October 30, 2025 – Capital Improvement Planning Committee – Video & Transcript
October 30, 2025 - Capital Improvement Planning Committee
called order the capital improvement planning committee meeting it's an in-person meeting
in the select board meeting room at the town building 6 p.m i believe we are being recorded
even though we're not hybrid with the white cam recordings on just for everybody's awareness
so going through the agenda we have called order and review the agenda announcements i don't have any um 605 approximately public comment and number's response 615 we're going to review the outstanding approved capital improvement projects that was briefed to the select board when i originally put this together i hadn't looked and didn't realize there's not that much there so that should take 20 minutes but at 635 we can discuss review and discuss consolidate our questions on departmental capital requests the only thing we have so far is department of public works because we weren't able to be hybrid tonight i didn't want to ask
the head of the department to have to come in so i thought it would be good if we consolidate questions get those to him in advance and ask him if he can come next week let me meet and then 705 review the capital improvement template form which you can actually use the dpw they use the existing form and i think it would be good once we talk about that sort of look at the form and say what else do we think we're going to standard need to know and i'd like us to have a later project around revamping that request and it goes hand in hand with this easy cip software like can we get what we can we orchestrate the things we want and get it in the software so that it can be used and be collected more efficiently going forward i don't think we'll have that for this year and then 725 review the um discuss potential content for the draft report we did send you guys a couple of samples um that was not comprehensive but i tried to pick a couple that were wildly different just so you could see that there was a pretty wide range of um how that's done and i from what i can tell it tended to correlate to size of of town and size of the budget right and likely how many volunteers are involved versus how many staff members um and then 745 we can review both the minutes of october 15th 750 any topics not anticipated 48 hours prior posting and set time for the next meeting and then hopefully by eight we are returning okay so since we are not hybrid and there are no other people here i assume we do not have any public comment all right and then let's that update that i sent you from the select board meeting was not what i was hoping for um i was hoping for a more comprehensive listing of projects i will reach out to calci and see if we can get a more recent except one that's dated in two it wasn't it um did you find something i couldn't find um yeah oh was it in the supplemental not in the okay oh in the packing i want to circulate but i can send it to you after the meeting okay then i missed it um because i i thought the highlighted portion was what they gave um i mean too excited you all can access the kind of website you can pull it up and you can okay so it wasn't in minutes per se because it was an agenda agenda supplemental packet for the agenda that's okay right i guess that's my fault i missed it okay um all right can everybody hold that up
town website select board what page agenda June 16 should be a tab for supplemental packet okay sorry select board support webpage yep then on the right side there's agendas yeah 2025 if you open that up you get to june 16. you can even i think you can usually can you go to the calendar and do it that way yeah you can do it on that little calendar on the right if you click june 16th and then click on the select board but everything from that meeting is on there yeah so while everybody's doing that um i think one of the thoughts i had because i think i've talked extensively about both needing the financial resources and human resources to do this is and i'm not quite sure how to do this yet is how do we assess right the amount of things open in a given department right or managed by a given department and how that affects them i think it probably comes down to talking to the department heads when we talk about the capital request of you know what's what's the timeline for finishing the things that you have how much more capacity do you have right to take on additional projects and some of them it depends right facilities tends to have the projects that are longer in nature right may take more resources as opposed to like dpw needs to buy a truck right that's not necessarily a long run out process or at least i would hope it's not um so but i haven't sort of figured out is how you make that determination right i don't have i don't have enough knowledge of how much much time it takes to do these right and how much how many resources they have and obviously that also interplays with their operating functions not just capital so i don't have clear answers on that but i know that that capacity has to it has to have to be a factor in how we're deciding on products okay clearly if you look at the last page dpw is the one with projects from 17 and forward and the rest of them are at least in the 20s
