LIVERMORE — Selectpersons voted 4-1 Monday after an executive session to propose a settlement agreement with the owner of a property the town foreclosed on earlier this year, town Administrative Assistant Kurt Schaub said Wednesday.

The board teleconferenced with the town’s attorney during the executive session before they made a decision, he said.

Stephen O’Neill of Massachusetts had challenged in court last month the foreclosure on his property, 89.5 acres on the River Road. The challenge came after the town sold the property by bid to a Turner company for $51,917.

Town officials previously said they made every attempt to contact O’Neill through the last known address they had on town records. However, O’Neill maintained in court that he requested his address to be changed to a new address in previous years while visiting the Town Office to make a payment.

The total taxes, interest and fees the town foreclosed on was $596, Schaub said.

The town had followed the foreclosure process as required and granted an extra 30 days, as voters permit, for the owner to come forth and pay taxes, Schaub had said previously.

Schaub said he intends to implement a new process that if someone comes in to change an address, it will be done on a form with the taxpayer signing it and the person taking the information signing it.

Residents had voted June 16 to use $25,000 of the proceeds from the foreclosure sale to go toward a new truck townspeople agreed to buy the same night during the annual town meeting.

In other business Monday, Schaub said the board adopted the new cemetery policy. Two small revisions were made to the draft policy to address concerns raised at a July 5 meeting, he said.

Language was added to indicate the policy shall be enforced, without limitation, in Hillman, Lakeside and Waters Hill cemeteries.  In the other cemeteries, its enforcement will be limited only by specific language in any deed that may exist, passing ownership of those cemeteries to the town, Schaub said. 

The second change is that the policy does encourage that plantings be in rigid containers, but does not prohibit ground plantings provided they don’t get out of hand and that plot owners understand they could be damaged in the course of routine grounds maintenance.

Previously the draft policy required plantings to be in containers.

In another matter, Schaub said the $1,000 Pollard Scholarship is scheduled to be awarded during the board’s 6 p.m. Monday, Aug. 1, meeting. Application forms are available at the Town Office.

The board also plans to award the Boston Post Cane to the town’s oldest known citizen who has a birthday of Jan. 8, 1912.

Schaub said he also updated the board on his work on the study committee with Oxford County Regional Recycling and Norway-Paris Solid Waste to look at the future of recycling and handling of solid waste within the region. 

One of the points of both the study and his participation is “the rapid encroachment of single-sort recycling programs and the detrimental impact they are having on Oxford County Recycling,” Schaub said. 

“I, for one, am a solid believer in strong, regional associations of commonly-sized towns to the extent that, as a group, we often do better in contract/price negotiations than we can individually,” he said. “Oxford has lost several towns to single-sort and, though that method is likely in our future, I think it is worth it to explore how that organization can adapt in this new marketplace.”

Schaub and Solid Waste Committee Chairman Ashley O’Brien plan to attend a meeting in August to consider the next steps.

dperry@sunjournal.com