report. [12:41] Chair (Select Board Chair): That's good you brought that to [12:43] Town Manager: the forefront. Financial report for this week, we're just under 27 percent through the year, doing pretty good. Motor vehicle excise, the largest variable revenue, is just slightly above a glide slope of twenty eight and a half percent. We see on the expense report just the summary page there, we're doing fine. The financial services area is a lot higher at 40%. Why? Because we, you know, paid an RSU 16 bill, we transferred money to the CIP's, and we paid our county tax in full, but that's not detrimental. That's normal. Elsewhere in the budget, we're on track, and I'm, I'm happy with where we are at this point. Subject any questions, that's the financial report. Okay. Second. Mark. Aye. Jim. Yes. John. Yes. Lisa. Yes. Jackson. Yes. 5-0, you've approved the financial report. [13:54] Chair (Select Board Chair): We're going to move on to page 21 for the CEDC BHA funding. [13:59] Town Manager: So this is our business after hours receipt, and to understand it was a great event held at Agassiz Village. They're asking for the authorization to spend $1,170. $170 their limits on a thousand and I recommend we approve it. 's a great event. Maybe they work hard to make them a success. [14:20] Speaker B (unidentified): Yeah, I'll make a motion to approve. [14:25] Town Manager: Mark, yeah, Jim. Yes, John. Yes, Lisa. Yes Jackson. Yes, I go to five to zero you approved the CDC VH V8 H funding request the amount of Camp Connor payback Scott Siegel and I talked about this. I'm sure you're all aware the town bought Camp Connor down off of Conner Lane about 10 years ago and it's been a big success. That is an absolutely huge thing for not just kids but parents in the summertime. Over the course of that time we bought it for $210,000 and we paid back about half of it. We've been doing that in an annual payment of fourteen thousand dollars the earlier in the payback scheme we asked to miss a year and that was during covid and we just didn't have the campers to pay that we're asking for the board to authorize us to pay eight thousand instead of fourteen thousand dollars this year the reason is we've had some higher than expected costs and we want to end up at the beginning of next year with a large enough corpus of funds to pay for minor repairs. Scott's done some hard work thinking what is he going to do to fix that problem. He's going to look for more donations to scholarships to support families to attend versus having those funds come directly out of the budget. that 's a big hit to his budget but it's a very good thing that we do that because there's a lot of families you know particularly have more than one kid you can't get your kid off to off to that summer camp so we'll take a look at how we might do that increase the registration fee we talked about that last year in advance of this year but we're trying to keep that down so we don't exacerbate the problem of families not being able to send kids to the camp and we're gonna find some cost savings In our activity and field trip budget living might be on transportation or just not do as many off-site field trips but happy to answer any questions but we do need a vote to authorize the payment to the 8,000 place $14,000 what is the registration Oh gosh, I think it's $110 or $135 a week, something like that. [17:01] Chair (Select Board Chair): So what would we, so which I like the fact that he didn't leave it at that, you guys didn't leave it at that, and you have options. So how much of an increase would you have if you went that route, did you know? [17:15] Town Manager: I don't know yet, and that's something Scott and I will have to sit down and have a talk about, because while we're trying to generate more revenue, we don't want to make it harder for people to go to camp. So just so you know, you know, I've been down there a couple of times every summer to see how things are going, and it's a real shot in the arm. You see here all these kids are all playing, there's a theme every week, they have a wonderful time. And I had a chance to talk some of the parents were picking these kids up, and you know, so they're talking about, one auntie was picking her niece up and who was doing canoeing for the first time ever, you know. They do, they're doing, it's not just they sit around and you know tell stories, it's real neat stuff that they're doing, and they're getting an experience of a lifetime, and nobody's on their tablet all day. And the other part of this I don't think a lot of people may be fully cognizant of, but if you're working, the camp opens up early enough where you can drop your child off, and they go to camp, and you can pick them up after work. And that's a big deal. That's because in inner Stroud and County, two-parent households, I think it's 75% both parents work. And they need to do that, so that's a big deal. [18:43] Speaker B (unidentified): It's a lot cheaper than daycare, too. Yeah. [18:46] Chair (Select