sorry johnny we're saying so we're on the last page so we pulled up on our computer a package yeah yeah the last page it seems like i don't know why the water fund capital would be that's they're all the oldest that's the water enterprise fund yeah that's a separate sort of accounting uh fund if you will which is why they those are segmented from the other dpw so this isn't a doctrine of your sense no it's just on the left page and where i'm sorry where is it where is it where is it it's on page three at the end of page three oh you have to open the supplemental package oh so oh yeah it's the very first of the supplemental faculty yeah one this morning at one high level comment about this yeah presentation um it's not that it probably is too far off but it's purely a financial representation yeah but how much of sort of an appropriation is left doesn't necessarily give you a sense of where it is actually in the percentage percentage right so i just i just want to caution everybody um when this got put together a year or two ago by the former assistant account manager there was another column off to the right and for each project he had gone and spoken to your point he had spoken to department heads and had just a 10 15 word blip about door about and where it was in the process or if there's anything notable and so those notes hopefully either exist or can find a way into whatever they're right in the spreadsheet before it was pdf done assuming i hope okay right okay so these have like last work done date yeah i'll give you some talk i guess some of these you might have on the bigger projects like the council and aging building
it says it was 99 complete which is probably true it's open uh it's probably down to a punch list and there's probably some reserve funds left you know to address that but um i just want to make that point and then second the other point i'm just not without being last tom holder for example um if you look at the very last the water enterprise one items the last section just as an example um second water tank construction um showed the beginning balance two and a half million which was the first appropriation there was actually an appropriation a year or two before that for design funds yeah that was the first major appropriation to build the tank second tank and then at this past annual town meeting in spring they decided to upsize the tank so they asked another million three or four i think yeah um and so this suggests that it's 97 complete the problem i have with that is one yeah it's not linked to all the appropriations so before we move on liz if you go to the towns thank you here my site yeah there's no email so if you go on the website um go to town wayland and click on boards and committees yeah pick the select board and then there's a calendar kind of off to the right i don't know if it'll show up on the mobile version very well but yeah trying to kind of yeah that's that's it yeah there is wi-fi i've seen it before yeah just picking on that one just by way of cautioning how much faith we should put in this document at the moment yeah i agree with you and so what and i i've experienced this before to brand is when when i tried to do write-ups for new capital going into the warrant right one of the struggles was always when it was additional funding where were the other right how do you give a representation of like gee this is an extra 1.4 on top of and or use fire station 2 right we've given it money three different times giving that full representation of everything that goes so i think the same needs to be true here when giving updates you have a project it has multiple pieces of funding right associated with it they should be captured together and then to your point what's missing from here these percent completes are all based on balance the financial dollars and not work right the state of the work i know that again easy cip which i want when i get up in using it has a module in it right for estimated you know original completion estimated completion and notes update you know periodic like what's the status of the project i'd like to ask you know if we can make sure that what they're planning to do in the future has those components to it not just the financial but the project status notes but in the meantime i think our best path this point in time is when we talk to each of the department heads we talk to them about their about their projects on this list and where they are right where they see you know resources needs being because otherwise i don't know how we make that any kind of assessment on do you have do you have room right i look at all the town it ones and i'm like there's quite a few things on here right um so but that doesn't give me any indication of like yeah we can get through i just finished my point on that one right and the former auditor when you find one item that you sort of focus on and it doesn't make sense that item was supposed to be financed with debt no money had been borrowed yet for that item and it's included in the financing that just is getting done they're doing bonds but the bonds are just sold so they couldn't have spent 2.4 something million dollars because they didn't have the money um so i'm just saying that they could if they advance the money from the general fund right but there's a process for that that they have to go through a funnel so i'm just saying that may be the only one just because i knew from the background and i knew that they hadn't borrowed for it yet and you know when kelsey kept track of that and looked at the general ledger for that development project um she may have misunderstood kind of what was in there so whether there's issues with others in that lineup ultimately it comes back to what you just said at least that's a list of projects we can certainly if you said you want to consolidate questions have department heads prepared to you can either go back to kelsey and say have you you have a side set of notes right that talks about the actual physical completion and discussions you've had or we can alert the department heads when they're coming to meet with us that we appreciate them sort of giving some color um so but that they just that was my caution uh other than that it's a list that i think it's a good place to start so do we sorry i was going to say so with the capital one like 2.4 million as an example isn't that kind of a definitional issue i mean because i was looking at some of the uh stuff from the state in terms of um you know how committees like ours are supposed to perform and they actually have definitions of what's a capital project versus something that's non-capital seems like the library one would not not necessarily be a capital project the way