 Okay. I do not see any public today. But we'll just open the meeting for the bylaw review at 1202. Michelle, I made you co-hosts so you can monitor attendees and stuff. Good. Thank you. And I figured we would just pick up where we left off. I thought we were on like page 15 or so. Yeah, okay. I did. Meet with. KP law this morning. And we got through basically to the same point. So I'm trying to schedule with him. I think we're going to be able to do that. Immediately before our meetings every, every week to keep up to date, but it's, I think what we've sort of come to the conclusion of is just that, how substantial these changes are that it's almost like a full on rewrite. But we'll. Cross that bridge as we come to it. I'll keep you guys in the loop as to what I'm doing as far as we're going to be able to do that. Yeah. I think we have implications if it's a rewrite versus revision. No, not really. Cause we still have to hold a public hearing. And it wouldn't be curious. Yeah. It wouldn't be a rewrite in the sense of like just abolishing everything, but more like. Comprehensive. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So I'm trying to remember where we left off and I don't really, I don't know. I think we had talked a lot at the last meeting about. Permits and. Town permits under the bylaw versus state permits and how we're going to reconcile that. I did. Talk to Alex at KP law about that. And he was equally. Kind of. Confused about how to do it because it's, it's not as straightforward as. You know, initially first initially thought. So he's going to talk to some other towns that do. And that, that have a similar process and advise us on what to do and how to handle it. You know, because there's no negative determination process under a request for determination. And under a notice of intent, if we required a notice of intent for bylaw project, there's that it would still have to be filed through. DEP, which doesn't make any sense if it's bylaw only. So. He will, he's going to check back with us. So this one's kind of. This section is kind of in a holding pattern, I guess, until we. Get some guidance, legal guidance on how we should maneuver on, on permitting local permitting as it relates to the state forms. Okay. So I'm just going to move through here because I think this is about where we left off. These are some things that Alex and I looked at this morning, just adjusting the language, pretty simple stuff. Again, some rewriting things like the way that this is written is just not very straightforward. So the commission may accept. As the application and plans under the bylaw notice of intent and plans filed under the wetland protection act, it's kind of weird the way it reads. And so we're hoping to sort of reword that like any application that's submitted to the conservation commission must meet the wetland protection act and bylaw submittal requirements. And also note that the applications will be considered separately under the regulations. So as we issue. And I know that this is kind of probably confusing to you guys, because when, when we approve, say in order of conditions, we say these are our special conditions and we're making a motion to approve. But when I actually issue the document, I'm issuing one set of. Special conditions under wetland protection act and one set of special conditions under the local bylaw. And usually I'm pretty careful about how I do that. So as that the more. I keep the conditions that can be better enforced under wetland protection under wetland protection and the ones that sort of. Go beyond wetland protection I put under the bylaw. So. Anyways, that just as a kind of background piece so that you guys know when the permits get issued, that's, that's what they look like. A lot of this language was not edited by me. Just so that you guys know. And I also wanted to just for a second. I know we were talking about a butter notifications at the last time. So we're going to add a 50 acre parcel. We're going to add some language in there to. Make sure that there's no, there's no loophole on that one. I do you guys remember which one I'm talking about? Yeah. Yeah. So here there's, there's a requirement that the owner. That the owner sign the application. We just put in some language so that it can be on legally authorized representative of the owner. If the owner can't sign for some reason. Okay, so I'm just going to highlight this section because this is really important. So this number seven here. What this is essentially saying is that. Any project would require. And this is without limitation, a narrative description, calculations of pre and post peak flows and estimated water quality characteristics of any drainage discharge from a point source. Whether closed or open channel outside a resource area. So this is important. That's a really important one for a couple of reasons. And it opens a big can of worms. So under the wetland protection act, there are certain. So there's, there's stormwater standards and, and you guys probably remember with the solar project. That I brought up a lot of stormwater related issues as far as compliance with those regulations. Those regs are really made for like commercial projects or large scale projects. They're not, they don't apply under state law to like a single family home. Right. If I wanted to build a house, I wouldn't have to put in a detention basin and catch basins and stuff in my driveway. That would be reserved for like a Walmart parking lot or something like that. Because the, the drainage characteristics are very different for a small single family house lot than