LONGMEADOW – The Longmeadow Select Board met for a regularly scheduled meeting on April 6 to discuss the Town Election, tax ceiling legislation and the Town’s fight with COVID-19.

The first order of business at the meeting was an update on the town’s battle with COVID-19 from Fire Chief John Dearborn.

He reminded residents to keep up their social distancing efforts and to only call 911 if they have severe symptoms.

One of the current tasks for the department is containing the virus in the nursing homes and he said, “Our nursing homes and two elderly facilities have confirmed cases, we have been working diligently with them to implement a containment strategy and this is incredibly complex. The management teams from these five facilities have been fully engaged along with our town manager, health director, and myself,” Dearborn said.

Town Manager Lyn Simmons then gave an update on rescheduling the town elections after the issue was raised at the last meeting that if the current date were to stand, there would be new members on the board at the rescheduled Town Meeting. She said, “Our two options would be a court order or to wait just a little bit longer we do feel like municipal relief will be coming to allow us to change that Town Election process if we need to.”

The next order of business was discussion about tax ceiling legislation. Simmons said that there are currently two models the town is currently looking at in regards to the legislation.

Board member Tom Lachiusa expressed his concern about making sure there was a time limit on potentially removing the tax ceiling and said, “Having an unlimited thing could put us in a situation where Longmeadow is so expensive in terms of taxes that a majority of people who already live in town may not be able to live in town in 10 or 20 years from now.”

However, before diving too deep into the discussion the board decided to look into the two potential models more and wait for the Tax Ceiling Task Force to give their own suggestions before making any decision.

The next order of business at the meeting was a vote to allow the town to overspend on some of its line items, including fire department overtime as a result of different shift schedules from  COVID-19.

Town Finance Director Paul Pasterczyk said, “We could be in excess of appropriations of certain line items of about $175,000. So this would be sent to the director of the Bureau of Accounts for approval procedurally.”

With little discussion the board approved the motion.

The final order of business at the meeting was to delay creating an election commission due to the current pandemic and the town’s bill for the election commission was still pending at the time of the meeting.

The board unanimously approved the motion.