Cheshire Selectmen Want Pine Valley Roads Paved
CHESHIRE, Mass. — The Selectmen fear Morgan Management plans to reimburse Pine Valley Mobile Home Park residents without paving the park roads.
Selectwoman Carol Francesconi read a letter from Morgan Management’s attornies Kraus and Hummel Tuesday requesting that the upcoming Aug. 25 rent control hearing be canceled and stated that they are currently calculating how much the park residents have paid since the rent increase.
"It sounds like they are willing to refund some money, but my concern is that I want to see this work done because these roads are awful," Selectman Edmund St. John IV said. "They may figure it is cheaper for them to refund what they have taken than it is to fix the road."
The Selectmen, sitting as the Rent Control Board, approved in 2016 a $7.20 monthly rent increase, $5.12 of which was to go toward repairing and repaving parks roads that were torn up during the installation of a new septic system.
This never happened.
Selectman Robert Ciskowski said part of the reason he allowed the general rent increase in 2016 was because they promised to pave the roads.
"If they are just going to give back the money that taints what I did," he said. "I can’t separate the increase form the paving. I don’t want the money to come back."
Ciskowski added that the roads are so bad the Highway Department can’t even help.
The law firm did say they could be present at a future meeting with this calculation, but the Selectmen agreed that they still want to hold a rent control meeting with all the residents in early September.
"That’s is the easy way out and it won’t provide the residents with any satisfaction," St. John said. "The residents have been waiting and waiting and I don’t think they want their money back they want the road fixed."
Morgan Management is reportedly selling the park for $1.7 million, however, the town has not yet received notification that the mobile home park has been sold.
In other business, repairing the town’s 1986 road grader may be out of the question and although it is possible, Highway Superintendent Blair Crane said it may not be worth the trouble.
"That is not a simple fix. I would have to split the machine apart and there are probably 25 hydraulic hoses in there," he said.
"If I can find the parts to fix I would have to replace everything it is a major project and surely not cheap."
Last month Francesconi asked Crane to figure out what it would cost to fix the machine that they thought only had a broken radiator. The town currently rents a grader for $4,000 a month and a new one would cost near $325,000.
Crane said when he took the machine apart he found that the center pin had about an inch and a half to two inches of "slop" or movement. The pin is not supposed to move at all.
He said this repair would be on the low end $10,000. With the radiator repair, the town right off the bat would have at a minimum $15,000 into the machine.
Crane said he suspects he will find more issues once he starts the project.
"Once you take anything apart like that that has been together 32 years you are going to find other things that aren’t right," he said. "Who knows what the upper busing looks like."
Crane added that finding parts will also be an issue and the company that made the town grader is no longer in business and was purchased by another company.
"The guy just about laughed on the phone…he had to call me back because he didn’t have the computer records for it and had to go to the other building to pull up the microfiche to look at parts," he said.
Crane added that just running the machine without the repair could also be troublesome.
"There is the risk that if it breaks somewhere on the road and dumps all of that hydraulic oil. When the machine splits it will snap those hoses," he said. "It will be like the old days when they put oil on the roads I guess there wouldn’t be any dust problems for a while."
Francesconi noted that $15,000 is still far less than $325,000 but Ciskowski said that project would be a "nightmare" and the town would likely have to send the machine away to be fixed.
He suggested keeping an eye out for used machines.
"A new one is not in our future right now and maybe we could find the right machine and maybe put some money into it," he said.