they are for a large scale development. And what this condition or this section here says is basically that. For any project. Then, in the spring. Within resource area, the commission could essentially require stormwater calculations. And also whether or not the points. Point source discharge. Is, I actually should add discharge in here. Whether or not the point source discharge is within the resource area or not. family homeowner would have to do stormwater calculations. And stormwater calculations, I don't know if you guys can see me, but they're like this thick when you get a book. They run, it's done by an engineer. They run hydrology calyx. They look at drainage catchment areas and assess pre and post drainage conditions. And it's a lot of research and calculation investigation. It requires test pits and stuff like that. So what we added here was the commission may require at its discretion stormwater calculation. So if it's a very complex single family house lot, the commission could say they want to see stormwater calyx, but it wouldn't be required for somebody to put in a shed, right? Does that make sense? Yeah. So we're sort of removing some burden in this case for a single family home or, I mean, I like that it's up to our discretion. It would kind of be nice to have some kind of trigger for it. I don't know what that would be. I'll just share this anecdotal thing when I was talking to Leverett, the conservation agent, he mentioned that they're pretty busy because there's not a lot of dry land left in Leverett, but there's still a lot of development pressure. So at some point, that's probably going to happen everywhere. And I wouldn't want to make it too lax, just like to keep a hold on future development that may start encroaching upon wetter areas that we're not necessarily dealing with now, but might be the remaining developable lots in the future. Does that make sense? I just want to... Yeah. Yeah. No, it's a good point. And I mean, I think that we could think about making... If you guys have suggestions for how we could put more teeth in this without making it a broad brush requirement, I mean, for somebody... I'll give you an example. Recently, we had a building permit application. They're doing an inside home renovation on a house that has been there since the 1700s or 1800s or whatever. And so they're doing this huge interior renovation and they're putting a little mudroom on the front, like an entryway. Literally one post piling to put this little mudroom on, but it's in riverfront area. So in this... And it almost even calls into question, like, do they need to file a wetland permit? I mean, I told them yes, just to be kind of really conservative about how I'm applying the law, but under this, it would mean they would need to do runoff calculations for adding like a five foot by five foot mudroom onto their house. And I want to make sure it's fair, but at the same time, that it's reasonable and that it's strong for us to... Right. Well, I think the way that you put it leaves it up to our discretion, literally. So I mean, that's good. It's just... Yeah, I don't know. I mean, as long as there's understanding about mudroom versus a huge addition to your house on riverfront, because... I mean, I don't have any better suggestions. I guess I'm just calling out what I could see as this being complicated in the future, no matter what. Mm-hmm. Yeah, definitely. I feel you, Michela, wanting a trigger. I have a little nervousness about writing one into the law. Obviously, economics changed a lot, but I have a feeling that conditions might change quicker than the laws do in the future. So to Aaron, is there any way we could... I don't know. I guess I'm thinking of like a memorandum of understanding, but less or so, maybe just a verbal one, when we next meet with a full commission where we could come up with some internal number that we like as a trigger. Let's say any projects that affect over 5,000 square feet or something like that. I'm just writing this down. I feel like I was thinking about like a square foot area, but that doesn't always necessarily translate into impacts, right? So it's like, it could be a smaller than that, but in a more sensitive area. And so they would come under the thresholds, but it shouldn't. So maybe just leaving it up to our discretion is the most powerful way to do it and just cross the bridges when we come to it. Yeah, well, we can think about this too. We've got lots of time. So let's leave it as is right now. Because you have all the experience here, how often would you say that it comes up is like you would like to have the ability to have the discretion? On a single family house lot, okay, so I'll give you one example in Leroy. I think you were there for this one. Remember that house in the riverfront area is number 74 East Leverett Road. It's on the other side of the road from Cushman Brook, and it was like up on this hill. Yeah. Do you remember which one I'm talking about? Yeah, because I got lost going to the site for this, but I eventually found it. Okay, yeah, I thought I remembered you being there. And remember I insisted that they have a stone or grass swale running along their driveway? Yeah. That was a good example right there of where because of the steepness of the driveway and it being paved and also because of snow removal and snow storage issues, what I envisioned happening was that they were just going to pull the snow down and store it in the in the riverfront area at the toe of the driveway. And I didn't want that happening. And they had no other place to put it. So that's why I suggested that