June 20, 2012
Dig Safe Work Group Meeting
Members In Attendance: Dana Wardwell, Bob Burns, Kevin Murphy, Marc Levesque, Bruce Hubbard, Bruce Brown, Randy Gardner, Stan Grover, Kevin Ishihara, Dan Wells, Leonard Blanchette, Ben Sanborn, Kathleen Dumaine, Don Johnson, Alan Dow Carl Bisson, Sam Murray, Sharon Staz (on phone), Robert Finelli, Mark Turner, Greg Connors, and Richard Davies
Meeting started approximately 10:12 am with Dick Davies checking in to see who was on the telephone conference line. Sharon Staz was the only individual on the phone, she indicated that there had been another person prior to the line going dead.
Thanked everyone for attending, good to see a lot of you folks again. For folks who are new members of the Dig Safe Work Group this year, many of the members around the table who were on the group from last year as well, so I think there may be seven new members. Why don’t we go around the table and just introduce yourself very briefly and if you are a new member tell us a little bit about yourself, why you got involved in this process.
Dan Wells , Superintendent Winthrop Utilities District
Randy Gardner, owner of Gardner Construction of Bangor
Bruce Hubbard, Vice President Enterprise Trenchless Technologies, Inc.
Dick – for those of you who got these little pods in front of you might want to pull those in – those are microphones – we are using them in part so that anybody who is listening in from away can hear but it also – we are going to be making a recording of this so that we have a record of meetings so speak into the microphone or at least close enough so that we can get them on the recorder so that it will be useful.
Leonard Blanchette, General Manager for Brunswick Sewer District
Mark Turner, City of Waterville, Public Works Department
Kevin Ishihara, Portland Water District
Greg Connors, Maine Municipal Association
Ben Sanborn, Maine Telecommunications Association of Maine
Sam Murray, Unitil (new member) took over damage prevention also project coordinator for
natural gas
Kathleen Dumaine, FairPoint Communications (also Executive Committee Chairman for Dig
Safe)
Bob Finelli, Executive Director for Dig Safe
Stan Grover, member of the public
Marc Levesque, On Target Utility Services
Don Johnson, TimeWarner Cable, Director of Construction New England (new member) believe
my boss Lance Boland was predecessor, no longer with the Company
Dana Wardwell, City of Bangor – Public Works
Bruce Brown, Shaw Brothers (AGC of Maine)
Bob Burns, Town of Gorham – Public Works Director (new member) picked through an MMA process I believe
Dick Davies, State’s Public Advocate, Legislative action, the Chair of the work group once again, I don’t know whether it is a good deed never go unpunished or what, but we are back again another go around.
Let me first of all start by talking about the process we are going to use this time, for those who were around last time, we had a sort of free for all and it seemed to work out reasonably well. We are going to try a few things a little bit differently a little bit more focus on it. One of the things that we ran into a little bit of a problem on the last time around is we had a lot of recommendations that were proposed verbally. We tried to capture them on paper but we didn’t always capture them as well as might have and it ended up leading to few problems, especially when the Commission got some of our language for consideration as part of the rulemaking that they were required to do. So this time what I would like to do is that any recommendations that are going made, to be put together in writing and what we will do is we will have discussions at each of our meetings on a couple of selected topics. You can propose recommendations at any time but we would like to have you at least submit a rough draft of what you want to say. What we will than do is one of the staff members from the Public Utilities Commission who are here, Derek Davidson and Matt Kaply who are over here, they are going to be working with us. What we will do, we will try to put what you have proposed into a format that can fit either with the rules if it is a change in the rules, or the law if it is a change in the law. We will not try to editorialize on it, we just put it in a format that if it goes forward and is approved, than it is likely to fit with either the rules or the law that it is attempting to that any changes with. We will make any editorial suggestions and we will get it back to you. You have the final say of whether you are satisfied with that or not; but we do want to have at least an opportunity to put it in proper written form so that if it is acted on that we that are able to have it go smoothly as possible with those who have got it after we are finished it.
As those of you who are around last time around, will recall one of the provisions of the Legislature included in the law that created this Work Group as they did the last time, is a provision that any recommendation that is made and voted on here only goes forward if it receives at least 2/3 vote of the full membership and there are 23 members of the Work Group. So in the past we determined you need to have at least 15 votes in order to qualify for that 2/3 requirement. The value of that was that became very obvious; people who have been involved in previous discussions found that, often times, ideas came forward with fairly narrow level of support. Maybe 51/49 or so they often times ran into some difficulties, by having the 2/3 requirement it means that there is going to be much broader support within the Work Group to have some things go forward and that tends to reduce, but not entirely eliminate, the likelihood that there will opposition further along the line.
