The Lincoln Squirrel – News, features and photos from Lincoln, Mass.

Schools offer data snapshots in first annual report

schoolFor the first time, school officials have published an annual report with information on demographics, spending, MCAS scores, educational programs and more, as well as data comparing Lincoln schools to others in the area on various measures.

The report is available on the Lincoln Schools website in two forms: a series of slides with charts and graphs, and a three-page executive summary. The report by the School Committee and Lincoln Public Schools administration is the result of an initiative by the Finance Committee to provide the town with information about the operations and performance of town agencies.

[Read more…] about Schools offer data snapshots in first annual report

Warrant piece: Water fluoridation

water-smEditor’s note: This is one of several Lincoln Squirrel articles about an agenda item (a “warrant piece,” with apologies to Leo Tolstoy) to be considered at the March 23 Town Meeting.

By Alice Waugh

Should Lincoln’s public water supply continue to be fluoridated? Residents will have a chance to say yay or nay at the March 23 Town Meeting, thanks to a citizen’s petition by a group opposed to the water additive.

[Read more…] about Warrant piece: Water fluoridation

Salamanders contending with snow

salamander-sm2

This sign on Conant Road was partially obscured by the latest snowstorm. (Photo / Alice Waugh)

Each year around this time, the Conservation Commission puts up sandwich-board signs on a couple of roads to warn drivers that the road will be closed for a night or two to allow safe passage for amphibians. Well, the signs are now up—but they’re camouflaged by snow, which is undoubtedly also puzzling the creatures who thought spring had arrived.

[Read more…] about Salamanders contending with snow

Library story times for young children starting March 28

reading-smThe Lincoln Public Library will host two weekly librarian-led story times for children this spring:

  • “Lapsit Storytime” (for children from birth to 24 months)
    Thursdays at 10 a.m. — March 28 to May 9
  • “Terrific Twos Storytime”
    Fridays at 10:30 a.m. — March 29 to May 10

Preregistration is required. Please email children’s library Jane Flanders at jflanders@minlib.net or call the library at 781-259-8465. See the library website for details on these and other children’s programs.

Warrant piece: Leaf blowers

leafblower-compositeEditor’s note: This is one of several Lincoln Squirrel articles about an agenda item (a “warrant piece,” with apologies to Leo Tolstoy) to be considered at the March 23 Town Meeting.

By Alice Waugh

A group of residents calling themselves Quiet Lincoln is asking residents at Town Meeting to consider the possibility of restricting the use of leaf blowers, which cause air and noise pollution and are bad for the land they’re trying to clear, according to the group.

[Read more…] about Warrant piece: Leaf blowers

Up for a hike?

hiking-smThe next outing for the Lincoln Junior Hikers is Sunday, March 17 at 2 p.m. We’ll meet at Lincoln Cemetery and explore the trails near the Wheeler and Flint farms.

Be aware that there are three cemeteries in town. The Old Burial Ground is behind Bemis Hall. The Arbor Vitae Cemetery is the small one on Trapelo Road about a quarter mile east of the library. We will meet at the third and largest, Lincoln Cemetery, which is located on Lexington Road half a mile north of Trapelo Road.

The hike will be about 1.5 miles round trip around some hilly terrain. Parents, as always, will be responsible for the supervision of their children.

Warrant piece: Codman wading pool

pool penguin-sm

Editor’s note: This is one of several Lincoln Squirrel articles about an agenda item (a “warrant piece,” with apologies to Leo Tolstoy) to be considered at the March 23 Town Meeting.

By Alice Waugh

The Parks and Recreation Commission is asking for $182,000 to rebuild Codman Community Pool’s tot pool, which is leaking underground and no longer meets handicapped requirements.

If Town Meeting warrant article 15 is approved, the town will appropriate a total of $976,950 for 11 Community Preservation Committee (CPC) requests, including the wading pool project. The CPC is charged with allocating funds that are collected from a 3 percent surcharge on real estate tax bills as mandated by the Community Preservation Act (CPA), which was approved by town residents in 2002. CPA funds can be used for expenditures related to open space, preservation of historic structures, community housing (defined as low to moderate income housing), and recreation.

During the last few summers, pool operators have noticed worsening water loss from the tot pool and have shut off the filters at night to save water, requiring them to chemically rebalance the water each morning, said Dan Pereira, Director of Parks and Recreation.

Last year, the Parks and Recreation Commission got a contractor quote of about $25,000 to repair the pool, but in spring 2012, Americans with Disabilities Act codes changed, so now the town can’t do any work on the tot pool without replacing the entire structure. The pool now has a short step into the 15-inch-deep water, but new codes call for a “zero-entry pool shell, so people can essentially roll right into the pool if they want to,” as they would at a sandy beach, Pereira told the Board of Selectmen in December 2012.