swale. So they'd have a place to push the snow to the side where it could where it wouldn't, you know, cause runoff erosion damage, and it would have like a storage place, but it would also offer some filtration before it gets to the bottom of the hill and goes into the catch basin to go into Cushman Brook. So there has been examples where I've incorporated stormwater elements into single family plans, but I wouldn't necessarily require pre and post runoff calculations or, you know, that type of thing. So it's, you know, it's kind of tricky. And I mean, as this is written, you could, you could literally allow, require stormwater calyx for any application that comes through and or whether or not the discharge points are within a resource area or not. You can still require it, which is kind of crazy because it's like saying we have jurisdiction outside our jurisdiction in some way. I don't know. And part of this is like, like, let's say we required somebody to do it, right? Let's say we required somebody to go through the stormwater design process. And they said no, we're not doing it. We think this is unreasonable. And we're going to appeal and take it to Superior Court. If a Superior Court judge looked at this, they'd be like, that's not reasonable, you know, to require somebody to have stormwater calyx for a shed, you know, so I think that at least having the discretion element there makes it like on a case by case basis at least. So anyway, I don't want to belabor this and get hung up too much on it. I like this question. I'm sorry I brought us into the rabbit hole. Oh, no, it's good. Seems to cover the circumstances that we would encounter. Yeah. And it's good that we're talking about this. And that's the whole point. We're not trying to rush this through. We do want to move it if we can quickly, but at the same time, we want to talk about these important ones. This one below number eight is I'm not going to really get into the language of it. But basically what it's saying is, if a violation occurs, and so it should really be under the enforcement section, this particular statement. And so when I talked with counsel this morning, they said, yeah, let's move that into the enforcement section. So I will do that. I'm like poorly written, poorly written. I'm, you know, I like simplicity. So public hearings on application for notice of, for permit, for notice of intent permit, whatever it is, however it's written, I just didn't like it. I would rather just say public hearings and just talk about public hearings in general. Let me see. Yeah, run on sentences. I don't like, which is required to notify the owner. So on this notice of the hearing shall be communicated by the commission words representative to the applicant and to the owner, if other than the applicant. I don't really think that that should be the commission's responsibility to do that. I think that should be the obligation of the representative to relay the information of the hearing dates and times to the owner. It's just anything that we do that puts a burden on us administratively. We already have a huge administrative burden in terms of everything that we're dealing with. So I would rather that the burden be on the applicant. I like it. Good catch. This is a standard practice here. It's, it states it and it's kind of restating. One of the things when we, when I kind of get a clean draft going is removing this redundancy because this is already stated just a few paragraphs above. Notice shall be sent to any person at the hearing who so requests in writing. There was another section like this up above and, you know, this is simple in the sense of like if I'm trying to think of a good example because I know recently we did have a project. I guess it was the, it was the, when, when we were doing the anrad for the solar project, there was a lot of continuations and there was a lot of a butters who were following it. And it got to be to the point where we would open a hearing and there'd be like 30 butters on the call. And then we, they, they would come on the call just for us to tell us, oh, the hearing has been continued another, you know, 30 days. And so it was wasting everybody's time. So I think that this is more so like a courtesy, you know, if, if a group of a butter say, could you just keep us posted on when the meeting was post is postponed to if there's ongoing continuations? I guess I just, it makes me nervous the way it's worded that the onus is always going to be on us. And there is really no understate law, no legal onus for us to notify a butters if there's a continuation. So I don't know how you guys feel about that. And I'm really interested in your opinion on it. Well, so in that circumstance where they log in to find out that it's been continued is the fact that it's been continued on the agenda, which is posted publicly, like for me, I'm necessarily, well, could it be? I mean, so if the easiest, so we post our hearings, our agendas, I post them the Friday before our meeting and the meeting is the following Wednesday. So ordinarily, they're only required to be posted 48 hours in advance, but I post them quite a bit more in advance. And so sometimes applicants will say, oh, you know what, we're not going to have revisions in time and they'll they'll send them, they'll send me an email on Monday after the agenda has already been posted saying there's a continuation. I mean, is it easier to then just update the agenda, add some like text line on the website that says something or I don't know about that one, but then you added that people want to be like kept notice about the the postponed