Peru to vote on 5 referendum articles Tuesday

Peru Town Clerk Deb Coudrain opens the information meeting on Oct. 24. From left are Select Board members Chair Gail Belyea, Patrick Houghton, Katie Lawrence, Arthur Clifford and Jason Dolloff. Bruce Farrin/Rumford Falls Times

PERU — Local voters have five referendum articles to consider in this year’s election.

Voting will take place from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. at the Peru Town Office. The articles were addressed at the Oct. 24 public information meeting.

ARTICLE 1

To see if the town will vote to repeal outdated ordinance entitled “Town of Peru Dump Ordinance.”

Don Roach, who also acted as moderator, asked if there was a mechanism for fining somebody if they dump stuff elsewhere.

Select Board member Katie Lawrence responded, “The ordinance itself only covered the actual town dump properties.”

ARTICLE 2

To see if the town will vote to repeal outdated ordinance entitled “No Parking Ordinance for the Town of Peru” (6/4/1977).

ARTICLE 3

To see if the town will vote to repeal outdated ordinance entitled “Holding Tank Ordinance for the Town of Peru” to revert to state and federal laws (9/26/22).

Resident Carol Roach asked, “Is the ordinance being repealed because it’s no longer consistent with state environmental protection requirements, and who will step in to regulate any violations if this ordinance is repealed?”

Lawrence responded that the ordinance was amended in 2017 to say that it would follow state and federal regulations, so nothing would change as state and federal regulations would continue to be followed. She believes code enforcement would be charged with enforcement.

ARTICLE 4

To see if the town will vote to repeal ordinance entitled “Town of Peru Building Permit Odinance” (6/9/15) and replace it with the “Land Use Ordinance” (9/26/22).

Select Board member Arthur Clifford added that the Planning Board and the Code Enforcement Officer would be in charge of the permits coming in, and the new ordinance also had the fee scales of what the permits cost.

Resident Carol Roach asked if the new Land Use Ordinance increased the permit fees.

Clifford said they did update the fees slightly.

Lawrence added, “Originally, it (building permits) was broken down into square footage — it would be a certain price for so much square footage. We changed it so that it was scale, so that the main living area is 10 cents per square foot…Keeping it pretty much the same (cost).”

Select Board member Patrick Houghton said it more closer reflects what the applicants are doing. “If they’re building only a 50-square-foot shed, the fees only cover exactly what they’re building.”

ARTICLE 5

To see if the town will vote to appropriate $10,000 from Coronavirus Local Fiscal Recovery Funds (aka American Rescue Plan Act funds) received by the town from the federal government for the following project: funding Med-Care for capital expenditures.

The Select Board approved recommended use of the funds, and the Finance Committee recommended against it.

Houghton, who attended the meeting with Finance Committee, said the Finance Committee’s main concern in denying it was that “there was no guarantee that that money would go to capital expenditures.”

Present at the information meeting to address that issue was Med-Care Chief Paul Landry.

“I very much appreciate your support and understand your concerns. I believe the motion made by the Select Board even indicated that those funds were to go to be utilized for capital funding. I guess I’m not 100% sure that would be legally binding upon me, but I am 100% sure that it would be morally binding upon myself and the organization. That is the absolute intent of myself as well as the board,” he said.

“The accounting process for that is going to be kind of intricate because I’d have to be providing a report back to the individual towns on exactly what the funds that they allocated to us were utilized for,” Landry said. “It has to meet the requirements of ARPA. And any of the funds that are allocated have to be spent on those capital expenditures prior to Dec. 31, 2024.”

He said, “What that allows me to do is between the time the funds are received and Dec. 31, 2024, I am able to match those funds with different grant funds — private grant funds, donations, etc. — so that we purchase the capital items in the appropriate manner; what we need most urgently first and stretching the funds out to get as many of those items as we can prior to the deadline of Dec. 31, 2024.”