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Select Board Discusses PFAS Meeting, DPW Equipment Needs

Posted: April 10, 2025

SHAFTSBURY – There will be a meeting on PFAS contamination in Shaftsbury on Monday, April 14, at Cole Hall at 6 p.m. with the Department of Environmental Conservation. There will be a Zoom option to attend, also.

The meeting will focus on the Furnace Brook, Red Clover Lane, Lucas Lane, and Lower East Road area. The wells have been monitored on an ongoing basis, Shaftsbury Town Administrator Paula Iken said at Monday's Select Board meeting. There will be a slide show including a map of where testing has occurred, and the different degrees of contamination that the wells have. In some cases, mitigations will be available, based on the level of contamination, she said. "The Vermont level is 20 parts per trillion and there are mitigation efforts that they can help with," Iken said. "Anyone who falls below that (level), there's kind of a question in there."

A meeting was held recently in Bennington but Shaftsbury officials did not attend.

"We were not able to go to the Bennington meeting. We had a Select Board meeting that night. So, we're having our own Shaftsbury meeting," Iken said. "So, if anyone knows they have PFAS or PFOAs in their well, absolutely come. It's an informational meeting, and we have some options, and we need to figure out how to respond to this."

About two dozen wells were tested in southern Shaftsbury in the East Road area, which is close to the former ChemFab factory on Route 67A in North Bennington, according to a presentation in February.

Per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a class of man-made chemicals used in a wide variety of products, since the early 1950s but only discovered over the past few decades [it] as a worldwide threat to human health and the environment. The substances are especially invasive because of their solubility in water and the fact they only slowly dissipate over as long as hundreds of years – prompting the nickname, "forever chemicals" DPW equipment

Most of Monday's meeting was spent on a discussion between Department of Public Works Foreman Mike Yannotti about DPW equipment. It led to three expenditures from the reserve fund. One was purchase of new Caterpillar backhoe in a five-year purchase agreement. Yannotti said the current backhoe was made in 2011 and has transmission problems, which required $15,000 in repairs last year. The new backhoe has a sticker price of $199,500, but with $25,000 taken off from a trade-in of the old backhoe and another discount, the price for the new one will cost $152,500 in a five-year lease-purchase agreement.

"At that discounted rate, there's nobody who can compete with that price right now," Yannotti said. "We use that machine for loading sand, salt, clearing trees out of the roads during windstorms, cleaning culverts. I mean, it's on wheels, so it's very versatile."

The board also approved the expenditure of $50,000 for the purchase and installation by DPW staff of a new dump body for truck No. 3. The current dump body was bought cheaply and is no longer made. It has needed lots of repairs, he said.

The third expenditure from the reserve fund approved by the board was to pay for a truck ordered in July 2024. Yannotti has budgeted $60,000 over the next five years to pay for the truck. A replacement for truck 4, it is a single-axel box truck, a 2026 International HV 507. It has not yet been built. Grant uncertainty

Board Chair Naomi Miller said she wanted to give a "heads up" to members of the public and the board the uncertainty about the availability of federal grant money under the current administration.

"We are going in all likelihood going to need to be thinking about making hard choices about raising taxes versus giving up services and some balance between them," she said.

"We want to do that in response to the public's considerations about that. It's on the agenda in order to sort of remind us to think about it," Miller said. "And also in order to ask the public, when you listen to this and watch this, to begin thinking about how to make those balances, what your own priorities are, so that we can have feedback when we need to make those choices."

Compliments of: The Bennington Banner
Posted/Author: Mark Rondeau

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