Board of Health

CITY OF SALEM BOARD OF HEALTH MEETING MINUTES July 9, 2019 MEMBERS PRESENT: Dr. Jeremy Schiller, Chair, Paul Kirby, Geraldine Yuhas, Datanis Elias, Sara Moore OTHERS PRESENT: David Greenbaum, Health Agent, Maureen Davis, Clerk of the Board, Beth Gerard, City Council Liaison, Jay Goldberg, Spire Investments, John Femino, resident TOPIC DISCUSSION/ACTION 1. Call to Order 7:00pm 2. Approval of Minutes G. Yuhas motioned to approve the minutes. S. Moore 2nd. All in favor. (June 11, 2019) Motion passed. 3. Chairperson Communications J. Schiller welcomed new member Dr. Sarah Moore and asked her to tell a little about herself. She said she has lived in Salem for about five years. She is a sociology professor at Salem State. Her area of expertise is around health equity. She does community-based participatory research and builds a lot of community partnerships to conduct her research. Kerry Murphy shared with her what the Board does and she expressed interest in joining the Board. J. Schiller said we are excited to have her on the Board. She was welcomed by all. 4. Site Plan Review for 9-11 Franklin J. Goldberg from Spire Investments, representing Gerren LLC, the owner Street of the property at 9-11 Franklin Street, spoke about the plans for the site. He reported that two years ago there was a fire at the former Ideal Transmission building at the site. It was his grandfather’s property. He manages the property now. Though the building at 11 Franklin Street was unaffected, the building at 9 Franklin Street was determined to be a total loss. He feels another auto use is not the best use of the site. He showed the Board the design for the building. The ward councilor and neighbors in attendance all seemed to be very supportive of the plan. The Zoning Board approved the plans at the first meeting. He will be meeting with Planning on Thursday to go over the design features and specifics of the property details. The new building will be much larger at 14,000 sq. ft. and will be more attractive than the old ones. There will be room for three, and potentially four, commercial tenants. They had to spend some environmental money to clean up some contaminated soil on the site and have filed all necessary paperwork for that. They will do rodent control during construction. In addition, no vehicles will have access to the rear of the building and no new lights will be installed back there so the neighbors are happy about that. Construction will begin in early Fall and finish some time next summer. J. Schiller asked what the relationship is between what he is doing and the Board of Health. D. Greenbaum said the Board would want to look at any possible environmental impacts and place some conditions on the project, such as rodent control and dust mitigation, etc. to try to prevent nuisance complaints from neighbors. We have a standard list of conditions for  projects. J. Goldberg said another good thing is he also owns the abutting property at 7 Franklin Street as well as the property behind the building on Foster Street so there will be very little impact to neighbors. G. Yuhas asked if there are any issues with flooding or FEMA’s flood zone. J. Goldberg said the property line as it exists now is one foot in the flood zone, but he has hired a civil engineer and when the building is built it will be one foot above the flood zone so that has been addressed. D. Greenbaum will put something together for the Planning Board that will incorporate the list of conditions. The site review is for the Board to get an idea of what the project is and if they have any specific questions they can ask the proponent. P. Kirby asked what kind of tenants he is expecting to rent the spaces. J. Goldberg said SERVPRO is currently in the next building but has expressed interest in moving to the larger, newer space. He will try to have two other light industrial warehouse-type use tenants in the other spaces. There is a huge demand for high ceiling storage bay warehouse spaces. These will be nice, modern spaces. 5. Monthly Reports-Updates a. Public Health Copy available at the BOH office. Nurse’s Report b. Health Agent’s Report J. Schiller inquired about beach testing for water quality. D. Greenbaum said we test about 10 beaches every week. Information is in the inspection part of his report. Rain storms and other environmental factors will compound the bacteria levels. If bacteria levels are too high we close the beach and post a sign and notify the State who posts the closure on their website. When the beaches reopen we also notify the State so people have access to that information. A couple of weeks ago we did have three or four beaches closed for a week. We tested the following week and everything came back fine and we haven’t had a closure since. D. Greenbaum said although he did not get Janet Mancini full time, we will be transitioning some of the Certificates of Fitness to Janet and Janice and Jeff will do primarily food inspections, along with their other housing and trash inspections. D. Greenbaum would like to get the food protection program back to where it was 10 years ago. We are mandated by the State to inspect food establishments a minimum of twice a year, but they have not been inspected twice a year for a long time. He believes we can achieve both quality and quantity with our inspections. Due to a shortage of staff, it has been about 10 years since we have been where we should be, meaning inspecting food establishments twice a year. P. Kirby asked how the Certificate of Fitness inspections are going. D. Greenbaum said they have leveled off since the introduction of the short-term online registrations have begun. G. Yuhas asked how many air bnbs do we think are not registered. D. Greenbaum said it’s hard to say, but the good thing is the company managing the short-term rental registrations monitor short-term rental