date. Like they just I guess I like can we just like put this on the website and refer people to that? Well, and the thing is as a courtesy, I always try to communicate to people like shoot them an email, tell them we always even like I know you guys notice Jen at the beginning of meetings will say, by the way, this application withdrew so you don't have to sit through, you know, three hearings to find that out. But I guess the question is, do we want it in our regulations? Because we we do try to be courteous in general, but like this says notice shall be sent. I mean, no, I don't think so. Beautiful. I like it. Okay. I apologize to is I've been having some because there's so many edits to this. I've been having some formatting issues coming up, but we'll just keep moving. So this is just rewording. I'm not going to go over these changes with you. They're not really substantive. The commission or its representative shall provide access to. Okay, so this is a change this top one coordination with other boards. And this is a rewrite on my part. So let me know if this is okay with you. The commission or its representative shall provide access to elect an electronic version of the permit application to the planning board board of health inspections and town engineer or building commissioner planning board board of health town engineer and building commissioner I do this on on your board packets are copied to all of these parties. So but I just did an electronic version as opposed to applicants needing to provide hard copies to all those parties because I feel like that's a complete waste of paper. Yeah, it's like an inaccurate case. These boards can provide written comments like so if the building inspector had a problem or the board of health had a problem they could provide us with comments. But this is just kind of the way that it's written and these are more notes to myself to sort of rewrite this so it's a little more clear which the commission shall take into account but which shall not be binding to the commission like I don't really like the way that's worded more so like the commission can take these comments into an account or not you know stop me at any point if you guys want to talk about any of this. You don't think it's important to say that they're not binding you just think it's no I I do think it's important to say I just don't like the way it's stated I just want to read wordsmith it a little bit so it's more just like this little comment here is just a place mark for me to adjust the wording and and once I I'll go through this whole document once we're done and we get through page 44 I'll go through this whole document and rewrite these sections that I think aren't well written and you guys can look at the old version and the new version and say I like it or not you know and figure it out mostly I don't like anything that is not crystal clear the way it's written if it's if it's too much too much verbiage I try to pull it out and just keep it simple yeah these little these little notes so one of the things we're going to have to do is take out these all of these references to the wetland protection act the town attorney gave me sort of a a boilerplate language to use which would be I don't have it right in front of me unfortunately but it's something to the effect of the standard wetland protection act requirements shall apply other than specifically referenced and then if if we have additional requirements that go beyond what the wetland protection act requires then we would list those but we don't have to keep referring back to these sections of the wetland protection act they don't it's not good for bylaws to to do that because the town attorney doesn't want those in there I agree with changing that up Erin but I'm wondering if the original intent for that was to give some sort of reference points to the public so I'm wondering if maybe at the end of this document when it finally comes out there could be some list of reference laws for the public to check on yeah I I agree something like so notice of non-significance is is capitalized so it's a term I assume within the wetland regs so maybe like um like a terms list like what are they called what yeah it's something where you can look up what a notice of non-significance is and what it's bound by or what its teeth are whatever just because otherwise like you know even when I read this I have no context when I see that there's a citation for wetlands regs I'm like okay that's where it's from so I mean to somebody like you it's totally unnecessary but it is useful in clarity for other people yeah and and and just for the sake of you know I guess understanding as we're going through this document a notice of non-significance is exactly what it sounds like it's basically like let's say somebody files a notice of intent and says we want to do all this work we don't think any of the work has significance to any of the provisions of the wetland protection act and I want you to just issue a notice of non-significance that's what that's there for and I have literally never seen or heard of a commission ever doing that um because it's like it's always significant I was using I know I know but it's a good point in the sense of what the Roy mentioned that we should use it as an opportunity to educate people and also point toward what it's referring to so I'll figure that out I'll figure something about that out for you guys and and I'll run it by you um once we get to that point but I think it's a good point um okay um it was already stated above that the conservation commission can impose conditions