Solar Bid OK’d; Flood Law Set for May Hearing
by Robert Lynch; March 14, 2025
Call the March 12 monthly meeting of the Enfield Town Board one of multiple, yet manageable, catastrophes. And battling fatigue, shock, and occasional sniffles, but finding no disagreement among themselves, Town Board members waded through their agenda; a long one… one consuming three-and-a-half hours.
For starters, the five-member Board could barely muster a three-person quorum. Councilperson Cassandra Hinkle was out sick. Melissa Millspaugh was also ill, but attended remotely from home. She could vote, yet still not count as present toward a quorum. Meanwhile, sitting at a side table, Town Clerk Mary Cornell also nursed a cold. Cornell could barely speak.
Next problem: Little more than 15 minutes into the meeting, the video stream encountered its worst “Zoom bomb” attack ever. Multiple hard-core pornographic images suddenly flashed onto the meeting room screen. A hacker slurred a racist obscenity. And Supervisor Stephanie Redmond found herself momentarily helpless in trying to expel her video’s unwelcome intruders. In time, the feed was cleansed, apologies were shared, Millspaugh returned to the sanitized Zoom room, and the session resumed.
But those calamities brought only inconvenience and embarrassment. What cost the Town real money that night was the catastrophe that lurked outside, deep down under the driveway, just a few short steps from the meeting room door.
The dry well had failed. The lid that covers the dry well (dry hole), a pit that receives sewage effluent from the Enfield Courthouse’s septic tank and then disperses it into the soil, was about to collapse. It must be dug up and replaced. And the replacement won’t come cheap.
“Nobody knows how deep it is,” Enfield Highway Superintendent Barry “Buddy” Rollins told the Town Board. Most likely the six-by-eight foot cinderblock repository was dug 77 years ago, when the Courthouse building, formerly the Enfield Fire Station, was built back in 1948. Rollins judged replacement as too complex of a task for his crew to undertake without help. A private contractor, Paul Carpenter, will oversee the work. Rollins said Highway staffers will assist him.
Board members were told that Enfield Food Pantry Director Jean Owens and her volunteers had only days earlier spotted the imminent rupture. The Food Pantry co-locates on the Enfield Courthouse’s lower floor.
The Town of Enfield Budget maintains a contingency fund, a catastrophe cushion of sorts. Of the $27,500 in contingency moneys budgeted in 2024, more than $20,000 of the total had gone unspent, the Town Board learned that night from the bookkeeper’s year-end report. An identical $27,500 had again been placed into the contingency fund for 2025.
Sadly, when it comes to unspent surplus in contingency, the Town won’t find itself so lucky this time next year when books are closed. And it’s little more than ten weeks into this year’s budget.
Rollins and Redmond estimate the dry well’s replacement cost at $10,000 to $12,000. By a quick, unanimous vote among the four members present, the Town Board pulled $12,000 out of this year’s contingency fund to pay for the reconstruction. Of course, that’s what contingency funds are for; unplanned emergencies. Some years you win; others, you don’t. This year, one guesses, Enfield won’t.
As for the work ahead, Rollins predicted a timely completion. He said excavation will likely occur either Friday, March 14, or on Wednesday or Thursday of the following week.
And Food Pantry officials assured Board members that the driveway’s current precautionary closure will not impair weekend food distributions. Instead, the oft-seen patron-parade will follow an alternate route.
If another public works disappointment needed to be put on the Town Board’s plate—and it was—Rollins reported that this winter’s off-and-on bouts of sub-freezing cold had taken a tough toll on secondary roads.
“Dirt roads and oil-and-stone (surfaced) roads took a real bad beating,” Rollins stated, assessing their seasonal damage. And wintertime harm will, no doubt, heighten summertime repair costs.
One thing more: Two trees are dying and need to be felled in Town-owned Budd Cemetery off Gray Road. Rollins recommended their professional removal. It was that kind of night.
But amidst a sudden run of disappointment, the Enfield Town Board did move forward March 12 on a few other fronts. It awarded the winning bid for the largely grant-funded addition of solar panels atop the Enfield Town Hall, the long-vacated old Highway Barn that currently quarters the Town Clerk’s office.
By a 4-0 vote, the Board awarded the Enfield-based firm, Fingerlakes Renewables, Inc., the contract for putting the panels in place. Fingerlakes Renewables will install the 25.4 kilowatt rooftop array for a quoted price of $70,248. A state grant will cover $60,000 of the cost, and estimated rebates will contribute another $6,355.
Of the five companies that quoted on the job, Fingerlakes Renewables, Rebekah Carpenter’s local firm, did not tender the lowest bid. Yet her company got the award, nonetheless.
