Uh pursuant to Governor Baker's March 12th, 2020 order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law and Governor Healy's March 29, 2023 revised order extending remote participation by all members in any meeting of a public body.

This meeting of the Great Marge and Board of Health will be conducted both in person and via remote participation to the greatest extent possible.

Specific information and the general guidelines for remote participation by members of the public and or parties with a right and or requirement to attend this meeting can be found on the town's website at town of GB.org.

For this meeting, members of the public and committee members may attend the meeting in person, or for those who wish to do so remotely, maybe by following the instructions at the top of this agenda.

For those who are not in person, every effort will be made to ensure that the public can adequately access the proceedings in real time via technological means.

And I am here as well, Michael Lanou.

First order of business is approval of minutes from March.

Are we ready for a motion?

We are.

I

make a motion to approve the minutes from March.

I

second.

And the roll call will be Peter.

Ruby.

And I vote I as

well.

All right.

Board of Health questions and updates.

I'll start with the Earth Day cleanup announcements.

That you

I

just I uh put it on there because that's something that the Board of Health um has paid attention to and been involved with in the last couple years.

Um this year the health department didn't participate in the organization, which is fine.

That means it's a well-oiled machine, it can run on its own.

Um I believe that there are oh, so let's start with the date.

Um, Saturday, April 25th, um, will be Great Barrington's Earth Day cleanup.

Um 25th.

Sorry, did I say the 28th?

28 Saturday, April 25th.

Um it is organized by Housatonic the Beautiful and

the

Husatonic Improvement Committee.

Um 8 30 a.m.

There will be coffee and pastries at the Ramsdale Library, and then cleanup begins at 9 a.m.

Join us at noon on the Husatonic Commons.

So I know that there will be two different bags, uh one for recyclables and another for just regular garbage, and um participants can just leave the bags.

Um, and DPW staff will go around and pick up the trash the following Monday, I think.

Um there is a nice information page on the town website with this with these details.

So yellow bags for trash and green bags for recyclables.

Right.

Yeah.

Um so uh there's uh I I like to include a uh instruction sheet to go with the collection of the bags, mainly, because number one is that we get RDP points if we give instructions on how to collect, because the transfer station cannot take uh dirty recycling uh so cans and bottles that have a lot of dirt in them, they cannot recycle.

So even if you put it in recycling, it will be cost as waste, which costs the town money when they have to toss it out.

Um so having said that, having some instructions would be helpful for people so they know how to collect.

Um I was wondering if I write out a uh uh you know, receive a paper like this.

Could I mail it to you and you could distribute it?

Yeah, I'm wondering we can look at the details another time too, but would it satisfy RDP requirements if it if it just goes on the website, or does it have to get handed out with for each participant?

I don't know.

I have the book.

I mean, it's it can be both, but I think at the very least it should it should go on this information page too, so folks know ahead of time.

Right.

Um and then um the other thing is that you'll see a lot of NIPs.

So those little bottles, those are not recyclable.

So they go into our um our dumps.

Um yeah,

okay.

They go in solidways.

So another important reason to have this happen is that if we can increase our recyclable tonnage in the next couple of months, we can actually decrease the cost that it costs the town to dispose of the waste.

So the more we can collect throughout the towns, the more we can recycle into our transfer station, the less it will cost us, and any little bit helps as far as the budget is concerned.