WESTFORD — The Select Board approved two additional American Rescue Plan Act projects on Tuesday night.
The town has approximately $367,000 of its nearly $7.4 million ARPA disbursements it received between 2021 and 2022.
This year, the town has funded five projects, including:
- An ATV for the fire and police departments for $13,796.
- Special Town Meeting services totaling $28,000.
- Land surveillance at 12 North Main St. for $14,900.
- A 2-year contract with Northern Middlesex Council of Governments for sustainability support services for $50,000.
- A cash counting machine totaling $675.
Fiber repairs
The first project is a $20,000 repair to the municipal fiber network in Forge Village.
“We experienced a major outage on our network at the beginning of our term,” Technology Director Mike Wells told the board on Sept. 24.
The outage impacted the fiber cable from Town Hall to Forge Village Road, the Council Aging and Westford Academy.
“We lost some strands on that cable somewhere between the Water Department and the end of Forge Village Road,” he said.
Wells says contractors were “unable to figure out what was wrong with it.”
“Given the fiber is nearly 20 years old now, I think the sensible thing to do is to pull a new fiber alongside it and switch over to a new fiber.”
Select Board member Chris Barrett questioned whether network issues should be looked at holistically and “try to replace the entire network.”
“I think for now we continue to patch it as we need to and keep an eye on it. This has been by far the most troublesome leg and it’s the oldest leg,” Wells said.
Microsoft subscriptions
The second project is a $177,000 request for a three-year subscription for Microsoft services.
“We decided we needed to bite the bullet and switch to cloud-based Microsoft services, which unfortunately is going to create a huge bump in our costs for the year,” he said.
Wells said the town will see a large price bump due to the town coming off of a three-year fixed contract, as well as having to increase the number of licenses for available users in the town’s system.
“We calculate an increase in cost per year to about $89,000 per year above what we’ve been budgeting in the past. That’s even after we’ve done things like cancel out subscriptions for Zoom to use Teams, which is included,” he said.
Funding will be used to offset subscription cost increases through FY27.
The board unanimously voted to approve both projects. Members discussed potentially adding additional funding to offset the Microsoft subscriptions for FY26 if funding remains unallocated by Dec. 31.
