Several weeks of work that Marion Health Agent Ana Wimmer put into formulating dumpster regulations were put through the shredder in but an hour during the March 3 public meeting of the town’s Board of Health.
Alarmed by a set of proposed regulations that they strongly feel do not apply to their businesses and would only result in bureaucracy-driven paralysis of their operations, several entrepreneurs attended the meeting to voice their objections.
The common message was don’t fix what isn’t broken.
“There’s an awful lot in this regulation that goes after (waste haulers), I would describe as harassing them,” said Tucker Burr of Burr Brothers Boats, Inc., who prepared a detailed list of notes in response to the proposed regulations.
Burr said that between 10 and 15 years ago Marion had a municipal dumpster service that fell into disrepair and was discontinued. Business owners, he said, were instructed to arrange their own private services. “These companies strictly volunteer to come to our town. If you end up overburdening them … they might decide that Marion is a place they don’t want to do business,” he said.
Waste-hauler violation fines proposed in new regulations would begin at $300 for a first offense, $600 for a second offense and $1,000 for a third. Dumpster-operator violations were scheduled out at $100, $300 and $600.
What the board intended to do with the regulations, said Board of Health Chairperson Dot Brown, is leverage “a few bad actors,” but lacking any regulations the board has been powerless to act on recent complaints emanating from a residential housing project. Therefore, the members requested that the health agent study other towns’ practices and produce a working set of rules that could address such situations.
“It’s public health, that’s what we’re trying to protect here,” said Brown of the proposed regulations that would levy fines on trash haulers. “If you’re a good citizen and doing the right thing, our purpose is to not let the bad citizen get away with it. We’re not asking you to get a new permit, even every year. …
“If somebody isn’t a good actor, we have a way to enforce something. Right now we have nothing.”
Wimmer told the meeting that she had received four or five complaints from June 2021 throughout the summer and into the fall. She said the problems resulted in raccoons. “This is the solution that was proposed by the board,” she said.
Upon hearing several other business owners echo and/or elaborate on Burr’s sentiments including Dan Crete of Saltworks Marine, Mark Riley of Top of the Hill Liquors, Todd Zell of Brew Fish restaurant, Chris Washburn, Ryan Cosman of Barton’s Boatyard and Michael Sudofsky of Sky Development, board member Dr. Ed Hoffer suggested the regulations need to go back to the drawing board.
“It really helps if you write down some of your excellent objections as Tucker has here,” said Brown, suggesting that the think-tank of business owners can assist in the process.
Tension was already high for the March 3 public-comment session after the Board of Health’s failure to post the required 48-hour notice of its February 17 agenda until the morning of the meeting scheduled for 4:00 pm. The notice that was posted did not contain the required time stamp from the town clerk’s office, according to attorney John P. Mathieu of New Bedford-based Mathieu & Mathieu Attorneys and Counselors At Law.
Mathieu sent the board a letter on February 17, advising its members that he intended to file an Open Meeting Law Complaint with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts pursuant to MGL Chapter 30A, Section 20 (b).
The meeting was called off, and the next day the Town of Marion issued a statement apologizing for the cancelation: “The Proposed Dumpster regulations that were the subject of the Public Hearing have been discussed in multiple open meetings. There was some interest in yesterday’s meeting and as such we welcome input on the proposed regulations. We encourage either written input or comments at our meeting on March 3, 2022 where time will be allotted for comments on the proposed regulations. The proposal will then be finalized and the public hearing rescheduled.”
Brown and the board addressed the matter at the start of their March 3 public meeting.
“There was a time sensitivity and mistakes were made, and we apologize for that. We have changed our procedures,” said Brown after reading a letter that Health Director Lori Desmarais prepared for the state attorney general. The board voted to approve the letter in response to Mathieu’s complaint.
The business owners felt wrongly targeted not only by the threat of losing their private services due to what they consider an unreasonable schedule of fines but because of proposed regulations that would undermine operations already governed by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection.
“That fee schedule is scary,” said Riley. “If a guy makes a mistake, … we are going to lose people in town.” Riley said that, if the town is going to write any new regulations, “it should be extremely targeted at a known problem and not anything else. … Five sentences, I know we can’t do it, but that should be the goal.”
Brown thanked Hoffer for his time serving as the board’s chair.
The next meeting of the Marion Board of Health is scheduled for Thursday, March 17, at 4:00 pm.
Marion Board of Health
By Mick Colageo