Epsom News : pembroke

No money to fix Suncook River

Hooksett Editor — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:39:00 GMT

Steve Landry, Merrimack County Watershed Supervisor, has a simple answer for when the Suncook River should have been stabilized: “About two years ago,” the staff member of the Department of Environmental Services said.

But there are no simple answers for the Suncook, which changed its course in the Mother’s Day flood of 2006. Landry, fellow DES staffer Steve Couture and the town of Epsom are applying for alternate funding after a grant application to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was rejected recently.

Water under the bridge The Suncook changed its course, and the face of Epsom, on May 15, 2006. The storm event, now known as the Mother’s Day Flood, rerouted the river, which originates in Alton and Pittsfield. The river used to split at Bear Island in Epsom, with a larger tributary running around the northwest and a smaller one around the southeast, before they joined up again. With the rerouting, called an “avulsion,” all the water went to the southeast, leaving the northwest high and dry.

The change of course resulted in a process known as “head-cutting.” When the level of a river drops, the river “wants equilibrium,” according to Eric Orff, wildlife biologist and longtime Epsom resident. So the river “eats at” the bed of the river upstream, trying to reduce the grade, and sending sand, silt and sediment downstream.

The avulsion has created problems ranging from recreational to real estate, according to Epsom Selectman Chairman Keith Cota. Property values have dropped, resulting in both a loss of equity for homeowners and a lower tax base for Epsom. The town has lost its flood storage capacity, he said. A second avulsion, at Round Pond near Epsom Central School, has affected a wildlife habitat and is near the Epsom Municipal Well. The town beach, on Short Falls Road, has been closed for two years due to sediment from the avulsion.

Cota said he is “extremely disappointed” at the rejection of the grant. The grant wasn’t regular FEMA reimbursement, but from FEMA’S Disaster Mitigation Fund, a funding source for projects “so this kind of thing won’t happen again.”

But the process was simply too competitive, he said, with the “little Suncook River” up against projects from all over the country. The town has $50,000 set aside from a Community Development Block Grant, but will need another $3.5 million to do the job properly, he said. And the town doesn’t qualify for federal stimulus funds, he added, because the project is not “shovel ready.”

Job specs
“It is a big job,” Landry said.

The town of Epsom and the DES co-funded a study on the best ways to deal with the river, Landry said. They had public forums and formed a Suncook River Restoration Task Force. They came up with four or five different options, and decided option 3 to be the best.

Landry said option 3 involves installing grade controls, made of large stones, in the main channel of the Suncook. These are very large stones designed and sized specifically to stop erosion, he said. They are placed in structures called “rock veins” or “weirs,” and provide the river with resistance to further erosion.

“They arrest the head-cutting,” Landry said. Ideally, the grade control needs to be installed as soon as possible -- “as of two years ago,” Landry said.

The channel also needs access to a properly sized flood plain, which it doesn’t have now, Landry said.

Over geological time, Landry said, the river would eventually right itself. But that would take decades,and Epsom doesn’t have decades, he said.

“The infrastructure is at risk,” he said.

And residents, especially those living downstream, are frustrated, he said.

Cash flow crisis
While the river is flowing, the cash is not. The estimated cost for the “full-blown” project, is $4 million, Landry said. Since FEMA denied the grant, he expects to see the town scale back and just do the highest priority item, which is the grade control. But design and permits for that should run $400,000 to $500,000, he said, “just to get it ready for construction.”

Cota and the other selectmen, Bob Blodgett and Joanne Randall, are firm in their resolve not to ask taxpayers for the money. Epsom can’t afford it, Cota said, and the river is actually a state-owned entity.

Landry and Couture are seeking other funding options for the town. They have applied for a grant from the Department of Homeland Security for the design and permit phase, and Landry said, “I feel pretty good about this one.”

The grant is actually from the DES Dam Bureau, for the costs of maintaining dams in the Suncook River Watershed, but Landry thinks Epsom will qualify. And, he said, if the grant is given, it should go through fairly quickly.

Both Congressman Paul Hodes and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen are also concerned, and have made river stabiilazation funds part of their requested appropriations for 2010 -- in the full amount, Landry said.

While he’s waiting for the federal and state funds to come through, Landry will continue to explore other ways of creative financing.

“It’s what we do,” he said.

And Cota hopes they do it well and soon.

“It’s very disappointing,” he said, ‘that we can go from 2006 to 2009 without a solution.”

Epsom, Pembroke join forces with other towns to save on health care

Hooksett Editor — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 17:48:00 GMT

BY JENN McDOWELL

Epsom and Pembroke will hope to see some lower health insurance costs for town employees after they agreed to share costs with some neighboring towns.