Carpenter’s company won selection after the Town Board first excluded the rock-bottom bidder, Solar Environment, from Saratoga Springs, saying its bid offered too few specifics to be considered a “responsible” offer. And then as it employed state-authorized “best value” analysis, the Town Board calculated that Fingerlakes Renewables would generate the most kilowatts for each dollar the Town would invest. The company also achieved “best value” preference as a woman-owned business.
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Flood Prevention Law: More than a year after state and federal officials had warned that Enfield would need to restrict development in its newly-mapped flood plain bordering Enfield Creek, the Town Board Wednesday finalized a preliminary set of development rules. It authorized the draft regulations, forwarded them to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation for a required review, and set a local public hearing on the proposed “Flood Damage Prevention Law” for its May 14 meeting.
“People I’ve talked to say this looks a lot like zoning,” Rosanna Carpenter, an Enfield Main Road resident, warned the Board before it acted. Carpenter’s home, while not located within the proposed restricted area, stands close to it. Carpenter also owns vacant land within the flood plain and maintains a private bridge that crosses Enfield Creek. Carpenter cautioned that restricting future development in the flood plain could diminish her land’s value should she ever subdivide it.
In response, Town Board members pointed out that for the most part, their hands are tied. Given the Enfield Creek’s newly-designated flood-prone status, they said Washington as soon as this June will dictate the purchase of flood insurance by anyone who holds a federally-backed mortgage and lives in the flood plain its federal agency has newly-designated. And the insurance would only become available if the Town adopts the development rules. New York State will go further, they were told, demanding the regulations regardless of the insurance consequences.
Enfield, however, has chosen to make the state-scripted rules one step tougher.
The draft Enfield Flood Damage Prevention Law would prohibit any new residential structure in flood zones, not merely follow state guidelines that still allow new homes be built in flood zones, only if elevated above worst-case flood levels using “pilings, columns… or shear walls parallel to the flow of water.” The Enfield draft would also prohibit the placement of any new mobile home in a flood zone. In either instance, aggrieved property owners could plead hardship and seek a variance.
“We as a Town Board may exercise ‘police powers’ to keep our community safe,” Councilperson Robert Lynch (this writer) wrote in an email to other Town Board members and the Town’s legal counsel one day before the meeting, defending the tighter restriction. “And building a home on elevated pilings in a flood plain is less than safe or desirable,” he said. “This is a safety thing for me.”
One day later, during the meeting, the Town Board agreed to retain within the draft law, at least for now, the more restrictive language. Should residents object at the public hearing, members said, the prohibition could later be stripped out.
Subdivision Regulations: Pressed for time as the hour advanced and attention spans waned, the Town Board gave only glancing attention to an end-of-meeting chore that’s evaded resolution for as long as 18 months; namely the revision of Enfield’s Subdivision Regulations. The Planning Board had handed up its rewrite of the nearly 40-page document as far back as September 2023.
About all the Town Board decided at this latest March meeting was to tone-down any attempt to infuse Town Board oversight into the subdivision review process. The Town Board had sought to involve itself in the wake of the “Breezy Meadows” development controversy two years ago.
Having been cautioned by the Town’s attorney that state law limits Town Board intervention and prohibits any form of novel, “two board” subdivision review, the Town Board resolved itself to offer the Planning Board only advice and recommendations—not hold veto power—regarding a future developer’s plans for larger subdivisions. The Town Board will hone regulatory details at future meetings.
Ukraine: Before adjourning for the night, the Town Board resurrected an initiative it first took three years ago. It directed that the flag of the Republic of Ukraine again be flown on the flagpole outside the Town Hall, this time for a renewed 30 days.
“[A]s the third anniversary of the Ukrainian war has come and gone, significant adjustments in United States foreign policy affecting Ukraine have occurred, changes which in many people’s minds complicate the path to peace and imperil the preservation of Ukraine’s democratic sovereignty,” the latest Resolution to “Reaffirm Solidarity and Support for the People of Ukraine” stated in part.
The adopted Resolution further expressed Town Board sentiment that continued American support to Ukraine “in both word and deed… stands vital to the achievement of a true and lasting peace in eastern Europe and also serves to advance American interests of democracy, independence, and freedom, principles this Board wishes to embrace.”
Expect the banner for Ukraine to return to the flagpole within days.
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It was a long Town Board meeting. And in case anyone should ask, Supervisor Redmond said she’ll take extra precautions to deter future Zoom bomb attacks. That was a sort of catastrophe that no one needed that night. Too much else was going on.
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