that it's defined in the um capital improvement planning committee yeah maybe arlington one was pretty expensive it has to do this much spend this is the minimum it's not paid it's not it adds light to the to the term you get i think we talked about a lot of that last time it was it was a lot in that document defining what capital is right what was your brad what's your specific concern with the library improvement project well i guess if it's not if it doesn't fit the definition of a capital improvement but it's something that like you said it's it's financed separately is that what you said uh i was referring to the second water tank oh the second maybe second water tank yeah yeah the library one is the lower level mostly it's the lower level improvements which were pretty extensive when you're at the top there yeah the other one so she said like if it's paint but no but if it's paint included like a major reconstruction that it is so the first one's up 2.4 million yeah and the library improvements as kelly was said it did reconfigure inside the library the upgraded elevators yeah i i i feel like that constitutes capital i don't it wasn't just a uh yeah it wasn't just a fair small facelift right um well yeah i guess i guess maybe i'm not even i'm not going to be able to articulate it well but i thought there was something i've read said that if for instance if it's stuff um if it's finance through bonds or or borrowing then it doesn't necessarily fit the definition of a capital improvement it's it's a different sort of improvement because it's financially it's just handled separately or differently i may i may i may i may not i don't i may not be your typically yeah yeah yeah but capital improvements can be funded in many now okay yeah and arguably your biggest capital would have to be done with that right yeah so it's more as john said typically dollars and useful lives uh normal sort of measurement of whether it is or isn't but you will find some items that could be design funds or feasibility study funds that end up getting on the capital list because they're attached to a potential what would be a project as an example of you know i think there was a capital item two or three years ago high school wanted to invest in some math curriculum curriculum and found its way in through the capital budget as opposed to through the operating budget so as to whether this committee calls those things out over time that will be i presume things we have to talk about okay so i have one note i would make this one yeah it's a very long time to settle all of this but what i would say is if someone's requesting new capital and somehow the project name is overlapping they should have to defend why they're still open capital i think i think that could be a very right so if they're asking for more money to do um fine protection it doesn't really matter so you know why if you have an open project why are you asking for more money to do something similar like what is the system yeah i think i think you're right john i think it comes on a couple different flavors there are times that it has been intentional that there was going to be at the outset the project was broken into three pieces you know phase one phase two phase 38 we're going to request it in three different years right that was the plan all along and i think if you do that right at the outset the question is okay what constitutes the need right yeah it's in the plan but what needs to be done in phase one in order to start phase two is it you must spend all the money is it you must have spent a certain amount of money is it is it a progress milestone right like when we hit this milestone in the project that's when we approve the next phase i think that has to be done at the outset for anything new um and then in the case of we ran out of money right or the scope changed same thing you still have to do though like well why did we run out of money why did the scope change if for no other reason than from a learning perspective of what could we have done better right at the beginning and i think there's brian there's a few real good examples of projects that have happened like that over a number of years um and the question i always have is would the voters have approved the project had they known that it was going to cost two plus four plus five right when they voted on it originally right versus you got halfway through and you're pot committed and now you've got it now you've got to spend it and what as committee i feel like that is our responsibility try and prevent that as much as possible there are some things we can't circumstances happen i get it um but i think the goal should be you know we're trying to avoid that right we planned appropriately for the project we've budgeted appropriately for the project that we're not coming back for additional funding but in the meantime i agree with you and i've got my notes here on on what we need to ask for um i think anything that's on this list should be grouped you know by project up all the funding items that belong in the same project to the extent there's more than one and then we need additional information on actual status of the project not just how much money's left you know we used to do that in a way which if you had a project and you said okay just go change i mean any of the reasons you just wanted to add more money we would say that it's this project dash one so that it grouped it even though it wasn't meant to be it might be i mean this is account numbers there's no project numbers so yeah they don't to my knowledge don't use project numbers the one big spreadsheet i sent you i tried to institute something like that i did like a an abc like if you added to it it became you know abc so that you could connect them but so more complicated question yep how do we know all these projects are still approved so once town meeting has approved them they're approved but funding-wise it could get delayed or no it could say we had this approved we're not going to