ANDOVER — Voters at the annual town meeting Saturday will decide whether to have a committee look into having a town manager, change the annual meeting to March and enact a land use ordinance.
The meeting will begin at 8 a.m. at the Town Hall.
Among the 60 warrant articles is one asking residents if they prefer having the annual meeting in March, starting next year.
“Moving the annual town meeting back to March allows the board to get bids and get on the contractors’ schedules sooner once monies are approved at town meeting,” Chairman Brian Mills wrote in an email this week. “Town Meeting in June puts us at the bottom of their schedules and in many cases pushes the work into the following year with an increase in prices. We changed our Town Meeting date a few years ago to coincide with the school budget (vote in June).”
Mills said the question to have a five-member committee look at options for hiring a town manager is the third time it’s been brought to voters. He brought it twice before and Selectman Justin Thacker did this year.
“The Town of Andover needs something to change in the running of its town,” Mills wrote in the email. “Selectmen need no qualifications to get elected and really can get away with doing nothing and collecting a check. This is not beneficial to the town in any way.
“Most selectmen have another job,” he said, “and do not have the time to devote to all the work that needs to be done to run a town efficiently and effectively,” he said.
Regarding the Andover Land Use Ordinance, Planning Board Chairman Sidney Pew said, ““The way the statutes are written, if someone comes in with a travel trailer or puts a tent up, and they start occupying it, living in it, unless it’s in the shoreland zoning, unless you have an ordinance in place, you have no way of knowing what they are doing with their excretion and their wastewater.”
Also, the town needs to have regulations in instances when people set up travel trailers for the long term and don’t come to the Planning Board to get a building permit for them, he said.
Other articles include taking $5,000 from the designated road for future sidewalk repairs and raising and appropriating $147,000 to improve the town tennis courts, swing set and playground.
Information on the proposed budget for the coming year was not available early Thursday evening.
The proposed budget for the coming year is $2.7 million, which is bout $600,000 more than this year, Thacker said.
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