Board Chair): Yeah, $107 a week, yeah. [18:49] Speaker D (unidentified): Yeah, so there's no like interest ramifications, this is just a debt that's the rack owes to the [18:54] Town Manager: town. That's right, so the town paid for the purchase of the camp, two hundred ten thousand dollars out of the unassigned fund balance. We didn't take out a loan to do that. The deal was we would pay this back over time, okay, so that you know eventually the entire amount but [19:10] Speaker D (unidentified): it's interest-free. Yeah, so and they're not doing a terrible job of paying it back, I mean, yeah, considering the amount of time involved, I mean they just got it in 2017. [19:21] Speaker B (unidentified): So we need a [19:22] Town Manager: motion either to approve or not approve the 8 000 payback. I'd make a motion to approve the [19:30] Speaker D (unidentified): 8 000 payback. This is worth, I'll [19:35] Speaker B (unidentified): second that. John, yes. Oh yes, Mark, Jim, yes, Lisa, yes, Jackson, yes. [19:44] Town Manager: By vote of five to zero, you approve the eight thousand dollar payback for Camp Connor. Thank you [19:50] Speaker B (unidentified): for that. All [19:53] Chair (Select Board Chair): right, we'll move on to the library furniture and bookshelf RLA, so we want to buy [20:02] Town Manager: Some bookshelves and this RFP is going to get us down that road. The and I asked the board to approve that. I've reached out to a number of companies and received some positive feedback so far. The interesting, we have asked the main state prison if they would come down take a look and they did. They do that kind of stuff. They took some measurements. We'll see how that works. We're looking at how we might do this. The goal is to have bookshelves that are actually going to work for the next, you know, 40 years or so. The stuff we had in there, some of it we were able to save, some of the larger ones. The other stuff, particularly the smaller wooden ones, were just, they couldn't be saved. The ones that were against the wall were dented and in many cases the bottoms of that were rusted out. So this will be a big a big deal to get that going. We're trying to figure out how that's going to work and we've got there is some interest in firms participating in that bidding process. So the layout looks great. Yeah that's that's the record like a swag. Yeah so we'll see how it goes. The idea is that we're going to have some of these things are in the middle of the room on casters so that we can move around say we want to have an event upstairs in the library that we could move them and that'll also mean that you know going forward if we need to change the layout we can do that without totally messing things up. Those to be a combination with metal [21:50] Speaker B (unidentified): shelving type thing. Yeah I would I want to go all wood. I want to go durable. Yeah [21:59] Town Manager: that we can afford that's that's the thing. It's so let's say we pick a company and we're not going to be able to buy all the bookshelves that we want. Well we're not going to buy all the bookshelves that we want. We'll buy the ones that we can afford and then over time they're not going to be like a bazillion dollars but we may not have enough at this point in time to do it. But we'll look at putting some more money in our budget and buying additional bookshelves. But my goal here when we do this is they've all got to look the same or pretty doggone close to the same. They've got to be durable and when you walk in there, you've got to go, okay, this is the library that I'm proud of. So it's going to look good and it will look good, but we just got to keep our eyes, keep focused on quality. [23:02] Chair (Select Board Chair): Yeah, so how, yeah, so it might be tough. [23:06] Public commenter: Excuse me for interrupting, but I was going to say, I can tell you from personal experience that the quality of work from the prison is amazing. My family has furniture, probably 60 of them, and it's just, the prison, they do amazing, work and it's really cool yeah well that's wonderful really good too [23:27] Town Manager: yeah they were they were the first people to raise their hand and come down and so you know we'll see how we go here but we need to start this now because we want to get these things whoever we end up going with on order so we can get them here and put in the library by [23:45] Chair (Select Board Chair): the march time frame so we want everything to match though it's nearly is that only a kind of a sticking point thing if we can't do it all at once how are you supposed to kind of match it up [23:55] Town Manager: can they if it's a main state prison yeah they'll have the drawings that they're if it's another vendor and we go say a metal shelving system you know we could go with even a slightly different style as long as it's fairly close in color you don't have to be completely exact but I think you want things to look uniform yeah exactly we don't want them too tall so some