In a reluctant vote, the Rochester Select Board granted the leadership of the town’s Council on Aging its wish by unanimously agreeing Monday night to a mask mandate for the Senior Center on DexterLane.
Select Board member Paul Ciaburri was most vocal in his hesitancy.
“I understand where everybody’s coming from, I just don’t like the idea of the mandates. … I don’t know if we really need to mandate,” said Ciaburri. “If the Board of Directors feels that strong about the Council on Aging, I just don’t feel that strongly about mandates. … The finger wagging going on makes people not want to do things. I think we should have a conversation. … We have seniors at risk, I understand that.”
A December 8 letter from the COA requested the mask mandate for the Senior Center.
“We’re hoping you would at least consider the Council on Aging. … The numbers (of positive Covid tests) are climbing here in town. We’re hoping that the mask mandate will help control that,” said COA Board of Directors president Pauline Munroe, who represented the council at the meeting along with Mike Cambra, the COA’s vice president.
“We’re trying to have a program where everybody’s wearing the mask. … Everybody’s looking at it like it’s no big deal. Well it is a big deal,” said Cambra.
Until December 20, the COA had been posting a sign encouraging people to wear masks.
“I’m active up there — was there today — they’re concerned. It’s easier for the director if they had our support,” said Select Board member Woody Hartley, who serves on the COA Board of Directors. Noting CDC recommendations, Hartley said, “We don’t want to wait until we’ve lost somebody.”
Town Counsel Blair Bailey reminded the Select Board that it can authorize protocols for all town buildings. The board was also reminded that at the beginning of the pandemic, the board had said it would respect the Council on Aging’s Board of Directors.
“It would need the vote of this board and the Board of Health. … I talked to Karen (Walega, Rochester’s health director,) and they said they’d do it as well,” said Bailey. “Given the number of cases in town, they’ve gone up considerably. … That (Senior Center) building was part of the conversation.”
Karen Thomas, a retired nurse and a senior citizen who attended the meeting, was given the floor and asserted that common practices involving the repeated wearing of and storing of cloth masks are often unsanitary and that requiring people to wear them is against their constitutional rights and in many cases unhealthy.
“We’re not going to take N95s from the healthcare community,” she said of the industry standard, arguing that the alternatives worn by the general public are failing them.
Hartley said it is not appropriate for her to say in a Select Board meeting what constitutional law is. Thomas said, “I’m not saying what constitutional law is.”
“I think the point is at the Senior Center it’s not about having the sniffles,” said Bailey, implying the elevated vulnerability of senior citizens to the coronavirus.
Hartley made a motion to mandate masks for the Council on Aging at the Senior Center only. “I will second it because it’s at the Senior Center only, I’m against a mask mandate,” said Select Board Chairman Brad Morse. Ciaburri then relented on his opposition and said, “As long as it’s the Senior Center only.”
All three Select Board members voted “I,” and the mandate carried.
In her Town Administrator’s Report, Suzanne Szyndlar told the board that March 4 is the deadline for the submission of articles for the May 23 Town Meeting warrant.
The FY23 budget season has begun, and capital requests are due from department heads by January 17.
Szyndlar announced a submission of over $100,000 in CARES Act, Covid-related reimbursable expenditures. Rochester’s total to date has reached $904,000, and Szyndlar credited Assistant Accountant Kathy Mchenry for “a great job” in preparing and processing the town’s many invoices for CARES Act submissions.
Municipalities will transition to the new ARPA funding program with Rochester’s potential apportionment capped at $1,700,000.
Bailey suggested asking town departments to build in a buffer in their individual requests “because everything keeps going up in costs. … If we don’t use it, we don’t use it.”
In other public-session business, the board voted to approve the appointment of Travis Lalli to the Rochester Agricultural Commission. Morse abstained from the vote, citing that his and Lalli’s farms are adjacent to one another.
Before the board entered executive session to discuss negotiations with union and nonunion personnel and did not return to open session, Szyndlar addressed the January meeting schedule, noting that the board’s second meeting of 2022 would fall on January 17, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The board agreed to meet instead on Monday, January 24.
The next meeting of the Rochester Select Board is scheduled for Monday, January 3, at 6:00 pm.
Rochester Select Board
By Mick Colageo