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Voters Approve New Fire Boat Purchase

At a Town Meeting on Dec. 6, residents approved the purchase of a new fire boat for $645,000. The boat will replace the current boat, which is over 20 years old.

Around 50 people showed up at Town Hall on Dec. 6 to vote by voice to approve the purchase and capital project appropriation of $645,000 pursuant to a five-year lease agreement. Clinton Emergency Management Director Michael Neff said the boat would be paid off over a five-year period.

The boat is a 32-foot aluminum vessel that Clinton that Neff said the town should have in its possession by next Fall, though he didn’t know an exact date.

Neff said that the current boat, which the department has had for over 20 years, will be sold to offset some of the cost of the new boat. Neff said the new boat should last about 20 years.

“We’ve got 21 years out of the current boat, which is aluminum in salt water. We take good care of the boats to get the most out of it,” Neff said. The current boat will be used this summer for the last time as the department waits for the new boat to come in.

As a shoreline town, having a boat that can respond to an emergency on the water is something of obvious importance. Neff said that in the last year, the boat responded to about 30 to 40 emergency calls and many more non-emergency call outs.

“That boat was out on the water all the time. Anything you can think of we respond to,” Neff said.

While the vote to approve the purchase was unanimous, Art Kuever spoke about how he was disappointed with the process the town followed in bringing the boat purchase to a vote. Kuever said that since the boat purchase was such a large amount, he disagreed with the vote being done via a town meeting, which typically gets less turnout than a referendum.