Good morning Sangerville,

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. Mother Nature has had our plow crews busy this last week as well as the fire department helping out with accidents and downed trees. I know Chris and Warren are working hard to get the roads in good shape, this morning they had a breakdown of one of their bigger trucks, so they were using a smaller truck to help get things opened up until they can get to the whole town with the larger truck. So, I will ask everyone to be patient, they are doing the best they can, and I am sure the roads will be in good shape shortly after the storm is done.
One of the challenges I have learned recently to doing maintenance on our dirt roads, especially the dead-end ones is that we have some really inadequate turn around spots for our snowplows. I will be putting that on the agenda for our road committee to discuss and we will add that to our project list for next summer. Again, I ask for patience with the roads. We still had work we wanted to accomplish this fall, but the weather has shut us down. We will develop a list of projects and their expected costs over the winter and with the blessing of the voters in March at the annual town meeting will be out working on those projects as soon as we can in the spring.
Our Select board meeting last night had a fairly light agenda because a lot of our time in between meetings was our Thanksgiving break. We were able to appoint four out of five positions for a board of appeals. We still have one opening for anyone interested. Recently, several residents have questioned why we are using Mid Maine Solid Waste Association in Corinna for solid waste disposal as opposed to Dover-Foxcroft. The concerns voiced to the select board and I have primarily been two issues. One is the distance, as I live in Dover-Foxcroft and Corinna is my hometown, I have a good understanding of the mileage and time differences between the two and it is significant. The other issue is that MMSWA has fees for the disposal of many items, specifically demolition material that Dover-Foxcroft does not. It has been conveyed to us that this is causing a hardship to certain residents who are doing their best to comply with our property maintenance ordinance. I will continue to research this topic and the select board may choose to put this before the people at our annual town meeting. We learned that Moosehead Cable will cease services to the Town of Sangerville residents in six months. They only have 64 current customers between Guilford and Sangerville and cannot afford to keep this operation. The office staff and I met with representatives from Androscoggin Savings Bank last week and feel that they can better serve the banking interests of the town than our current bank. We recommended to the select board and they approved a switch to Androscoggin Savings for our banking. This will have little to no impact on you the residents, other than we will be earning more interest on our sweep account, which is a form of municipal savings account, which is your tax dollars. Finally, from the select board meeting it has been decided to call a special town meeting for next Thursday, December 12th, at the Fire Station at 6:00 PM. The purpose of this is to vote on an article that would allow the select board to apply for and accept grants that may require matching funds. The article in the town meeting this past spring was written to exempt this type of grant from those which we may apply and accept. This limits us on our grant applications, particularly for the town hall renovation. Please try to come out next Thursday evening to discuss and vote on this article.
In my next installment of how we collect and utilize your tax dollars, I will discuss the other have of the equation that determines your tax bill. One half is mil rate, that I talked about last time. The other half is evaluation or assessment. When I became a selectman in Dover-Foxcroft almost twenty years ago, I did not realize the title of select person also included tax assessor and overseer of the poor. The tax assessor responsibility terrified me. Fortunately, almost all communities have recognized that tax assessing is a professional skill set all to itself. Larger towns have full-time assessor agents, towns like Sangerville, mostly contract with an assessing firm. We use Hamlin Associate out of Parkman. These professional assessing agents look at a variety of factors to determine the assessment of your property. The state of Maine has passed laws taking as much of the subjectivity out of the process as possible as well as requiring towns keep their assessments up to date, so everyone is being taxed fairly. I recently read the manual the state requires assessors to use, and it is very complex. To keep it brief, the assessment accounts for location, i.e. is it waterfront, on a paved road, etc., size of the lot, size and condition of any buildings on the lot, taking into account everything from paved driveways to number of bathrooms. They also use data collected from sale of similar properties in the area. The goal is to have the assessment as accurate as possible. This assessment multiplied by the mil rate determines your tax bill. On the next installment, I will start discussing how we collect and use your taxes. Have a great day and a great weekend everyone.