Town Meeting voters on Oct. 23 will be asked to approve funding for a speed monitoring device for the Police Department, a tax agreement with a solar company and a land swap with the owners of Great Hill for a water tower.

Town Meeting, which serves as the legislative branch of the government, will be held at 6:45 p.m. at Sippican School. All registered voters in Marion are eligible to attend and vote.

The Marion Police Department has requested the purchase of a new speed trailer. The town would vote to transfer $7,900 out of town funds to buy one. “The town had a speed monitor trailer for a lot of years and it died out,” Town Administrator Paul Dawson said.

“The town does not currently own one, and the technology has changed too, so the new trailer would collect and save data for us.”

Dawson added that if the town ever wanted to change speed limits, such as the 50 miles per hour speed limit on the east side of the Route 6 and Front Street intersection that has caused much concern in recent years, data would have to be provided to the state transportation department.

Police Chief Lincoln Miller said that in addition to collecting data, it would also make people aware of how fast they're traveling.

"We have a lot of complaints from different areas, so it reminds people of their speeds," Miller said.

The Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) agreement would be with Marion MA 1 LLC of Louisville, Colorado for the personal property used to build a solar farm located at 99 Perry Lane. Essentially, the agreement is a fixed cost that the company will pay the town over the duration of the project instead of paying taxes.

Marion is part of other PILOT agreements, such as with Clean Energy Collective.

Elsewhere on the agenda, voters will be asked to fix a budgetary issue. At the spring Town Meeting, voters approved a budget of $4,205,091 and a budget for big ticket items of $216,728 for the Old Rochester Regional school district.

This was an error, as the numbers that the committee approved were $4,198,079 for an operating budget and $233,619 for a capital budget. This leaves a discrepancy of $9,879. Residents will vote to approve the transfer of $9,879 from available town funds to cover the difference.

Residents will also vote on a land swap between the town and Great Hill - Marion LLC.

“Way back when,” the Stone family sold a parcel of land to the town to build the water tower on, Dawson said.

Recently, a new water tower had to be built. However, the town couldn’t take the original water tower offline to build a new one on the same site, because east Marion was dependent on it.

To remedy the dilemma, the town built a new tower on another parcel of land owned by Great Hill. The new parcel is the exact same size as the original. The town then took down the old water tower once the new one was built.

“These two articles are sort of trading off the utility easements,” Dawson said. “We just traded plots of land…It’s just housekeeping to allow us the opportunity to continue the easements and finally have that water tower all set.”

Rochester Town Meeting will also be held on Oct. 23. For more, see Page 4.

The Marion Master Plan will also be presented for residents to vote on. After three years of input from officials and residents, Marion's Master Plan for the next 10 years is complete, and encourages maintaining a "village style" for the town, promoting economic development on Route 6, and developing senior housing and services.

For more on the Master Plan, click here.