The ADA change “removed out ability to just fix what was broken,” because a new code-compliant tot pool on the same footprint could now have only half the usable area it currently does, Pereira said. The Parks and Recreation Commission subsequently got quotes of $130,000 to replace the wading pool on its current footprint or $145,000 to replace it with one twice as big.

A preliminary design calls for a figure-eight-shaped pool, with half for wading and the other half with sprinklers and other play features commonly seen in public parks. The total price tag including contingency would be about $183,000. The new features would make the wading pool “a little more appealing and up to date,” which might have the added benefit of attracting slightly older children who now crowd into the shallow portion of the main pool, Pereira said.

The price tag is “a larger number than we expected when we started out, but essentially it’s a brand-new pool that’s double the size of what we have now,” Pereira said.

The main Codman Pool opened in 1974. Twelve years ago, the main pool got new decking and filter lines for $250,000, and a Codman Trust grant two years ago funded a $45,000 PVC liner to stop serious leakage, Pereira said.  The tot pool was added sometime in the mid-1980s and has never been renovated.

The Town Meeting is coming! The Town Meeting is coming!

townmtgBy Alice Waugh

Lincoln residents will gather on March 23 to vote on 41 warrant articles on matters ranging from the town budget for fiscal 2014 to citizens’ petitions on leaf blowers and water fluoridation.

The town’s total budget request for fiscal 2014 is $33.09 million, an increase of 4.6 percent over this year. If all elements of the budget are approved, the median property tax bill would rise from $11,340 in fiscal 2013 to $11,815 in the next fiscal year—an average increase of $475, or 4.2 percent.

[Read more…] about The Town Meeting is coming! The Town Meeting is coming!

Town to submit new statement of interest for school project

brooks entranceBy Alice Waugh

Lincoln officials are reworking a document from the rejected school building project in preparation for resubmitting it to the state, and town residents will be asked for an as-yet-undetermined sum of money for project planning expenses at Town Meeting later this month.

The School Committee last week began going over the town’s original Statement of Interest (SOI) preparatory to making updates, and the Board of Selectman will do the same at their meetings on March 11 and March 18. The School Committee will schedule a one-hour community forum as part of its March 21 meeting to answer questions about the SOI and the warrant article to go before voters at Town Meeting on March 23.

The committee will also vote on March 21 on whether to submit the revised SOI to the Massachusetts School Building Authority. That agency recently told the town that the “L-shaped proposal” would not qualify for preapproved funding and said the town would have to start over with the state approval and funding process for a school building project.

Warrant article 9 asks for money to “[conduct] architectural/engineering studies and designs to address facilities issues of the Lincoln School” without specifying an exact amount. If the MSBA had said yes to the L-shaped proposal, that request would have been $400,000 for design documents required before going out to bid on construction.

Now, however, residents will be asked in Article 10 for a different sum of money to proceed with planning—although the dollar amount of that request won’t be known until shortly before Town Meeting, said School Committee chairman Jennifer Glass. However, she emphasized that “by no stretch of the imagination” would the request be as high as $400,000 and would in fact be “a lot less.”

In the last round of approvals, funding and votes for the school project, the town submitted its SOI in 2008. Based on that, the MSBA invited the town in fall 2009 to submit a feasibility study, and Lincoln residents voted to fund that study in March 2010. The town vote on funding the project itself took place in November 2012 at a special Town Meeting, where the measure failed to garner the necessary two-thirds majority.

Glass noted that Lincoln took longer than expected to gets its construction funding request before residents. Also, the MSBA is likely to act more quickly this time around, since it has already acknowledged the need for a school building project of some sort. Given these variables, Lincoln could be looking at a fall 2013 acceptance of a new feasibility study and perhaps another town vote on construction funding in late 2015; if that vote is successful, the project could be put out to bid in January 2016, Glass said.

More spending ahead

Given the delay of approximately three years in starting a major renovation and addition project (if residents eventually do approve such a course), the school will have to “patch things up and make them continue,” Glass said. Even if the original project had gone ahead, the school would have needed a new main fire alarm panel immediately. That $36,000 expenditure appears in Article 9 of the Town Meeting warrant.

Other school-related expenditures in that warrant article include $105,000 to replace wooden window curtain walls and insulate masonry walls in the Hartwell building, and $40,000 for increased security measures in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., school shooting. Glass declined to specify what those measures might be, though she said they do not include armed guards.

Article 12 also asks for
$75,000 for the annual classroom rehabilitation and preventive maintenance program. That amount would have been only $50,000 if the building project had been approved by the state, but the town’s Capital Planning Committee recently green-lighted the higher amount, Glass said.

“Even though it’s a big-ticket item and I totally understand people’s shock” at the project’s $49 million price tag ($28 million from by Lincoln residents and the other $21 million from the state), “I still believe in the long run that the right thing for the building, for [town] finances and for [minimizing] disruption for the kids is to do this as one project that’s carefully planned and thought through and not done in a piecemeal fashion,” Glass said.