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December 2020
Dear Fellow OLS Member;
As the year comes to a close, we hope this letter finds you and your family safe and well. Although we have faced many challenges this year, we finally witnessed actual shovels in the ground for our much anticipated sewer project. We initiated the project over ten years ago and the challenges of completing the planning and design phases seemed endless. Because those phases required complying with regulations of multiple state agencies, contracting with various municipal entities, their stakeholder interests and resulting complexities raised many political sensitivities that prolonged the timeline for their completion. The volunteers of the BOG/WPCA have been guided throughout the process by legal counsel and the engineering and professional services of Fuss & O’Neill to ensure that we follow the mandate objectives and direction that 86% of our Association members voted on in 2012. With the start of the bidding and construction phase, we will regularly update our progress with you.
The construction phase begins with our request for bids in the Spring on several elements of the entire project. You surely noticed that construction began this summer with the installation of our new Connecticut Water Company supply lines. This portion of the project jumped ahead of the request for bid process, because the Connecticut Water Company absorbed the infrastructure cost for this themselves. They also began this process early in order to satisfy their internal financial planning requirements that resulted from acquisition. Both of these items benefit our association, since it offloaded substantial cost to our water service provider and delivered real, visible results after a long period of waiting.
Obviously, the delays result in anxiety on the part of our community. After all, time is money and the longer it takes to complete the project, the more expensive it becomes as we encounter inflationary pressures and expend funds on extended negotiations and planning. Without a doubt, both the BOG and WPCA, recognize the escalating costs and, as individual association members, share in the same concerns and its financial burden.
The Board of Governors and Water Pollution Control Authority of Old Lyme Shores Beach Association have worked diligently and purposefully over the past decade as individual members have passed through both committees, and their duty-bound focus has been to execute the Association’s 2012 mandate for water pollution control. The mandate was reinforced by the Consent order issued by the Connecticut Department of Energy & Environmental Protection. DEEP and DPH have supported OLSBA in seeking technical and providing Clean Water Fund funding solutions. Both boards commit to ensuring successful delivery of the State mandate for cleaner water through a combination of water supply, wastewater management, and stormwater management. We always invite members who identify problems to bring them to our attention and offer suggestions on how they can be positively addressed to advance the project.
We recognize that the Shared project with Miami Beach, Old Colony Beach (and soon Sound View) and our internal projects are complex and may have impaired our members’ understanding of the full efforts, successes, and challenges of the project. Our goal is to provide better communications and we have started moving toward a better means of regularly communicating updates to our community, and you should notice a significant improvement in information flows in the new year.
The WPCA is actively working on a project to reformat our website to make it more user friendly where we will post WPCA minutes and relevant documents. We anticipate this 1st phase of the project will be accomplished by the end of January. We will augment this with regular WPCA updates and direct members to information available on the website. Internally, we have begun adopting better technology for communicating more frequently and substantively. This includes project management tools and video conferencing technology. While the www.oldlymeshores.org website has immense technical capabilities below the surface, it requires constant care and feeding to populate it with content and keep it curated so that content can be easily found.
On behalf of all BOG & WPCA members, we want to thank you in advance for your cooperation and understanding as we continue to navigate through this major construction project. Successful completion of the project benefits each member, the entire Association, and all of us who enjoy the beaches and Long Island Sound – today and in the generations to come. We hope that you and your families remain healthy and enjoy the holidays and we look forward to a better 2021.
Respectfully Yours,
Matt Merritt, President – OLSBA Joe Halloren, Chairman – WPCA
mattmmc@sbcglobal.net
(860)729-2290