A recent story in the Southern Ulster Times revealed that for years the town’s water and sewer Committee failed to keep and submit meeting minutes to the town, even though every committee is required to do so by the Town Code. This has left the public in the dark about what and where future development projects are being proposed, because where the water and sewer pipes are laid is where development takes place.

At the urging of Adam Litman, Lloyd’s water and sewer administrator and committee member, the full committee agreed to temporarily suspend their future meetings until February 2023. He stressed that he does not want the Committee to be dissolved but only to be put on pause in order to allow time for a restructuring of the Committee.

“As you know we don’t have secretarial, which I have tried to achieve a multitude of times, and have yet to find a volunteer who wants to compose minutes,” he said.

Moving forward, Litman will be meeting with town engineer Andrew Learn a few times each month, “because he advises the Planning Board and gets to see a lot of the [developer’s] plans starting to come to fruition.” Litman said in the past he had been able to look at plans that would give him information on future development projects being planned. He indicated that a new direction is being considered, “to see if we can either restructure or come up with something else, because people would like to see minutes that we don’t keep.”

Litman informed the committee that his department’s clerical person has just started to work full time and may not be able to assemble and submit minutes.

Committee member and Fire Chief Peter Miller said the water and sewer committee often does not receive information on development projects in a timely manner and sometimes is lacking in detail. He said the committee, “should get more information on projects to look at and review before we sit at this table and start to think about it; all of that [information] should be forthcoming.”

It was brought up that drainage issues of proposed development projects should also receive more scrutiny, with Miller warning, “the more you build the worse it’s going to get. I think the Bridgeview Plaza may get washed away at some point.” Litman pointed out that, “when grass is growing out of catch basins all around town, the drainage is not right. They might work as a filtration system, but it’s not drainage.”

Committee and Planning Board member Franco Zani said that only recently have developers been told to come before the water and sewer Committee to discuss their projects. He said this was not done in the past but today, “that’s one of the steps developers need to do.”

Learn said as he gets plans and information on projects from the Planning Board, he will forward them to Miller and Litman. Miller said the water and sewer Committee should also receive, “any comments that any advisers are making so that we get the whole picture...We are in that position because all of that information isn’t put in the same file so we can deal with it. I think that’s important if we’re going to clean this up and make sure there is transparency on how we got from point A to point B and how a decision was made, without turning around and finding out that something was done that nobody knew was happening.”