the first sentence is superfluous we should combine these sections to be comprehensive I don't get the condition limiting quality or quantity of discharge this makes no sense to me the applicant either meets the regulations or they don't I don't see how the commission can control discharge volume other than storm water so let's just look at this because this is kind of important here the permit shall impose conditions upon the activity or the portion thereof that will in the judgment of the commission result in removing dredging filling building upon or altering a resource area the permit shall impose conditions setting limitations on the quantity or quality of discharge from any point source whether closed or open channel when said limits are appropriate to protect the interest identified in the bylaw so do you guys see what I'm saying about that like we're not going out there at somebody's discharge point and taking a water sample and testing the quality or quantity of the water that's coming out of it ever um we would be making sure that what they what they have proposed as far as their plan meets the regulations and if it meets the regulations then the assumption is that the quantity and quality of discharge is being controlled effectively does that make sense I mean the experiment says to me I'm kind of just wondering you have any idea why this is in there in the first place like what the intent was original intent yeah I mean and and I think it's a great point LaRoy I would I would sort of estimate that the reason for that is so let's just say for example the commission permits a given stormwater design and that I'll use I'll use Aspen Heights as an example so Aspen Heights is a development that's on Route 9 Northampton Road it's sort of you know where Domino's pizza is right across from Stop and Shop it's kind of that big one that's like right behind there they had a couple stormwater structures and they're called level spreaders so what the way that it was designed was uh these the system collects water under the driveway infiltrates it and then there's sort of an emergency outlet for these two level spreaders and essentially they're only supposed to be wet like during major rainstorms but most of the time they're supposed to be dry but whenever I went out there to inspect them they were always standing water ponds and I I think that the reason for this condition is for situations like that where whatever was approved isn't really functioning as it was intended until your original point we can't really regulate that right we can just regulate the original intent but you can regulate the plan once it's in and they satisfy the original conditions that yeah well so we can to some degree so what happened with that particular situation was I met with the engineer out there and they had there's like there was a couple issues there's a high groundwater table um but they're they also still had erosion controls in which we're basically damning up the the level spreader and since they've removed those it's been functioning quite a bit better um but there's also other things we can do so like in our conditions we require inspections logs we require maintenance logs to make sure that they're inspecting and cleaning these systems because a lot of times the quality and quantity of discharge can depend if they're not adequately cleaning these systems out when they're supposed to which is part of the order of conditions so like that why I brought that example up was I asked them for their maintenance logs and they didn't provide them to me and then it was like radio silence and I'm like okay so you know I think that one thing we might want to do there is to say something to the effect of um systems must function as they are as they were designed and intended to function and if they're dysfunctioning then or if they're causing resource area damage maybe then the applicant would need to come back to the commission to address that that does that seem um like a good kind of different way to say this yeah I guess I'm sort of surprised that we have so little say after the fact as I was saying because you know you know water rainfall changes it's changing and if something is not working then it's just there's no repercussions which that seems odd to me well there there are repercussions so and let me talk about that really quickly just and again this is an educational process so I want to make sure that we're talking about these things that you guys can can learn and I know LaRoy has been through this a little bit so the reason that this came up was because the applicant applied for a request for certificate of compliance and I know Michelle you've seen one or you know you've seen a couple of these come through but when the request for certificate of compliance comes in that's when I start saying well I need an as-built plan I need maintenance logs I need um you know inspection logs I need uh a sign-off from an engineer that everything was built to spec um and if any of those things aren't in order like uh Ed Vista Terrace remember we saw runoff and erosion over there on West Street recently and I said I don't recommend we issue a certificate of compliance on this until the site is stable if they do something that is like far-fetched and their permit isn't functioning we don't have to issue a certificate of compliance and that's a really powerful thing because what that means is there's an encumbrance on the deed so if the owner wants to sell they can't or they have to notify the person they're selling to and usually that requires holding an escrow which is a huge amount of