delay that project so the town has approved so the voters have approved this expenditure of the funds if i brian you can correct me if i'm wrong about this but my understanding is the decision on whether or not to spend those funds right or to halt the project would lie with the select board or the relevant board in question so that we have had situations where the town approved the use of funds for a particular project but something happened circumstances changed and we've halted a project um and in some cases even return the funds right maybe it was became obsolete it wasn't available like there were there have been that has occurred but as far as the tap that once the town meeting approves the project the funding theoretically exists it may require debt right and if you haven't issued the debt you have to have so funding approved but i'll say funding available correct yeah i asked sorry like the it projects are so old i mean either someone just quit or decided not to do it so the question i mean and it leads to that big questions so maybe it's not just a question for it it's a question that's like for itself have any of these projects been put on hold for something because there should be a whole status yeah i think covid covid put a whole bunch of projects on hold and um it's got i said that i mean most of that stuff has to be done via contract and contracts ultimately have to be executed and most contracts get executed by the town manager uh and some of them find their way up to the select board um and you know there have been plenty of times where select board might ask a question before they approve the assignment of contract money's approved but they have a rational question um sometimes it may be do we have enough to complete the project or maybe they're you know a good example is the infamous dam that it's yet to be built um all the money's not been approved the town to go to a loan but we're still trying to get we got a state grant we're trying to get the federal grant but it's unclear we may run out of time to spend other federal funds which goes back into why we that holds that yeah and so the town manager in front of the select board saying we're going to have to make a go no go decision and so that decision is going to be made at the select board um and there it's really just we pulled out waiting for the federal grant or we proceed not to that we change our mind about product but i'm sure over time there have been projects that turned out not to be needed and you know you point to i.t if there's an i.t project that's five years old three years old it's probably updated technology at this point and it's probably not enough money which is it goes back to my earlier comment about right when you approve a project if unless you approved it unless it was budgeted right knowing you weren't going to do it for a couple years and you included some incredible inflation in there right a lot of projects that got approved there isn't going to be enough money to do them in the way they were intended which means one of two things will happen right either the project will get scaled back right to fit within the budget or there'll be a subsequent request right for more money and again these are the things really as a committee i'd like to try and start to prevent right as much as possible i guess i guess that raises a question in my mind then you know our charge is supposed to be sort of uh capital projects going forward but you know say you take one that's from 2022 285 000 it's 51 percent complete are do we have any responsibility or should we have any responsibility to ask okay so what's up with that project and is it going forward or so i i think where our responsibility lies relative to that you guys are all free to to opine or disagree is if we're going to give more money to the it department in the five-year plan right can you actually achieve these projects in the years that they're slotted in if there's this many projects left like that's why this is important because if you've got a whole slog of projects and they're not done over a period of time i don't have a sense of what's your run rate how fast are you going to get you're just three years behind and you're always going to be three years behind or you're three years behind and you're catching up at a rate of you know two to one and therefore we can put more projects on but i don't think it's responsible from a taxpayer standpoint right to be adding more projects to the mix if they're not going to get done because again it goes back to that i'd like when i decide on a project right as a voter that i had a full picture of how much was going to get spent when it was going to get finished well i think that's the key part of this is that it worries me this is the debt service we're making assumptions on a capital plan based on how much debt we can have and how much money is available if someone decided to go execute those projects then debt service that wasn't as planned for we're trying to move into play a project that we were expecting it yeah so in the model that i is in that big spreadsheet i have all these slotted in probably as they're going to get issues as debt or as early as possible so they are in the in the projection the thing is they might ultimately end up pushing out um but they are in there but that was an issue when i first came on fincon was like oh here's the debt schedule that's the stuff that's already been bonded and here's the stuff we're asking for but there was a piece in the middle that was missing that was projects that were approved but not bonded yet um so that's in there now um but it's it's important so the bonds they're just doing out of for example um or with respect to projects approved two years ago town meeting and it's passed them as an example but i look at it at 17 there's no reason if that came up and i was supposed to be bonded saying well we could slip in there correct yeah i mean again most most of the folks and again they go through this i think we talked