19 Articles on Oct. 2 Special Town Meeting Warrant

Voters will be deciding on 19 warrant articles when they gather Tuesday, Oct. 2 for the fall Special Town Meeting.

The meeting slated to begin at 7 p.m. in the Christine McGrath Auditorium at the new Tewksbury High School.

Topping the warrant will be an article requesting the appropriation of $422,970 from available funds to purchase a new Elgin Sweeper for the DPW, purchase 30 Smartboards and 200 monitors for the schools and payoff the last of the town's equipment leases.

The sweeper purchase and lease payoff are part of a plan by Town Manager Richard Montuori to reduce the town's year-to-year expenses by ending equipment leases and purchasing equipment outright as needed when funds are available.

Another article on the warrant will ask for permission to use $500,000 from the Water Enterprise Fund for replace the water line on East Street. This money is in addition to the $1 million approved at the annual town meeting for water line work on East and Shawsheen Streets.

Unfortunately, the bids came in at $1,295,000. So the additional $500,000 from the enterprise fund will cover the additional costs with some extra as contingency funds.

The most exciting article on the warrant may be Article 10, which will ask voters to approve appropriate $275,292 and take another $2,557,534 from free cash and transfer the entire $2,832,826 into the stabilization account. This would bring the Stabilization Account to a higher level than it has been in several years.

The move was made possible by the fact that state aid was greater than anticipated this year, giving the town $3,628,447 in Certified Free Cash as of July 1, 2012. According to Montuori, money in the stabilization fund is used to stabilize the tax rate and to make one-time purchases.

Article 11 on the warrant asks voters for permission to use $375,000 in Community Preservation funds to build a tennis complex at the new high school.

Article 12 will ask voters to approve spending $750,000 on an artificial turf field for the stadium being constructed at the new high school. However, those funds would not be spent unless the town successfully landed a Massachusetts Division of Conservation Services PARC Grant.

Articles 16-19 deal with zoning issues. Of particular note are Article 16, which will add a parcel of land to the existing Village Overlay District, and Article 18, which will modify language in the Cluster Zoning bylaw to allow for greater flexibility in design and Article 19, which modifies language in the Wetlands Protection Bylaw to give the Conservation Commission more flexibility to make rulings on a case-by-case basis.

The entire warrant is attached to this article as a PDF file.