websites for advertisements and if they are not registered they notify them that they are in violation of the ordinance. J. Schiller asked if there are any updates about the Task Force final  meeting. P. Kirby said the meeting is scheduled for next Tuesday night. D. Greenbaum said Kerry Murphy is going to be a good addition to the department. She has some good ideas. He will sit down with Kerry and Suzanne and brainstorm. Kerry is still involved in the backpack program and will continue her presentations at the elder living facilities, her cooking demonstrations and nutrition talks and Salem for All Ages. S. Moore said she and Kerry will be meeting to discuss a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation 24-month grant of somewhere between $300,000.00 to $400,000 as part of their Healthy Eating Research Initiative. S. Moore said she is envisioning a partnership between Salem State University and the City with regard to the grant as Salem State has the capacity to administer research. D. Greenbaum said this is an opportunity to create a partnership with the University in a way we have not had in the past. Copy available at the BOH office. c. Administrative Report Copy available at the BOH office. d. Council Liaison Updates B. Gerard reported there was a Joint Public Hearing meeting on Monday, 7/8/19 about accessory dwelling units. Owners would be allowed one unit per lot. The unit could be in the attic, the basement or the garage. The unit can be up to 800 square feet and must share utilities with the main house. This is the City trying to look at ways to address our housing crisis. The majority of the people at the meeting were in favor. In 2015, MAPC said if we don’t have 2,700 more units by 2030 we would be 15% short of housing for current residents. The Governor is trying to get rid of the super majority requirement for zoning. That would be helpful since she feels we will never get eight votes to meet the super majority since five members always vote against anything related to zoning. The Planning Board will make their recommendations about the ordinance to the Council who will vote for it or against it. Unfortunately, she is not the slightest bit hopeful about it. Affordability and inclusionary zoning will come up, but builders can’t get funding for the affordability units, so the price of the market rate housing gets jacked up, then people complain about the high-priced luxury condos. J. Schiller said it is a quagmire and asked if there is a role the Board could play to help. B. Gerard thought it would be fantastic if perhaps the Board could draft a letter stating that it is a public health crisis. J. Schiller said maybe if we take the issue out of politics and into a public health context it would have an impact. It is easy to dismiss a letter, but we could go to a Council meeting to speak and present the Board’s perspective and submit the letter. G. Yuhas said somehow people don’t see who the homeless are. They see the homeless as the drug addicts on the street and don’t see the children and families affected by it. The Mayor pointed out on Facebook how many school children are homeless. J. Schiller would like to have a strategy in place and will be in touch with B. Gerard to discuss. P. Kirby motioned to approve the reports. G. Yuhas 2nd. All in favor. Motion passed.  6. New Business/Scheduling of Future J. Schiller said he talked to Kerry Murphy about creating more of an Agenda Items established relationship with the hospital and the health center. D. Greenbaum said he met on Monday with the Mayor, Dr. Roberts, the CEO of the hospital, and Patricia Zaido from Salem for All Ages. He said they had a really good conversation about how we can partner as a department with the health center and the hospital, as well as what they can do in the community at large. Dr. Roberts gave him a contact person, Tina McLaughlin, who is the community outreach person. He tried unsuccessfully to reach out to her, but he will follow up and try to reach out to her again. The hospital recently did a health assessment for Lynn and Salem. We will get the data for Salem and see if there is something that assessment showed that we may be able to work on together to affect some sort of policy on the topic. S. Moore thought the health assessment may be helpful for the grant as well. J. Schiller said the hospital is a great resource. Not many cities have a great health center right in the city. S. Moore asked how members can communicate any ideas they may want included on an agenda. D. Greenbaum said to send him an email and he will try to include the item on the agenda, depending on how full it is. The Chair always approves the agenda before the meeting. J. Schiller said going forward he would like us to be motivated to make use of item 6 to put things into action and be positive. S. Moore motioned not to meet in August. G. Yuhas 2nd. All in favor. Motion passed. D. Greenbaum distributed a memo from Joyce Redford of North Shore/Cape Ann Tobacco Alcohol Policy Program showing eight tobacco violations during the most recent compliance checks. Very disappointing. J. Schiller said Busa, now with their fourth violation, needs to be brought up to licensing since they also sell alcohol. D. Greenbaum will notify licensing. D. Greenbaum said since he’s been back, this is Busa’s 2nd violation in five months. He feels we should invite them in to the next meeting to discuss possible revocation. J. Schiller asked that we send copies of the violation letters as well as copies of the tobacco Regulation 24 to the Board for the next meeting. MEETING ADJOURNED: G. Yuhas motioned to adjourn. P. Kirby 2nd. All in favor. Motion passed. 8:00pm Respectfully submitted, Maureen Davis Clerk of the Board Next regularly scheduled meeting is Tuesday, September 10, 2019 at 7:00pm At City Hall Annex, 98 Washington Street, 1st Floor, Salem, MA