of our elderly patrons can't reach the top shelves of the larger bookshelves we have yeah you know it's making it easy for folks to [24:31] Public commenter: enjoy the library boy there's something about wooden shelves in a book in a library nice [24:35] Town Manager: yeah but this one I need to get a vote on to put that out so what do you what do you need Matt to approve the library furniture and bookshelves RFP hold on just one second [24:52] Speaker B (unidentified): yeah the this has its own budget now right bookshelves itself the money that we have [24:59] Town Manager: set aside for the library is where we're gonna get and what's that up to I don't know the exact amount yet because we have a new payment request that we're processing so that will that will change the amount we have but so I can't give you an exact answer right now I don't know what they're gonna charge us for the bookshelves so yeah do [25:29] Speaker B (unidentified): you think that what we have in budget is gonna get [25:32] Town Manager: roughly what we need for bookshelves maybe and I'm not trying to flip it I think when we started this it's going to be tight and you know I think you know we're going to build the building the bookshelves we're going to get some bookshelves are they going to be every single one that we want I hope so if it's not it's not the end of the world because there's a way to way to get out of that and I think folks would understand that instead of compromising and getting something that we do not want We're just going to stay focused and get the quality stuff that's going to last for the next four years or [26:12] Chair (Select Board Chair): so what's he, you have a plan as far as trying to recoup some of the funds like we briefly left up maybe some fundraisers and donations we raised 62 [26:22] Town Manager: two almost 63,000 over the course of the summer, so because they've never got a lot of money, but you know we have a production meeting Friday and we'll talk about, you know, where we are with funding and all that, so you know I'm not giving you a very good answer how much money we have because I just, I don't have an up-to-date, yeah, accounting that's going to be and it's going to change based on this meeting on Friday. When are you hoping to get bids in? Get what then? Get your bids in how this will come in and you'll see them on November 17th. [27:06] Speaker B (unidentified): So they have a better one. [27:09] Town Manager: Yeah, so the process is, I talked about six or seven companies, is that they've got the RFP, we're going to get on a Teams or a Zoom meeting so we can talk about specific requirements and I'll send some photos if they need that, and then they can send us here's what we can do for you, either it's make the stuff or here's the list of stuff you can buy from us, and then we can, you know, have a think about what we want to do and make a recommendation to the board. Yeah, hey [27:51] Chair (Select Board Chair): Mark, did [27:53] Speaker D (unidentified): you get started on it? Right, I mean it's, this is a, it should be an easy one, so yeah, I have a motion to approve the request for do [28:02] Public commenter: we have any other questions or anything, Jim? Well, let's second it first. Okay, second, and now discussion, Mark. [28:13] Speaker B (unidentified): Yes, Jim. [28:14] Town Manager: Yes, John, yes, Lisa, yes, Jackson, five. Oh, you approved the library furniture and book sales. Yeah, thank you. All right, [28:26] Chair (Select Board Chair): and then we'll go over to our, go to page 28, authorized [28:36] Public commenter: cast disbursements, I'm going to get that word out before next June, disbursements for the fiscal year 2027 totaling 525, forty five thousand two hundred eighteen dollars and sixty three cents. Mark, yes, [28:53] Town Manager: Jim, yes, John, yes, business marketing. [29:08] Speaker D (unidentified): Well, like I was saying about my field trip, I went with the historic society to the heavy mine, which was fascinating. People in Poland don't know about this mine, it's totally worth knowing about. Jeff Morrison was an excellent tour guide and there are some really exciting stuff coming out of that mine, so people should be proud that it's right local. A lot of it, his tourmaline gets sold right through Cross Jewelers and it really is a fantastic walk around and he's really somebody that's worth Listening to and if you have any kind of interest or your kids have any kind of interest in geology, you should really arrange some sort of a tour with them. Yeah, no, it was a good time. And by all means get out there and hang out with the historic society because they're a wild bunch, a lot of fun. We had a lot of fun. [30:04] Chair (Select Board Chair): I'm good. What? [30:07] Speaker B (unidentified): Was that nothing from me? Thank you. All right, a motion to a year. I'll make a motion to be a jerk. A second, Mark. [30:18] Town Manager: Yes. Jim. Yes. John. Yes. Lisa. Yes. Jackson. Yes. I go, meeting's adjourned.