Ellington Ready to Finish Cleaning

On Monday, the Ellington Board of Selectmen and the Board of Finance approved an appropriation of $300,000 – pending a town meeting – to cleanup from the October snowstorm.

The approval comes on the heels of – something that town officials had all but given up on.

“With the major declaration, we’re now able to hire the state contractor and receive the 75 percent reimbursement,” Department of Public Works Director Timothy Webb said.

He said that the $300,000 will be used to bring in an outside contractor to really come into town and help clean it up. One run will be done through town and then the town crews will address smaller issues on an individual basis.

“We’ll continue working side by side with them,” he said. “We’re still working. We’re still going to work side by side and try to get this cleaned up in the next two to three weeks, period. Then our own forces will go back and hit residents that we’ve missed. As long as Green Cycle is open, our crews are working. Green Cycle closes on Sunday so we close. We don’t pick up on Sunday but we do keep somebody at the brush dump, pushing up the piles and controlling the traffic over there.”

He said that as it stands, the town crews have been working six days a week and deliver 40 to 60 loads a day to the Green Cycle facility.

“We’ve been on top of it since Nov. 1 and I’d like to see us wrap it up and wrap it up in a nice clear, crisp fashion and put it behind us,” Webb said. “This would help us really take a heavy load off the crew and get us back to a cleanup monitoring roll rather than a full blown cleanup.”

Webb credits the residents for helping with the cleanup, lightening the load on the town crews.

“The residents in this community have been a huge help,” he said. “The residents have been hauling in on a regular basis. They’re moving their brush to our brush landfill in a rapid manner.”

If there is money left over after the town has been cleaned up, chipping of the brush at the brush dump will be looked into as well.

The big thing that this money allows is for the town to be cleaned up in the next two to three weeks, hopefully ahead of any major snow.

“When winter sets in and we get snowstorms on top of the stuff that is piled next to the road, we’re going to have a really, really difficult time,” First Selectman Maurice Blanchette said. “The fear really was that we couldn’t do this before the big snows hit, and if we didn’t, then we have a problem all winter long. With this, it will speed up the process a lot and hopefully we’ll get there in time. We’ve heard that some towns have had big, big problems with this so far and basically, we’re trying to stay ahead of the curve and get this done before we have any problems with a real winter.”

The town meeting regarding this appropriation will be held on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m.