Franklin Matters: RFP goes with a drive through option

Thursday, September 18, 2014

RFP goes with a drive through option

The Town Council meeting Wednesday was a relatively quiet affair. The agenda was changed to move the action items before the appointments. This was mentioned here earlier.

The resolution to add membership to the Franklin Advisory Committee needed to be voted on before the actual membership additions could be approved. Normally, the appointments are to standing committees where one or two people are replacing folks who have left.

In my seven years reporting on the Council, this circumstance had only come up a couple of times. The resolution was approved and the appointments were confirmed.

The change in agenda may have surprised some of the residents who could have spoke on the Emmons St property as only Lisa Piana, Executive Director of the Franklin Downtown Partnership, came forward to make two points on the RFP.

The Council acknowledged the two items but effectively dismissed them as something that could be handled later and proceeded to approve the RFP as written by a 7-0 vote. Councilor Padula was absent from the meeting and Councilor Kelly recused himself for the first time from this discussion item.

Franklin Municipal Building, site of the Town Council meetings

In a PR move, Ron Roux, the Cook's Farm developer spoke briefly about his intention to use local resources on the construction project. He could not commit to specific skills that would be open or keep for his standard group. He will be scheduling a meeting to present details of the project and needs to let those interested get more information and consider their involvement.

David McKearney, presented an overview of the operations of the Board of Health. The Health Dept is quite busy and their duties vary from beaver permits to food inspections of the more than 100 restaurants and food service operations twice a year in Franklin.

His presentation doc is supposed to be posted to the Franklin website. The outline used seems to be similar to their section in the Annual Report. The numbers would have been updated to reflect current activities (versus prior years).

My detailed notes reported live during the meeting can be found here