Tolend landfill topic of City Council workshop

posted on 1/9/2023

The City Council will hold a workshop on the former municipal landfill on Tolend Road, followed by its first regular meeting of 2023, on Wednesday, Jan. 11.

The former landfill is a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s National Priority List site, also known as a Superfund site. In 2022, the EPA completed its required five-year review of site cleanup at the landfill; the report is www.epa.gov/superfund/dover. The workshop will review proposed cleanup operations at the site and the EPA’s recent five-year review. The City of Dover is one of eight responsible parties for the landfill cleanup, which operated from 1960 to 1980.

The Council will hold two public hearings at the meeting following the workshop.

One is on a proposed ordinance change that would clarify the Planning Board can designate “its site review powers and duties” for “minor site plans to a committee of technically qualified administrators chosen by the Planning Board” from Community Services, Planning and other city departments, such as members on the Planning Technical Review Committee. The other public hearing is the acceptance of a $250,000 InvestNH Municipal Planning and Zoning grant allocated to municipalities to analyze and update their land use regulations to help increase housing development opportunities.

Other items on the agenda include authorizing:

• Final payment and settlement with contractor George R. Cairns & Sons, Inc., of Windham, for its work on installing a new culvert underneath the train tracks on Broadway, which was completed in 2021; the contractor filed a claim with the city in 2022 seeking additional compensation related to various events on the project, including the project delay after a significant amount of ledge was discovered in 2019 during the project;
• A $33,500 contract with Kessler Consulting, Inc., of Tampa, Florida, to conduct a feasibility study on the city operating curbside trash and recycling pickup; currently, this operation is contracted out;
• Adding $46,000 to the contract with Horsley Witten Group, Inc., of Sandwich, Massachusetts, which has designed the public improvements aspects of the waterfront development. The additional scope of work is for geotechnical engineering, structural foundation design, and design coordination and meetings;
• An $86,100 contract with CJ Architects of Portsmouth for architectural design services as it relates to a public waterfront park building in the waterfront development area on River Street.

Click here for current and previous City Council agendas. The workshop begins at 6 p.m., and the meeting begins at 7 p.m.; both will be held in City Hall’s Council Chambers.