money to make sure that the the issue is resolved so we do have the power but uh it's really when the commission wants to exercise that power and sometimes it can cause a lot of people to get very very upset um I've had somebody dive across the table during a concom meeting to try to strangle me over one of these because they built they built like 30 feet closer to the wetland and I didn't I recommended that we not issue a certificate of compliance and they it was in you know it it's a basically a bad mark on the deed for the property so when they do a title search to try to sell it they can't well thank you for that education um I I do like what Laura was saying like to maybe try and understand the original intent and make it more clear or you know consistent with um an actual power law okay I do I do think that that is important and I think um I'm just going to highlight that all these ones that are like these important items that need to be addressed I think we should incorporate them okay so let's see yeah so this is another one of those um this one right here we'll have to change that um permits can definitely under state law be extended so I don't recommend that we tell people they can't extend permits it just creates a nightmare if somebody's in the middle of working on something and they haven't it might not be their fault that they couldn't complete it within three years um so they should have the opportunity to do an extension there are conditions though that I added further down the line here for when an extension is appropriate so we'll get to that um I have to find out I have to get an answer to this question from DEP and from our town attorney because we have these we have like so many hard copies of well and protection act applications and permits and I want to find out right now we're keeping a hard copy and an electronic copy of all application materials and I kind of want to find out if we if we can just move to electronic this is this question right here is one that I want to talk to the town town council about or town attorney about we haven't gotten to this point yet but we will um him and I left off on page 16 when we were going through today but um this says that we can't revoke a permit without holding a public hearing which would mean notifying a butters and posting a legal ad and I don't think that that's necessary um I think one thing to keep in mind was is the original bylaw that was written in Amherst was written by a consultant by a wetlands consultant who did private consulting and so something like this would be really um important for a consultant because it means if their client commits an egregious violation the commission can't just revoke the permit they have to go through this administrative process to do it and why should we go through an administrative process if we don't have to I think we should have the power to revoke it just during a regular meeting uh that's a quorum of the board if we if the commission so chooses to um so I'll I'll double check on that just to make sure that we're on solid ground but that might be something I will try to strike okay so this says the commission may combine the commission may combine the permit or other action on an application issued under the bylaw an application that should be a permit um with the order of conditions issued under the wetland protection act so remember I mentioned earlier that we keep the conditions separate under the wetland protection act in the bylaw this condition says that we can combine them you don't want to do that because what happens when it goes to appeal is that they won't if so like let's say for example I issue an order of conditions and somebody appeals it there's two courses for the appeal one is mass DEP and the other in a town that has a local bylaw is superior court usually the appeals run concurrent to one another so they're going one course through DEP with their appeal on the wetland protection act side and they're going one course through superior court on the bylaw side that's how it's supposed to work now if there is one document of conditions so essentially it's all combined into one a superior court judge would just throw it out and say there's no separate permit here for the local bylaw so I'm not taking any action and it's happened many many times that's why that that's why they DEP actually requires when you're issuing an order of conditions to keep them separate so that needs to be adjusted accordingly feel free to jump in with questions if I'm anything I say isn't clear guys I don't want to feel like I'm dominating here but we are making progress for we've we're almost to page 20 okay so remember earlier I was talking about extensions and it said you can only issue a a three-year or you can only a permit is only valid for three years and basically says there's no extension process there is an extension process there's actually a specific permit for an extension on an order of conditions however or actually an order of conditions and I believe on an ORAD as well so an order of resource area delineation however these conditions in those cases are extremely important and we've run into major problems because these conditions weren't followed so a site visit to visually confirm that resource area area boundaries have not changed so when you're dealing with a permit that's 20 years old which recently and actually we still have a valid one that's over 20 years old where the boundaries changed dramatically and we never nobody went back to to to document that and so now there's the old house lots are really close to the wetland and we could