about this at one meeting closing out capital and then largely as projects actually are billing but there's money left appropriation left and so you can ultimately grab that back and you apply it to other projects but presumably and that's generally uh that that's led an effort led by the finance director presumably while he's going through that he's trying to ferret out are there projects that are just never going to happen because you could then clock right now once it's appropriated my guess is most department heads are not going to really want to say it's never going to get done and so that's something that you know we should we should pick a few examples perhaps in it maybe one of them uh and it's you know we have a new it director so he's not going to know about you know he may know about those projects but he i just i i do think it's going going to be difficult for us to only get a piece of it i mean if this is a partnership with finance i think this gives us more ability to push back with an asset status and say well close these let's move with new ones right because i assume it's not a priority that i have to write again as all the things that are on that list i'm assuming so i do mean it's not a big list and i just it it's to me it seems like a fundamental thing that has to get done how do they know what they're going to do if they don't even know what's happening to these projects and you just raised a good point which you could also add to this um is what the funding source big group funding source was so it's helpful to kind of understand where the money was supposed to come from um and i can add if it was actually if it was dead if it had been issued yet yeah okay so i think this will be our sort of starting guideline for when we're talking to departments having i think it is an important almost first step to talk about the projects they currently have what the status is and i'll see first if kelsey already has it so that we can not waste time if it already exists but if it doesn't i do think that that's something we want to be able to do with the fundamental as we're deciding on additional projects yeah yeah where you'll find this you go to the town website yep select board webpage yep on the right side you see the agendas down there's a june 16 agenda item 25 and then there's two or three entries one of which is supplemental packet and that's very important i can send out a link to it too after school
any other comments on on that before we move on to the next agenda item i don't got some notes for kelsey but i'll check in with her
and i'll just move um and i didn't look exhaustively but the uh the design funds for the mwra hookup margin were found on this list that funding was not two years ago that funding was not included in the five-year capital plan this past year the extra funding was so so again i there's still possible a project the first of the original design funds come from no that was for the emergency hookup okay the uh the first the initial design funds was part of the yeah it was a capital budget i guess they both were in the capital but it was over a two-year period so i just wasn't sure why that wasn't i'm sure it didn't have been really and it was so large it's been held off and that's an example unfortunately it's on the front end two years ago when that first came to town meeting to get permission to go through the process of the mwra the estimate for the project was 14 to 22 million and then it was up to 34 million and then due to some additional contingency
funding we're hoping to get it's now up to 38.5 million so as kelly would say you'd rather want to know that before you go down but you can see over just a two-year period of time it's a wildly escalating cost and hopefully it's settled down at this point all right anything else i'm going to raise on on that and i know you just got into it liz so i'm sorry no no i i guess through is tom coming no not tonight okay yeah because we're not we're not hybrid tonight so okay i didn't want him to have to come and i also because this is our first time looking at any of these felt it was better if we got our our ducks in a row figured out what we want to ask and also give him the chance to if we have questions i can send them to him in advance and give him a chance to get his answers together versus just doing it on the spot yeah so this goes to the uh i'm sorry you're talking about the next it tops yeah and i'm going out of order than no no that's what we're going next yeah i just want to make sure there was nothing else on the wasn't wasn't labeled terribly well if you're referencing the fact that there were side-by-side columns and approved or requested or whatever is that what you're referring to um this is a dbw request yeah the dbw so there's a couple of days before how is it going to be funded loans for everything not necessarily no but so when that so let me back up when when the departments ask they do not know where the funding source for the money it's going to be that is typically brian keveney as finance director takes the pass of like hey where is where should this come from um so we don't ask the departments to do that because that's kind of beyond their scope um but your question is that each of tom's request so that it was in the budget or that it is yeah we'll quote it was in the budget but it was being financed by a lot or there might be uh you know sometimes it was general law yeah so that's what i want to talk so in in these forms right so i think i told you guys early on in the meeting i don't like the form that we use yeah um i don't think that in fact i mean the the time managers said he doesn't like it would like to discontinue using it so part of what i want to talk about is what's the actual information that we need from the department heads in order to evaluate requests versus what they're giving us yes there's a funding source section but my my instruction when i first joined fincom was to ignore that because the departments don't actually know