BELLOWS FALLS-Rockingham voters will soon vote on our town's purchase of the Bellows Falls Train Station, a property with a long history of deferred maintenance and environmental contamination.
Costs to address the known problems with the building and site will total millions of dollars. Hazardous materials issues at the site include contamination with volatile solvents - chemicals that are much like those with a history of harm at numerous industrial and military sites. Projected costs have increased substantially during planning. Recent figures for mitigating the hazmat and the basic restoration of the building now exceed $4.5 million.
The proposed purchase and the essential work would draw heavily on town funds. It also would depend on a very complex array of grants.
The unacceptable liabilities of chemical contamination are reason enough to cast the idea of the purchase in a negative light. If you also predict the property's future of burdening taxpayers, the uncertainty of grant funding, and the scarcity of eager future tenants, then you have a second, third, and fourth indelible reason to vote down our town's purchase of the train station. If the staggering $4.5 million figure weren't discouraging enough, it won't include improving the building for commercial use.
The expansion of automated vehicle (AV) testing in Vermont represents a very slippery slope. At the joint board meeting of the Rockingham Selectboard and Bellows Falls Village Trustees on Tuesday, June 29, the boards are expected to discuss and possibly make a critical decision on AV testing on our...
The proposed merger of Bellows Falls and the town of Rockingham soon comes to a vote. At Bellows Falls' first merger hearing, a lone booster for the proposal suggested that the town of Rockingham could be likened to God. I was relieved to learn Scripture doesn't support that notion.
Dec. 4 is the date for an important vote to adopt the amended charter for the Bellows Falls Village Corporation. The following is based on my personal perspective. This amended charter, the first revision of the charter in many decades, is the product of a revision process that began several years ago. Over the past 14 months, the Charter Revision Committee met 12 times in legally warned public meetings. The revision process included two public hearings for the public to...
The Commons not mailing to this subscriber, as requested, is appreciated and is in sharp contrast to the practice of the publishers of the four non-subscription papers that arrive weekly in my Bellows Falls mailbox. These four papers are the Bellows Falls Town Crier, The River Record, The Shopper, and The Message for the Week. They all just keep coming, despite emails as well as phone contact with each publisher over the past few months. Emails to each publisher seem...
At once ephemeral and durable. Exquisite performance art. For the second year, November has been witness to power line contract crews working on the upgrade of high-voltage transmission lines on Fall Mountain in Walpole, N.H. This is a small part of ongoing line upgrade work occurring throughout the region. Most notably, there have been many hours of small turbine-powered helicopters unflinchingly hovering and deftly maneuvering in turbulent air with external loads, sometimes with external crews. These captivating performances won't be...
To: My Rockingham Select-persons, my village trustees, my municipal manager, my village police chief, and local friends: A very central issue on the Shelter proposed for Canal Street [story, page 1] is how the village was not consulted by the town regarding the location. This action on the part of town officials defies all reasonable standards of decorum or protocol. Explanations of this administrative discourtesy are encouraged. It is the village police department that stands first and foremost to be...