Town Board holds final meeting of 2016
At the last Town Board meeting of 2016 on December 28, the board unanimously passed a resolution to set a public hearing for January 27 on purchasing “4.5 acres of property at Burns Road … from the Shelter Island Meeting of Religious Society of Friends for the bargain sale price of $25,000.”
The Reporter will have more on this resolution in subsequent posts and in the print edition this Thursday.
Supervisor Jim Dougherty announced that the town had received a mortgage tax check from Suffolk County for $143,127 for the third quarter of 2016. Mr. Dougherty noted that the town had budgeted for a mortgage tax total of $348,000 for all of 2016, so “with three months to got it was a very favorable budget variance.”
The town also received a favorable grade on the effectiveness of the Building Department’s enforcement of building and zoning codes from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The ISO is an is an independent, non-governmental international organization with a membership of 163 national standards bodies from the ISO.
On a scale of 1 to 10, with one being most favorable and 10 being unfavorable, the town’s Building Department scored a “3” for one and two family residences and “3” for commercial and industrial properties.
The ISO rates the department every five years and this is a “dramatic improvement from 2011,” Mr. Dougherty said, when the town scored a “5” in each category.
This means that “short term and long term insurance costs for our constituents” will result in a “slowing down of increases or a lowering of insurance premiums,” Mr. Dougherty said.
The supervisor announced that the Shelter Island Ambulance Foundation had presented the town with a check for $85,000 to be used for capital improvements.
Mr. Dougherty thanked Councilwoman Mary Dudley for her hard work during the past year. Ms. Dudley was defeated in the November election by Amber Brach-Williams, who will be sworn in Tuesday.