We are going to try to have meeting roughly once a month. Last time we kind of , we had a tight schedule because the PUC was going to have to a full blown rulemaking proceeding on any things that we voted out that required action on the rules so we needed to get it to them far enough in advance so that they could go through that process and still meet the deadline for the legislative session. This year while circumstances have not changed dramatically, the fact that recommendations that would be approved here this time would be going to the first session of the next Legislature which is a much longer time period, the Commission and I talked, and the thought was that, though they will still need to a rulemaking proceeding, we can wait a little bit longer for them start it because they could undertake it and have it done either by the end of year of early into 2013. So they have a little bit more time to do that, they are not under as great level of pressure, so we will try to spread the meetings out a little bit, create a less of problems with your schedule and as we do this time, we will try to get your feedback on what the best days are out of the next coming month. We will identify several dates and times; circulate them as we did the last time around. Based on the feedback we get from you we will try to select the date that seems to have the potential for getting the greatest amount of attendance. We actually have somewhat better attendance than what was indicated by the feedback we got and always glad to see more people able to be here. The work that we do is obviously better done when we have more people around the table to participate in that process. That is the run down on the technical things.
In your packet you’ll find a few items, some of which you have seen before. You have the agenda for today, you’ve got the appointees to this Work Group (names and addresses) on the yellow sheet, name tag so we can recognize who you are (especially for newer folks that we haven’t gotten familiar with) and lastly, we’ve got the copy of the law that created this Work Group.
For the new members before you leave today, I’ve got copies a Damage Prevent Training workbook that the Commission has put together. It is very useful compilation of a lot of provisions of the laws and rules and things, one difference in this one, this was produced before the latest rules were approved, so the version you have there is not the most up-to-date, but we will get you an up-to-date version. But otherwise the information in here is useful. If you are a returning member and would like to have a copy of this let us know we will get some additional ones, we have got enough here for the new members, but we will be glad to get additional copies for anybody who would like to have a copy of that yourself.
To get ourselves started, I asked the Staff at the Commission, particularly Matt Kaply to put together sort of a summary document on each of the issues that the Legislature assigned to us. While you will find it in the law, I am going to pass around a portion – what I am going to pass around is just those provisions that are just those duties of this work group extracted from the law, just so they are easier to work with, without flipping through several pages of law to try and find the right sections. This may make it a little bit easier to work with. So there are six items that the Legislature specifically directed us to examine, they will be on this sheet. I am going to ask Matt if he will talk a little bit about a couple of the issues.
Matt Kaply – Power Point Presentation incorporated
Matt Kaply ended his Power Point with asking if anyone had any questions and there were none.
Dick Davies went to the agenda discussing about taking up two of the topics. Thinking as I started to elaborate on a little earlier, that we will have discussions about specific issues you will know in advance the issues that we are going to have on the table, you can make recommendations during those discussions, you make them after those discussions, you hold the votes on those recommendations to a later time so there is an opportunity to put it in writing, to have us make sure that it fits within either the Law or the rule and to get it back to folks for them to take a look at it before they come to the meeting in which we will have the vote on those things so there will be plenty of time for everybody that is involved understand the issue and have a chance to frame it properly, make sure it fits into the law or the rules, look at what the language is before you are going to be asked to vote on it. And by having it meeting roughly a month apart allows for time for us to get things prepared for people’s considerations and we’ll probably as we did the last time we may take some straw polls on issues, we will hold the formal votes on any recommendations that are proposed to the latter part of our schedule. It may not be the final meeting but it will one the last couple of meetings that we will hold on that, so there is time for folks to consider these things. You will have – we will make every effort to have the written version that the sponsor of the resolution or recommendation has agreed to in your hands at least a week before any meeting in which they might be voting on. So you have time to think about it talk among yourselves. With the list you’ve got you’ve all got emails, phone abilities to contact other members of the Work Group to talk about this, I know a number of the Groups who nominated people have been very interested in those sort of things and may work with people to help craft the language of things and all those things are perfectly appropriate. We just want to make sure that everyone has an opportunity to see it and think about it, talk with other people about it before they are asked to take a vote on that.
There are two issues that we put on the agenda today. We think, in part because they may be ones that you can sort of get our minds around and while we scheduled, a three hour time period, we will tend to do that for all the meetings, if it takes us less time to complete our work we are not going to make you sit around and make you wait for that third hour to be completed. We will get out, though it may be very tempting today to look outside and say jeez it is almost 90 degrees why don’t we stay still 5:00 today, we won’t make you do any of those sort of things.