THE NEW CHAIR OF RANDOLPH’S BOARD OF CIVIL AUTHORITY.
Look, it snowed last night, a lot, and then some more today. I've been doing a lot of shoveling. I *could* have changed my clothes for this meeting, the one where I was sworn in as chair, but it's really not the Vermont way.
And look, it's both cool because hey I have seniority and I look forward to running nice tight meetings, but also not so cool that anyone else wanted to do it. #civics #vermont
What does the BCA do? I am glad you asked!
We oversee elections (in conjunction with the town clerk, and we appoint an acting town clerk for elections if something is wrong with ours), help maintain the voter checklist, give feedback on redistricting, and serve on the Board of Abatement, which hears property tax and water/sewer bill abatement requests.
I'm on the BCA because I'm an elected Justice of the Peace. My joke is that I do this so no one makes me run for Selectboard.
Spent the last three hours at the Town Hall both attending a Water/Wastewater Committee meeting (more interesting than you'd think - plus the head of the water department is the dad of the young woman whose race car I sponsor) and then writing NO 3000 times (1000 ballots x 3) because there was a misprint that no one caught and it needed to be fixed before election day next Tuesday.
It's warm at the Town Hall and folks are nice and there are free snacks.
@jessamyn water infrastructure sounds low-tech and unglamorous but it's essential and nothing can replace it!
a friend of mine moved up into the mountains after he retired, where he ran a tiny water utility serving a handful of households from a couple wells. he really liked having important work to do with his hands :)
sometimes infrastructure people just can't stop, and i think that's beautiful
@astrid @jessamyn on the subject of "tiny water utilities" - the house I grew up in was on a property which had been subdivided from an old farm, and our water came from a pump-house built around a spring. when my parents bought it the deed had an easement that the old farmhouse across the field could use the pump house "if needed".
@elfprince13 @astrid Oh wow. My first house was spring fed from a spring not on site which had an easement (and no pump house, it was all gravity-fed) and I owned the place for maybe a decade and never really knew where it came from.
@jessamyn @astrid my parents' house is about 80' above the spring, and the old farm house is about 40' below the spring, so they are all gravity fed (with the cistern to make up for the pretty tiny pipe doing the feeding, but we needed a pump.
I always wonder how far down their pipe is buried where it crosses the corn field to stay safe from farm equipment.
@elfprince13 @jessamyn @astrid
As my old boss at the local housing authority always used to say, "it all comes down to sewer"
@elfprince13 @astrid @jessamyn and that's why my third-tier backup water cistern, the one without a fully sealed roof, has a mouse ladder in it
@astrid @jessamyn fast-forward a bit more than a decade and one winter a family of rabbits chewed through the side of the pump house, fell in, and died. my parents + younger siblings (who hadn't left for college yet) spent the winter drinking bottled water, and then in the spring we all set out to rebuild excavate and drain the pump-house foundation, pour a new foundation and build a new, critter-proof structure on top.