SUNDERLAND — After residents on Reservation Road asked the town to take action and better protect their drinking water against per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), the Selectboard scheduled a Special Town Meeting to set aside money for next steps.
The testing for PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” began after the nearby landfill closed in 2005, Jeffrey Arps of Tighe & Bond, which has led the water monitoring, told the Selectboard and residents at the Oct. 26 meeting. After the testing detected PFAS in July 2024, Tighe & Bond, an engineering, environmental, planning and design consulting firm, tested water from 15 properties between 40 and 118 Reservation Road. The chemicals were found in the wells of five properties.
To treat the residents’ water, Tighe & Bond recommends that point-of-entry treatment systems be installed in the homes of the properties that tested positive for PFAS. According to Principal Environmental Scientist Jesse Arroyo, “granulated activated carbon” inside the systems catches the PFAS molecules like an adhesive to filter them out.
For the two homes with PFAS levels above 20 parts per trillion, or above 4 parts per trillion of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctanoic sulfate (PFOS), Tighe & Bond recommends a system with two units that contain the carbon filters. For the homes with PFAS levels below this threshold, the company suggests a one-unit system.
To pay for the PFAS testing and monitoring, the town allocated $19,478, according to Mel Williams, administrative assistant to the town administrator and Selectboard. However, the town is “running out” of this money, said Selectboard Chair Nathaniel Waring.
While the Selectboard has not yet decided its next move, or whether to follow Tighe & Bond’s recommendation or install more two-unit systems, Waring said Sunderland does not have enough money in its PFAS testing budget or in the reserve fund to install the filtration systems.
At its Monday night meeting, the Selectboard unanimously approved scheduling a Dec. 14 Special Town Meeting to ask voters to approve transferring funds from accounts with money to spare to cover the cost of Tighe & Bond’s PFAS monitoring and the installation of the filtration systems.
“We’re at a place where we need to figure out where we’re going to get the money [from],” Waring said. “We do not want to wait until [Annual] Town Meeting in the spring because that’s just way too long. People need their systems. We need to get this taken care of now.”
Selectboard member Christyl Drake-Tremblay stressed the importance of the Town Meeting warrant including the proper dollar amount for the cost of the next steps. Nov. 23 is the deadline for the warrant.
“We need to push to get all the numbers in, so that this doesn’t get delayed, because there are people that are in the situation where they’re using bottled water,” Drake-Tremblay said. “We don’t even have a true game plan yet.”
“I don’t have all the answers to this; I would love to have all the answers to this,” Waring said. “We are moving fast is the answer, and we are moving faster than necessarily I am 100% comfortable with in terms of this, but we’re doing so because the longer we wait, the more time goes by that these systems aren’t in people’s houses … and we’re trying to get the money in place so that we can move forward.”
The board has not yet settled on a location and time for the Special Town Meeting.
At its next meeting on Monday, Nov.16, the board also plans to discuss an Emerging Contaminants in Small or Disadvantaged Communities Grant, a state program that provides funding to protect drinking water from contaminants. The grant would address long-term plans for PFAS testing.
“This would be more, we put the fire out but we don’t want the forest to catch fire again,” Waring said, “so we’re going to do something to protect the residents longer term.”
Other business
Like several other municipalities, the Sunderland Selectboard voted unanimously to send a letter to the state asking for help with covering the town’s share of the new $236.6 million building for Franklin County Technical School that voters approved in October.
Sunderland residents approved the project at the polls, with 156 voting in favor of it and 88 voting against it. According to a document from Franklin Tech, Sunderland’s yearly capital assessment for the new building comes to about $457,000.
“Now the question becomes how will the town fund that,” Waring said on Monday. “It is a fairly large chunk of money, and it’s going to be quite a bit for Sunderland over 30 years.”
The letter the Selectboard signed came from the Greenfield City Council, which voted unanimously on Oct. 21 to send a letter to the Massachusetts School Building Authority and Gov. Maura Healey requesting supplemental capital funding to help pay for the building project.
The Selectboard also voted unanimously to join Mayors for Peace, an organization of approximately 8,600 cities and towns dedicated to demanding the complete abolition of nuclear weapons.
