Thursday, January 16, 2014

Timely communications still an issue


The Town Council voted to purchase the recreation land that the FinCom approved, appointed Jim Dacey Treasurer to complete the move of that position from elected to appointed, and heard the apology from Waste Management on the trash schedule delays.

The trash schedule delays should be resolved this week although with the Martin Luther King holiday coming next week, the schedule will 'normally' be offset one day. The combination of the New Year's holiday, the weekend storm, the deep freeze causing equipment trouble and then regulations on hours worked conspired for this situation. There should be an alert coming from the DPW that will announce that extra trash will be picked up with no charge to the household for the 'extra bag' to help offset the problem.

The Town Council was rightly upset with the lack of communications from the DPW/Town Administration. There could have been a notification on Friday night to let folks know that the trucks would not be running on Saturday. That notification did not happen and the buzz began to build until we finally got official notification late Sunday and early Monday morning. But that was too late!

The Council also moved to second reading a water and sewer map adjustment to enable a 9 or 18 unit subdivision off of Uncas St. The developer had an approved project some years ago, ended up in court with the Franklin over the details and apparently has reached an agreement where they will provide some additional improvements to the area (i.e. Hill St) in return for the town agreeing to proceed. The second reading will come up at the Feb 5th meeting.

Yours truly spent 15 minutes presenting to the Council on lessons learned while operating Franklin Matters. I could have talked longer but kept to a short and hopefully to the point agenda. Communication is so easy to do and in some cases so hard to execute. Case in point with the recent DPW/Waste Management trash schedule. They did well to give us the first notification about the delay in schedule due to the snow storm. They did not do well to explain that the Saturday pickup would not occur.

It takes a service oriented approach to bring those communications to the forefront every time. Unfortunately as well as many of the Franklin employees do, there sometimes is not this mindset of sharing the info. It will take time to change that.

Franklin Municipal Building
Franklin Municipal Building


The full set of notes taken live during the meeting can be found here

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