Here's a summary of what we covered at our Town Council meeting on Monday, November 9:
We granted a restaurant license and entertainment license for the Friends of Inspire Café, a new nonprofit organization that will be reopening Inspire Café on Main Street in the coming weeks. It's great to see the café coming back, and supporters are invited to donate or volunteer to help support this effort.
The public hearing to consider the installation of a utility pole on Farm Street was cancelled due to ongoing work by the Wakefield Municipal Gas and Light Department to determine the exact placement of the pole. The hearing will be rescheduled for a future date.
Due to an extraordinarily high number of traffic modification requests received in recent months, the Town Council voted to pause Traffic Advisory Committee meetings until February. The pause will give the Department of Public Works and the Town Council the opportunity to update Wakefield's Traffic Calming Policy to better manage and evaluate resident requests.
The Town Council received an update from the Department of Public Works on various infrastructure projects underway in Wakefield. Work is nearly complete on the Veterans Field bathrooms, which will open to the public after the winter, as well as the realignment of the Oak Street/Green Street/Greenwood Avenue intersection and the environmental remediation at Butler Avenue. The Town also has replaced two miles of water mains this year, and repaved 15 miles of roadways in the last 4 years. Upcoming projects include water main replacement and repaving of Nahant Street, for which the Town received a $3.1 million state grant, and signal coordination along North Avenue, supported by a $500,000 grant.
The Council appointed Aimee Forsythe as the Finance Committee representative to the Affordable Housing Trust, and Maureen Hickey as the Council on Aging representative. We also reappointed Benjamin Donovan to the Economic Development Council.
We appointed eight community members to Wakefield's decennial Charter Review Committee: Bill Boodry, Mehreen Butt, Rebecca Gilding, Sam Hockenbury, Dan Lieber, Pete McManama, Bob Vincent, and Lorri Wheeler. We also named Councilor Stacey Constas as the Town Council representative on the committee.
Our next meeting will be Monday, November 23, at the Wakefield Community Access TV studio and on Zoom. Before then, please join us for Wakefield's fall Town Meeting beginning on Monday, November 16 at 7:00 PM at the Galvin Middle School Auditorium. All registered voters in Wakefield are able to attend and participate -- I hope to see you there!