JAY – Selectmen are scheduled to discuss transfer station hours, cemetery stone repair and a rail-trail project at their meeting Monday.

It begins at 6 p.m. in the Community Building.

Sandy Richard of the Healthy Community Coalition is expected to show a half-hour presentation on the 14.5-mile trail on a railroad bed that runs from Jay to Farmington.

A rail-trail committee is looking to improve travel on the sandy trail by adding a more secure surface without paving it. The group would also like to restore a bridge over the Sandy River to connect West Farmington to downtown Farmington.

The project is estimated to cost $1 million, with the group applying for a federal grant to cover 80 percent and the remainder of about $200,000 to come from local fund-raising and donations.

Town Manager Ruth Marden said Rhonda Irish plans to discuss Saturday hours at the town’s transfer station. Existing hours are 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Selectmen are expected to discuss whether there’s a need to stay open that long on Saturdays, Marden said.

The town has curbside pickup, Marden said, and the transfer station is open to the public Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays.

Marden also noted that she received an e-mail from resident Scott Sencabaugh asking the town to help restore a broken headstone of a Revolutionary War veteran in the Jay Hill Cemetery. Sencabaugh wrote that he spent a lot of time reading and researching the history of the town. On one of his trips to the cemetery this summer, he noticed that the gravestone of one of the town’s prominent early settlers was broken in half on the ground.

James Starr’s grave is on the front row of the oldest part of the cemetery, Sencabaugh wrote.

According to Francis Lawrence’s “History of Jay, Maine,” written in 1912, Sencabaugh said, Starr was not only a Revolutionary War hero, but one of the fellows who dressed as an Indian and helped to throw tea overboard from the British ship in Boston Harbor along with Jonathan Parker, who is also buried in the cemetery.

Sencabaugh also volunteered to donate time or labor for research or any kind of physical labor that would be needed.

The town’s cemetery sexton Larry Wright said Friday that he has cement to fix the headstone and would be talking to Marden about repairing the stone Monday.

dperry@sunjournal.com

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