Rockport Town Manager Rick Bates has submitted his bimonthly report to the Rockport Select Board in advance of their meeting, this evening. In town business: 300 notices to liens have been sent out to delinquent taxpayers, sewer water issues in the village are getting addressed, wifi system getting back online following spring hack.

Fire Department

The new fire truck is here and the Fire Fighters have been working hard to get it all loaded up with equipment and gear. They will be doing extensive driver training over the next couple of weeks to qualify everyone driving the truck. So, you will likely see it on the road often driving around Town to give drivers experience in it before responding to fires.

Jason will be giving us all a tour at the department head meeting and interested Select Board members are invited come and see what your money bought. It is an impressive piece of equipment.

The department has had a relatively quiet period although they responded to a structure fire on Wednesday morning, just after midnight in Rockland.

Police Department

Mark Bennett, our shared animal control officer/ parking enforcement officer has taken a job with the Camden Police Department as a Full-Time police officer. While we will miss him, Randy has already replaced him with a new person. Scott Entwistle will be taking his place and is in training now.

The street lights are currently being worked on. Central Maine Power was out over the 4th of July working on the ones that were identified as a priority in the village. At this point a large portion of the lights that were out should have been repaired. We have not yet received a final report from Central Maine Power.

Assessing

The Assessing Department has been working on inspections of properties, however a great dealof Kerry’s time has been taken up with an abatement request that requires an extensive amountof time for him to answer. At last count, he has nearly 60 hours into the research on the request.

Town Clerk/Tax Collector

The 30-day notices to lien have all been mailed out. There were 300 in this round.

Linda and I spoke again about the on-line car registrations and she is hoping that we can get that implemented before September 1st. We are trying to get this completed before the September 15th target, set by the Select Board. We are currently looking into the availability of a trainer.

Planning

We have not been successful with any of the grants we have applied for recently, but they were all long shots for us, but worth trying for.

Bill has been working on the TIF amendment documents along with Kerry and Megan. We have a meeting scheduled with Shana on Thursday, July 12th to get closer to a final plan. Once we have it all framed in we will want to schedule a special town meeting to vote on the changes proposed.

Our hope is to amend the TIF documents to allow us to use the money accumulating now to complete the design and engineering of the remaining sections of Route 1. Once that is complete we can do construction estimates and developing bid documents and go out to bid. Preliminary survey work has already been completed.

We also need to amend the boundaries of the TIF that will allow us to use the new revenue to pay off the bond.

This has been in the works for the past 5 years and will be coupled with connecting the water system to a looped system so that the water system is more dependable in case of a water main break.

Harbor

The “Sail into Summer” event was a huge success. The Andre rededication went well, several hundred people were in attendance for the festivities. A huge thank you to everyone who helped pull this event off. The Holiday on the Harbor committee worked long and hard to get this done and it showed. They are working hard to put on good quality events and thanks to them the event went great.

Thanks to Abbie, her crew and the Highway crew for all their work pulling things together.

Public Works

The Public Works roof has been completed. New membrane roof installed over 2” rigid foam and new gutters. This will provide a waterproof barrier and additional insulation value on the roof.

The generator bid documents are in the final stages of review and updating and changes to meet our specifications. It is not something that Gartley and Dorsky can do for us, so it is being sent out to an outside electrical firm to work on so that we can send it out to bid as soon as the bid specs are completed.

The Sewer Department ran a camera up the sewer line on Summer Street during the last significant rain event and found a significant source of additional inflow. As Mike suspected it is coming from the old school house condo at the top of the hill. They suspect that there is a roof and /or perimeter drain. They are making arrangements to get onto the property and dye or smoke test.

It is a large building with a very large roof. Mike says the intrusion is a significant volume of water that you can see almost immediately, when the rain starts.

Andy is comparing rainfall data from Maine Water Company with pump cycle data to see if he can see any abnormalities. Once those are identified, we will be able to focus on those areas.

We are also identifying sewer covers that might be low and allowing water to get into the system.

We have an intern that is continuing gathering data for the GIS system and have been collecting data on all of the Sewer covers so that they are all identified and in the system.

Mike has been working with the line painting contractor to get a date when they will be in to paint, but as of this time, no date has been set.

We have hired a new Buildings and Grounds Maintenance Person, Mike Gagne who will be starting the middle of July.

Library

Finance

The Library Book sale is scheduled for the 12th through the 15th at the Mid-Coast Recreation Center and the Summer reading program has begun.

We ended the year in good shape in spite of several unexpected expenses. Megan has been working on the pre-audit and the actual audit for 2018 will begin the last week of July so we will have our audit complete before starting the budget.

Technology upgrades are being worked on now. The new router has been installed and the Wi-Fi system is being worked on today (Friday July 6th 2018) once these are complete, Gus will begin switching over all of our cloud backup and e-mail server. This will give us the protection we need to avoid being hacked again.

Other Facebook

Diane has taken an active role in doing daily Facebook posts. People are using the posts as a wayto get and share information. She is posting my manager’s reports on the page as well as on the Town web page. This is a big help and people seem to be using it, liking the posts and sharing them with others. There are currently 1600 followers of the page. We will likely see that number grow as the posts become constant and relevant.

E-mail list serve

We have been working on merging the two lists from the existing list serve and the e-mail list of names collected during Town Meeting and election day. The existing list had a lot of fake addresses on it that we need to cull out and add the new names to it, so we have one list. A task easier said than done.