Holliston’s Select Board held its weekly meeting on Monday, July 17, 2023. Chair John Cronin called the meeting to order at 7:00pm and immediately moved to the first agenda item.

Update on Town’s Solar Project – Capped Landfill on Marshall Street (Consultant: Beacon Integrated Solutions)

Below (top center) Beth Greenblatt, Holliston’s solar project consultant, and Anna Noucas (bottom left) and Rennie Friedman (bottom right) from solar project contractor Sol Systems provided an update on the status of this long-awaited Town project.

The slides below outline the current status and the projected timeline for engineering, procurement of materials, and construction.

Sol Systems is finalizing financing in the next few weeks to spread the financial burden of the project’s cost.

With financing nailed down, the mechanics of the project should begin in the fall of this year.  Depending on the weather and supply chains, construction should begin in March of 2024.

The Town will receive its first lease payment by the end of September 2023.  Once construction begins, it’s about 3 – 4 months of building and a couple months of wiring / connections.  Sol Systems expects construction noise to be minimal as no demolition or piledriving is involved at this project site.  Mrs. Hein thanked Sol Systems for again awarding two scholarships to HHS 2023 graduates.  The Board thanked the presenters for the update and looks forward to September.

Review Draft Pavement Management Report (Consultant: Beta)

Below, Anthony Garro, Beta SVP (bottom right) and Rick Stinson, Beta Associate (bottom left) presented a report compiled for the Town by Beta regarding the surface conditions of nearly 100 miles of roads maintained by Holliston.

Basically, Beta staff spent about one week earlier this year traveling all town roadways, surveying the conditions using LiDAR and 360-degree photography to pinpoint road surface conditions.

Not being a highway engineer, I think it best to let Beta’s slides (below) tell the story.

The circular arrows on boxes 4 and 5 indicate that planning is ongoing and regularly reviewed for progress / needs.

The little blue cars (below) were out and about in Holliston.  LiDAR is a technology that uses laser beams to measure distances and create 3D maps of the Earth’s surface or objects.

The focus of the study was the Town Accepted roadways – 91.78 miles.

Pavement inspection scores were assigned to all the roadways surveyed.  The scoring grid is below.

Examples of each road condition are shown on the following slides.

The table below puts costs to the various levels of maintenance for the number of miles currently in each condition.

Road condition is not the only factor to consider – the volume of traffic on the roadway is also a factor as shown below.

Mrs. Hein noted that the street map below shows Norfolk St. as in need of rehabilitation and it is top on the Town’s horizontal infrastructure plan as approved at Town meeting / election.

The Holliston DPW will have access to this software (below) to analyze the data collected from this April’s survey.

Trained users can click on a dot along a roadway (illustrated below) and see the photograph of the road at that specific location.

Beta will remain available to the Town to get users up to speed on the software and keep the pavement plan up to date. These data can / will be merged with similarly formatted data from the two Stantec reports: water infrastructure and sidewalk infrastructure.

Of course, what is realistic for Holliston using available State Chapter 90 and other grants.  Most recently, the Town has received slightly less than $1 million / year.  Using the chart below, it will take about $1.5 million / year to maintain our current 73.9 overall rating (which is near the top of the “normal” range for other New England communities that Beta works with).

The Board thanked Mr. Garro and Mr. Stinson for their work and commitment to continue to work with Holliston to turn these data into tangible plans.

Warrants: The Board unanimously approved two warrants – FY 23 $2,168,122.00 and FY 24 $355,782.72

Public Comment:

• Mr. Sparrell:
  • Holliston’s Household Hazardous Waste Day is this coming Saturday – > https://hollistonreporter.com/2023/07/holliston-household-hazardous-waste-day-july-22nd/
  • Community Sing this Friday at the Historical Society -> https://hollistonreporter.com/2023/07/community-sing-this-friday-at-the-historical-society/
• Mrs. Hein:
  • Passed along parental feedback from last week’s HPD Jr. Police Academy experience, thanking officers Woods, Grace, Ciavarra, and Keefe for their work.
  • Attended the second Downtown Sewer forum last week.  The project is a “voluntary program to support downtown businesses”, according to Pio Lombardo the chief engineer on the project.
• Mr. Cronin:
  • Congratulated the Holliston Lions for their successful 60^th summer carnival. 
• Public: None

Comments from the Town Administrator:  Mr. Ahern provided the following updates:

• Grant Award for costs of transition to regional public safety dispatch with Holbrook RECC – while the grant award is not yet official – it is likely that the Town will receive about $4.5 million from the State to offset the hardware and communications enhancements needed to connect Holliston to the Holbrook RECC.
• Introduction & Appointment of Assistant Fire Chief / EMS Director scheduled for Thursday, July 20, 2023, at 6:30pm. This will be a hybrid meeting.
• Envision Future Holliston received drafts of a vision, mission, goals, etc. from consultant BerryDunn.  These drafts will be posted on the Social Pinpoint site soon -> https://berrydunn.mysocialpinpoint.com/holliston-strategic-plan
• The next ARPA Steering Group meeting will be on August 10^th.

Board Business: The Board took the following actions:

• Appointed Carl F. Damigella to the Holliston Housing Authority Board – (through May 2028)

Other Business:

The Board voted to approve the event permit request for the Community Sing on Friday, July 21^st to include the use of sound amplification between 5:30 and 8:30pm.

The Select Board will NOT meet on Monday, July 24, 2023, and Monday August 21, 2023.

The meeting adjourned at 8:16pm.