where the money's going to come from and that ultimately comes from brian keveney so i ignore that section in their cips what i'm usually looking for is the actual description of what the project is the project just description and justification um and then after that the dollars and when they're planning they're asking for it usually though they're only filling out the cip form the form itself for the next year's projects and then they're slotting in um just project names and amounts for anything beyond the next year so it's it's pretty limited so i this is not finance is my area of expertise um and what i would hope we've got a few people on the committee perhaps that have more expertise in like what are what are the typical things that you would want to see in in a form and i i'm going a little bit out of order because i said we talked about dbw and talked about the form but i think they couldn't go hand-to-hand so we can probably do them a little bit at the same time what time one um first first is that fiscal 25 to yeah yeah yeah no so what we're looking at we're looking at the form yeah so i would look at yeah so the one i'm looking at is the mac is the first project he has is the number 40 back slot loader dump truck i picked on the nwra oh yeah if you went to the biggest one well because it says yes it's in the capital plan well and this is so problem number one when the department head is answering they've asked for it before that doesn't mean it made it into the warrant and so when we ultimately when fincom ultimately puts together the warrant i would if i were doing it i would change that to
well i would change it to no except if i'm putting it in the warrant we would have updated the capital plan to put it in um so okay i guess it is in the approved capital well again if you look at the warrant there's a table that is a bunch of numbers above the line there are numbers that the fincom and ultimately approved for recommendation at town meeting and there's a few lines below that upper section of that table that reference potential projects that are funded through separate articles because they're okay yeah one-a-kind very large and so in this case we're talking about the mwra we purposely put a line item before it put tbd as to the amount because it has a range and it's changing and there was a difference of opinion on the fincom as to whether that meant it was in the five-year capital plan or not we didn't vote the amount of money when we took our vote on the five-year plan that's all interesting and that's what the fincom has historically done i think this group presumably has to come to its own decision on what is it going to put forth as a five-year and ultimately longer capital plan and should things be in or out and i think when we get around another agenda and talk about other communities and reports you know to me we should put request for information here that will ultimately make our job more efficient and easier and if ultimately i'm not sure we're going to get there this year um due to timing but if ultimately our plan is as recommended by that capital planning document you sent out and as appears in some of those reports if the goal is to develop a set of objective i can't develop an objective criteria it'd be nice to kind of you know have that criteria at least from a department head standpoint filled out we could then decide ourselves as we you know hear it described and some of this so some of the information here probably is part of that criteria but i don't think it's all in there i agree and um i look like the cat is all the canary it's because i totally agree yeah my i i think that what we are requesting from the departments should be strictly the information necessary to make a decision which the criteria has to be a part of making that decision because otherwise i don't know how like how we prioritize so that's what's important you know that's what i think is important to be in what we're getting from from the departments i'm less concerned with them knowing or filling out was it in the capital plan before right to me that's the committee's job to know whether it was in the plan before right what was approved um so i'm completely with you i think that's where we ultimately need to end up whether or not we can get there this year is going to be a challenge right and i brian and i had a conversation earlier just for this year i think we're going to have to reduce expectations to probably not a whole lot more than what has been done in the past but laying out what are the things that as soon as we get done with that right we're looking to improve for going forward i just given that the short time frame we're going to have we're not going to be able to boil the ocean here and fix um you know all of this but i think i like that we're thinking about it now before we have all the capital right so that we can we can be ready to implement that afterwards and it's something you can set um that that's where we go we can set that expectation with department heads as we even have a town manager just saying once we get yeah take care of the next 30 days or whatever um we're going to spend some amount of time on the process and etc and just just stay tuned because you're part of that what's it's interesting because you know some of them i'm assuming uh the requests are pretty straightforward it's probably like a lump sum amount for a piece of equipment or a truck or something like that although even even that is going to have maintenance issues but when i look at the big one like this mwra it says consortium 38 million but then they check off things like um will it additional um will it request personnel impact personnel and they said no i mean how can that be i mean if you're going to be doing a capital project there has to be some sort of ongoing personnel cost um and it's just one lump sum number 38 million i don't know how we one year for one year and i don't know how we're supposed to assess whether that's reason or not when we know