The Suncook Valley Regional Town Association, made up of representatives from Epsom, Pembroke, Chichester, Pittsfield and Barnstead, has asked the Local Government Center, which handles all of the employee benefits for their towns, to pool them together in order to lower costs. According to the association’s coordinator, Chichester Budget Committee member Bruce ***, the towns could save up to 20 percent in health insurance contributions this year.

The Local Government Center likes to work with groups of more than 100 town employees for costs such as health insurance for simplicity and success in getting lower rates.

“By grouping our respective towns together, we become one entity of over 100 employees,” said ***, of the five towns.

The town of Strafford contacted association members and requested to get on board with the health care regionalization program, and will also be included in this endeavor although they are not officially part of the association, *** said. The towns will be treated as one entity for the purpose of purchasing health insurance, he said.

While health insurance rates will likely increase for the 2009 fiscal year, the member towns of the association can still expect to pay about a four-fifths of what other towns with fewer than 100 employees are paying.

Bow also contacted the association hoping to get in on the health insurance savings, but it was a little too late in the game, *** said.

“We’re expecting we’re going to see a couple of other towns most likely join our association going forward,” *** said.

Several other resource-combining options are on the table for the association, *** said, including a regionalized approach to assessing, something that has already been done through a cooperation of New London, Sutton and Newbury.

The three towns hired a single assessor, which is included in one town’s budget each year, and gets shared among the towns. Combined, they save about $60,000 per year, *** said.

The group is in the early stages of debating that idea, but they are aggressively pursuing it, *** said. More analysis needs to be done on the demographics of the towns, and whether it would be more financially prudent to work in pairs or triples for that instead of involving all five towns.

The association is also looking into the potential of regionalizing their fire departments, something that is in the very early stages of their discussions. “That’s a big one. It’s one thing to talk about health insurance or assessing, but fire departments are a whole other matter, and we’re excited about that,” *** said. “There’s a feeling among some of the towns that it makes sense, and we as a community were very pleased to hear that within the fire departments there apparently is an understanding that it might make sense,” he said.

The association is exploring other possibilities for cooperation, including combining resources for paving, fuel purchases and buying sand and salt.

The group will publicly meet next at Grange Hall in Chichester on Tuesday, Oct. 2, at 7 p.m.

Stolen equipment found at Epsom home

Hooksett Editor — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 18:59:00 GMT

BY JENN McDOWELL

An Epsom man is facing charges after police found over $100,000 worth of stolen dirt bikes, snowmobiles, tractors, and an all-terrain vehicle (ATV) on his property.

Jerry Dupont, 42, of 32 Range Road in Epsom, was arrested at his home on Tuesday, Aug. 12, after Pembroke and Epsom police executed a search warrant resulting from a several week- long investigation into a dirt bike stolen from a Pembroke home.

Right now, Dupont is charged with receiving stolen property, a Class A felony punishable by jail time. More serious charges may develop as the investigation into who actually stole the equipment further develops, police said.

Lt. Dwayne Gilman of the Pembroke Police Department said there are most likely other suspects involved.

“This isn’t normally a oneperson deal,” he said.

In cases such as this one, it’s often difficult to prove who actually stole the items.

“No one is jumping ahead of us saying, ‘Hey, I’m the one who stole the bike,” Gilman said. “Right now, we don’t feel we have enough to go after the person who actually stole it.”

The dirt bike was taken from Pembroke on July 12, and the Pembroke police were able to gather enough information to search Dupont’s home.

When police began tracing the other vehicles contained in Dupont’s garage and elsewhere on his property, they found several other items which came up as stolen, said Epsom Police Chief Wayne Preve, allowing Epsom police to execute their own search warrant.

Police seized four motorcycles, three snowmobiles, one ATV and two skid/steer tractors.

The items came up as stolen from Epsom, Holderness, Northwood, Moultonborough, Deerfield, Barnstead and Boxford, Mass.

Also among the items recovered was a snow machine from Bickford Sports Center on Dover Road in Epsom, Preve said. “We’re dealing with 14 or 15 different items here,” said Preve.

Some of the property recovered still has to be verified as stolen or as belonging to Dupont, Preve said.

Pembroke police called the Epsom Police Department and told them they were going to search Dupont’s home, and asked for assistance, Preve said.

“Pembroke did an excellent job of getting the information, and it just opened a big can of worms,” said Preve. “Right now, it’s still under investigation.”

Dupont was not at home when police arrived on Aug. 12 at 10 a.m. to search the home, but officers had his daughter call him and he arrived shortly after.

Because the property was found in Epsom, Preve said, Epsom will be the charging jurisdiction in the case. Dupont was released on $2,500 cash bail. He is scheduled to appear in Concord District Court on Wednesday, Sept. 17, to answer to the receiving stolen property charge.