have basically restricted that from happening if we had gone out and checked it the flagging and wetland markers have to be present and complete as we're approved on the original permit and this is really important because like when I go out to do an inspection if I see where the original flag was sitting and there's a huge wet basin that expands 30 feet beyond that flag I know that the wetland boundary has changed and they need to we need to just let the permit expire and have them file a new permit or amend their existing permit no existing enforcement on the property if they want a continuation they have to resolve their enforcement issues and then just the changes in resource area boundaries would trigger change I think it's a really wise move to what is that number one about keeping the original flagging yeah that pretty consistently yeah and people applicants owners hate that because the flagging after like a year or two is completely gone it just deteriorates and that's the other reason why we like on Tofino required a metal rebar marker but and again that's an example of one where the wetland expanded significantly so you have a rebar marker but the wetlands expanded beyond that boundary so we will know in the future if it's expanded or not one way or the other this is really funny um k number one here this is completely illegal uh the commission its agents officers and employees shall have the authority to enter on privately owned land at reasonable times for the purpose of performing their duties under the bylaw um survey sampling the deems necessary under the constitution and laws of the united states and the commonwealth of massachusetts so that is trespassing and i definitely cannot and would not ever enter private property without the permission of the landowner um it will not be it will not hold up in court if i trespassed on somebody's land took pictures to document a violation and then left and filed a enforcement order the the d e p would throw the enforcement order out because i was trespassing you can view it from a neighboring property you can view it from the air like with a drone you can get permission from the landowner but you cannot just enter their property without their permission so that section definitely needs to be interested can i just ask one thing about that yep i agree um and so it would it would be then changed to may enter the permission of the landowner and something but do we need so so that's sort of taking away a right to um check the site out so is there some requirement that we have to at some point be let on to observe the property or else they don't get approved like is there some backup somewhere okay excellent point sorry um yeah so two things michelle to your question number one if there's an active permit on the property it's always a boilerplate condition that i can enter the site so so if somebody has an active order of conditions i can enter the site because they've granted me their permission to do so so that's number one um any site with a active permit has already been granted permission for me to enter if if there was a site that had an egregious violation and we needed to get on site and the landowner was refusing us access we can actually get a warrant and the other thing is and i've done this before you can call the environmental police and in massachusetts the environmental police don't need a warrant to enter property if there's a um environmental damage caused uh were reported so i could i have gone um with an environmental police officer onto a site and um i was really fun um okay so there's some recourse or something we have okay yeah big long section on enforcement which is nice and you can see there's not a lot of edits to the enforcement section which is a really good thing yeah i mean if there's one section that you want to be solid it's this so it's good that you're not seeing a lot of edits on here um sorry i i wish i could scroll to the right i don't know why this document's not letting me do that um so i have to ask i i really need to talk to the town to the town attorney on this one there's several sections in our enforcement section about fines issuing fines to people it kind of speaks to the vintage of when these were written because this has changed quite a bit um fines are not really the way to go um and i'll tell you why so in order to issue a fine you actually have to write a ticket and we don't really have tickets in the wetlands uh conservation department here in town what you would do is use like so the inspection department does have tickets um like building inspector so if there's like a building violation like somebody's doing electrical work without a permit they can issue a violation but in order to to actually follow through with these as these are written what you would have to do is have one of those tickets and basically write them a ticket every single day almost like a parking ticket and you have to send each of those tickets to them every single day and you have to keep a stack of them like this and you go after them and that's when they're talking about here like the town collector may go against the property owner and place a lien um it's very similar to like a parking ticket you know like if you park a car at a um uh you know a metered station and you don't pay that you can just keep getting tickets so it's it's kind of similar to that um but really the the the appropriate course which has kind of been a learning process since the wetland protection act came into effect is that if somebody's in violation you issue them enforcement order if they don't comply with the