that there's a lot that goes into there's design costs there's architectural costs there's construction costs and then iron dollar costs and if none of that is broken out how are we supposed to assess right assess that now we're in particular is by watching a whole bunch of meetings over the last two years have taken place yeah and um again out of all the projects we're going to be asked to assess in the next 30 days unfortunately that's the largest one and again i think we're going to have to do we review our role as to that project in the next 30 to 60 days because it's on its own it's been on its own glide path and equally i think we have to make a decision um are we are we de novo reviewing uh 27 28 9 30 or are we accepting the fact that that the thing that the old process including the fincom's recommendation to town meeting sort of blessed those already and unless there so if someone comes in and says okay i have the same number that was in the plan and it's now in my little form here so you're going to tell me you're going to be reopening and looking at that again i think we just need to decide how are we going to be doing that or for this cycle are we just going to say let's just focus on substantive changes within those four years and then really spend time on kind of the fifth year but everybody may have their own opinion on that yeah i i think we have to focus most heavily on the first year right and we do have to give a little bit on a little bit extra on the next year just because to the extent and maybe just all the changes because to the extent the changes are significant that's going to have a real budget impact um and obviously the the fifth year being added in so i think it's going to have to be for this year it's probably going to have to be a change analysis like okay how much changed dollar wise and why um and is it you know yeah the dollar amount stayed the same but the 20 projects i had before are 19 different projects right i think that we've got to do a little bit of due diligence on why right it changed and how reliable this process is right if it changed significantly from one year to the next so this kind of goes to my earlier comment and maybe it's just easy but in none of the tags did it indicate there are any prior funds and we'll you know since we're picking on the you know the mwra tab you know in the comments below more details it says early design which would seem to indicate their previous funds spent on it that were captured here but they're not the priority yeah and then the other thing is the flip side so things are going to extend like what they often do you know how are we capturing to say okay we initially need five million then you know they're free and then you know we don't just need more cost tbd until we do phases one and two we don't have a better clarity with that so i think when we talk about how we can make this more informative so we're making comprehensive decisions it's yeah tell me what you spent today and i don't know if there's a way to capture that it sounds like we don't uniquely the way i've done it for the warrant as i've gone back through prior warrants and pulled it out um which is not effective yeah um but it it so there's at least two problems with what the current process is right one is not everything you need is here two is there's some things in here actually there's three yeah there's things here that you don't need that aren't filled out correctly right and so you wasted time is wasted putting something together it's not going to use um and then the third is there are legitimate things already on the form that aren't filled out that are needed right so it's you're not you're not in compliance with what's here and the form isn't getting at what we necessarily really need so that's a great example is of mwra yes money has been approved it's not in the prior debate column money will be spent right for um operating costs but there's no indication of what that right what that means money resources will be spent in order to implement a project of this size how much of those resources are included in the project cost versus how much of that is resources that are existing town resources and that's a really important distinction because you've got an owner's project manager in the 38 million okay you funded that right that in theory that resource is going to be available because you're paying for it but how many people in the dpw and in town manager's office are going to need to devote x number of hours to getting the contracts executed in order to be able to do this and how many other projects do they have to do within their day is that feasible so it's all of those things none of which are captured here right one more thing i think you could say try at least putting uh you know bogey guess it says increased cost for water what is that monthly increase is it annually increase and semi-annually at the moment soon become quarterly about but how much so so we when we're thinking about and we might not have any i can answer your questions but but but i think your point is well taken that for those for those of you that haven't made it part of your life to track that particular project unfortunately i had to um you know you're looking at this so on i really there's a lot i don't know about this and that answers that's correct from the dpw's perspective they believe more than enough people have been tracking this project and we're just yet one more as i heard them say when there were some meetings we're just getting another stop along the way that i'm sure they would prefer not to have to spend any energy getting us up to speed on the project that said i don't think this committee should um deny itself the opportunity uh i would shouldn't vote it for this committee to exist so tell me i would encourage just because it's available i would encourage on that project specifically that if you go to the dpw website you have a separate tab just for this project there's a bunch of information there you could