Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Anaerobic digestion is 'not recommended' by the Planning Board

The Planning Board heard the joint presentation by Jeff Nutting, Town Administrator and MassDEP representatives, had questions and still wants to learn more about the proposal for the anaerobic digestion plant. They did move the two zoning bylaws to the Town Council with votes of "not to recommend".

listening to J Nutting
Bryan Taberner, Beth Dahlstrom, Mike Magilo, Jeff Nutting, James  Doucett, Martin Souberg

The Town Council will have a public hearing on Wednesday for the zoning bylaw changes. The presentation will likely be repeated in whole or at least in part for the audience at that meeting. The zoning bylaw change is the first step to this proposal.

With the change in zoning accepted, the Town could open a Request for a Proposal (RFP) to see what companies would step up to offer to lease the land and operate the anaerobic digestion plant. If the RFP brought in sufficient dollars for the Town Council to accept, then the contract negotiations would commence along with the permitting process.

food waste, solid waste
one driver for anaerobic digestion is to remove food waste from solid waste

The permitting process would be multi-level with permits required from MassDEP. The Planning Board would come back into action when the company and/or developer would cone with their site plan.

Handling the truck traffic through the interchange at Franklin Village to get to Pond St would be just one of many issues to be addressed. Adding 50-80 trips through the interchange doesn't sound like much but these trips would be trucks, rather large tankers the likes of which we see going to Garelick Farms. Add one or two of those to the line of cars heading east on RT 140 attempting the left turn onto Pond St and see how far the traffic extends its back up. The traffic already backs up sufficiently that the cars in the left turn lane prevent the through traffic from making further progress east on RT 140.


The collection of posts reported live from the Planning Board meeting Monday, June 3 can be found here

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