enforcement order town council or town the town attorney would then go after them and file charges against them and that's and that is the correct path of action as opposed to us getting involved in fines um so there might be some um adjustment that needs to be made here for us to um account for that difference and um I have to get to that section with the town attorney to make sure that that's um adequate and up to date I had said I'd be a little bit worried about uh losing the ability to fine we've only used it once but that guy came around very quickly he did but he never actually got a ticket and he never actually paid a fine all right it was more so him heart would no nope it was can't nav right laroy yeah yeah so you just threatened him with a fine and also how much was the fine is it like so the fine is spilled out um as far as what we can do every day but so I can't speak to it completely because I was actually out on maternity leave um when that occurred um but I came back on the tail of that um 300 per violation per day okay per day so it's it's got it's motivating well and and we may want to leave it in there for the motivating factor of it to be honest but at the same time keeping in mind that that is kind of the only applicable place for it is to threaten people in my opinion to come into compliance um and really ultimately our our strongest legal recourse is to sue them if they're not complying um through through our town attorney um so um because when I go ahead well when I came when I came back from maternity leave he had had like a month of fines and so that would have meant somebody would have had to write him a ticket every single day for 30 days straight have those tickets documented by day with the amount and they would have had to have been sent to him every single day and that didn't happen so I came in sort of on the tail end after 30 days um after the fine had been issued and I was like trying to figure out how do I backtrack on this and I called town council and said this is the situation and they said oh no give them till like the end of next week and if they don't respond then I will basically just start a lawsuit against them and um I contacted their attorney and by the end of the week they were they were in lockstep so um it ended up being fine but um mind the pun it's tough to say loroy I don't know if it was just because I had been gone and it was kind of like oh yeah you know we'll just wait till Aaron gets back I don't know I I don't know um it's tough to say what motivated them and I think at the end of the day my goal with enforcement is just to get people to come into compliance you know and work with us and so ultimately that's what happened so um but we do need some clarification on this and I'm not saying that we take out the fines all together but we might want to do a little um adjustments of some of the language wow we only got through 22 oh yeah okay so here's another example in a timely manner I feel like that's really vague um I think that we should probably say something like 30 days or even 14 days um for a violation um I think a timely manner is something that's just it's not really a certain amount of time I totally agree all timing manner should be struck from the document it's completely subjective yeah um so what do you guys think then what do you think is reasonable like in in the case of an enforcement um I'm going with your original 30 days because I generally have two meetings for us uh we've seen a lot of people have called us for various things I wouldn't mind given the full authority Michelle how you feel about that yeah 14 seemed like kind of quick okay so yeah as long as we don't think 30 is too long I mean I my only um I guess comment on that is that we um just the commission needs to be uh very specific about what their expected deliverables are within the 30 day window and the reason I say that is like if we say oh well we want this cleaned up within 30 days again it's discretionary and subjective but if we say you want a survey we want this reflag we want a redesign of the engineered plan and we want it all within 30 days then it's like okay you know is that probably what we'd write into it because in that in that respect 30 days seems like a reasonable time period a timely manner um but it would be like on our third meeting so we would go through two meetings right and then they probably don't know how big of a deal that is but if we're going to ask for all that I guess yeah 30 days is seems reasonable yeah well um so we are behind schedule pretty significantly behind schedule but honestly um I think this is great and everything that we're talking about I think we're going at a good pace in terms of the content it's going to start going faster in some ways because um once we get down I'll just show you guys really quickly I know I know I'm going to respect your time and not um uh go over but um we start getting into the resource area specifics and some of that I might sort of skip over for good reason and we can talk about that once we get to it um for right now but um but we're getting there we're only a few paid two or three pages away from there so uh we're we're getting there we're making good progress and it's a good learning experience I think just to talk about it so and to get to know our bylaw really well so yeah so um I am good for today and happy to um carry on on February 18th with our next round okay there are no attendees today so I'll just close the meeting at 101 sounds good thank you guys so much for your time I really really appreciate it stay guys all right bye guys take care