Page 12 - 2022 Annual Report

Engineering for this type of project goes in similar stages as the water/sewer engineering.
So far this has consisted of obtaining a grant of $70,000 to hire an engineering company to
lay out, or “scope” the basic design of a downtown improvement scenario. That study (a
public document) led to the next step--obtaining an $80,000 grant to further develop the ideas
suggested in the first study resulting in a Preliminary Engineering Report. The town had a
small 10% match required for these studies.
The next step for this project is to obtain funding for the Final Design, which will lock in the
design so that contractors can bid on the project. The town has submitted a grant application to
the Federal Lands Access Program for over one million dollars to pay for the cost of hiring an
engineering company to do the Final Design and for engineering services through construction.
The town is eligible for this grant because we are the last stop with full services for travelers
before the Silvio O. Conte National Wildlife Refuge. Those who are familiar with grant
funding know that writing successful applications for grants like these is a task in itself, but the
harder part is that if the grants are awarded, then the project has to be planned and completed
and the grant funds properly managed and reported to the grant source. It’s our experience that
anyone who provides funds for a project wants to know the project was done properly and the
funds were properly accounted for.

Infrastructure – Town Hall Sewer
About ten years ago it was discovered that the Town Hall fuel tank that was buried
underground had sprung a leak. The state Pollution Cleanup Fund (PCF) was immediately
notified and the PCF has been covering the costs of a consulting firm brought in to help the
town deal with the problem. That firm has been trying to determine the extent of the spill and
what needs to be done to resolve the problem. They have dug more than a dozen monitoring
wells in the area around the hall to see which way the plume of leaked fuel oil is headed. The
consultant developed a plan to inject a carbon slurry into the ground through one of the wells
to neutralize the spilled oil, but in the process accidentally drilled a hole in the sewer main
coming from Sunrise Manor. This resulted in some amount of the carbon slurry ending up at
the sewer treatment plant and then into the lagoons. The state was notified, but this event just
added to the problems at the aging WWTP, which was not designed to handle chemical waste
like this. The PCF will pay for almost all of this project.

Park Pavilion Project
While the preliminary engineering was going on for the downtown revitalization project,
a grant came along that would pay for improvements to the pavilion park area that were in
line with the other improvements being planned for the downtown. This project is in Final
Design stage, and involves some landscaping and paved paths to the lake to achieve the long-
sought goal of bringing the lake and the downtown closer. It is not every village that has a
commercial downtown on a lakeshore, and past planning studies have affirmed that we need to
take advantage of that.

Appraisal and Reappraisal
This year the state notified us that we need to do a complete reappraisal of the town. This is
largely due to the active real estate market over the past Covid years. Many Vermont towns
experienced increased property values, but there are only so many professional appraisers
available so our reappraisal will not start until 2025. We have had to upgrade our technology
that Listers and appraisers use. A new appraiser has been hired as well as a new tax mapping
company.

12 Town of Brighton, VT