Dover-Foxcroft to use $45K in ARPA funds on premium pay for town employees

DOVER-FOXCROFT – The Dover-Foxcroft Select Board decided Monday to allocate $45,300 of the town’s first round of American Rescue Plan Act funds to thank town employees who worked through the COVID-19 pandemic.

The board voted unanimously to approve the premium pay, which will benefit current full-time, regular part-time and on-call employees who worked from July 1, 2021, through Dec. 31, 2021. One member was not in attendance.

The board’s move on Monday was the first formal decision to dedicate a portion of the funding. Dover-Foxcroft was awarded $426,370 total in ARPA funding and has already received the first half, Town Manager Jack Clukey said. The town will receive the second allotment later this year. 

The town’s public works department will demolish and remove the structure at 72 Lincoln St. as soon as workers have a few days undisturbed by the weather, Clukey said.

Select Board members authorized the demolition in December after a monthslong debate over whether the property, whose owner has been incarcerated, would be remedied and eventually occupied.

“For the town to do it, there would be the cost of our time and whatever we have to pay for equipment and materials, which may just be the container,” Clukey said. “Our current plan is we would use our own trucks to haul the material to the transfer station.”

The town plans to recoup costs from the property owner, he said.

The board signed off on an overlimit permit agreement, which allows the Maine Department of Transportation to use overweight equipment and loads on municipal roads for construction work in Piscataquis County, specifically along routes 6 and 15.

Select Board members also discussed the town’s indoor masking policy, a conversation that member Barry Hutchins initiated because other entities, such as Regional School Unit 68, have changed social distancing requirements and allowed masks to be optional as COVID-19 cases have slowed, he said. 

According to RSU 68’s policy, if the number of cases in a week’s time is 13 or below per school, masks are not required.

“I think that we should be willing to adapt our policies to changing information,” he said, adding that he believed in the policy at the time that it was approved.

Most of the other Select Board members disagreed with Hutchins, some pointing out that Piscataquis County’s transmission rate remains high, which concerned them. The town is not a controlled environment like RSU 68, which does pooled testing, member Gail D’Agostino said.

“The schools may go back to a situation where they are in the red (remote learning) because it depends on the data and how many students test positive,” member Michael Sutton said. “If we were to change because they changed, we could change back and forth, back and forth. It seems like, to me, if the color changes out of red, we could change.”

The board will consider the indoor masking requirement at its next meeting.