read you could you just had a recent public um so i would say it's not just this specific example yeah this is my example well yeah in this example there's other instances really saying across the grow up costs it's going to go down but there's no that's it okay well i'm talking i mean it gets back to like we were talking about the you know the uh the senior center and how nobody thought to include maintenance costs you know so it's just what is this ongoing cost help us understand yeah and make sure that they're doing the exercise to think about it yeah and listen i understand right that this you know this is on its own fly path right and has been but the expectation both as a resident and a member of the committee that that information should be able to be summarized in one page in order to be submitted right so that we can make a decision and then communicate that to the town because i know there's all kinds of meeting right there's all kinds of meeting notes and there's all kinds of summaries but at the end of the day right it goes to town meeting and it has to get explained in a relatively brief period at town meeting and so we ought to be able to get it in that format right yeah i don't know if they started they have to this is going to be dealt with a separate article not through the capital budget is the intention and as a result they're going to draft a warrant article in the next 30 to 60 days that one article probably has to be you know more than three pages and that's going to effectively be what you just described yeah i know that said which is all the reason that could that information could be yeah they could do it now and provide that to us and again using it as an example um if there are other i think you're going to there's questions with it yes it will involve our cost or some savings could be nice to then quantify that and say correct here's how much yes and why um we say be nice but we were asking for 30 million dollars i think it was a requirement yeah that they give the details as painful as it is to do for the 19th time however right i don't know the other side of this process right yes just you know what you just give me the money i think that's but unfortunately right like are there costs are there savings it has to be more than yes yes there's you know what are you expecting and then maybe there's a threshold but it's great with this you have to report it right i have a hard time believing you're going to go from a four facility to one and not impact personnel like that huge red flag in my mind right it doesn't mean you're not going to deploy them for this project but is that what's happening yes and when is that going to happen right so there's 27 yeah well i will say on that in order to proceed with a project with the construction of a project generally you have to the town has to have approved the whole amount so and they will likely go out and bond it right and i mean i think part of this discussion is we're not trying to correct her past behaviors we're just trying to look forward and say okay how can we make this better and that's kind of the i know what i have to fill out my request investment for my company and then you know kind of block finance through okay this is how i'm going to use those funds so to ask the town to do that yeah again i i i think telling these could this be the first question of tom holder right just because of sheer magnitude yeah um i'm just preparing you for the they'll do it but because they have to do it anyway produce the warrant article but um you know it's it's it's it's been difficult along the process just because doing anything through the municipal process in multiple committees is just difficult and frustrating and i'm sure they've told their story enough times but again yeah i heard him say oh there's just another i i understand it brian but the bottom line is right this this project right eats a lot of capacity so it by definition has to have that that additional level of scrutiny and i understand how hard missful how hard it is to do projects municipalities but we haven't spent this much money on a project right what since we've built the high school right so it is warranted and it has it has real concrete costs for operating not just to the resident in the terms of their own water rates but to the town because we use water as a function of the town right so there's a cost there there's an operating impact from the change right in the use of the existing wells to remember what that takes for people they have it it just it should be right again i i'm just i'm just yeah i don't really want to be offended by your fellow citizens and your town staff when for sure but i think the point is if that keeps happening that goes to the very point that the forums would be completely because if the forum had the information that we're all asking for they're going to have to explain themselves they may have to offend it that's and i completely understand i think it's because it's not being documented properly which kind of goes back to your original point or discussion of what do we need to do with the forum either in terms of getting compliance with the forum or adding additional information and i think i think compliance with the forum would be better if there was completely overhaul right which is it's it's asking for stuff you know if i'm tom holder and i see the section on you know funding services like i don't know i'll just check one like how would you know that that that one again i think we've talked about it um i alerted folks because part of our decision process ultimately is um funding capacity and in particular debt funding capacity and there's been an ongoing debate over the course of the last six months anyway as to whether the town through taxation should bear some or all of the cost the price of 30 billion project versus putting all or some of it on water increases in the waterways ultimately most of the same people pay for it but not necessarily it's not identical yeah and that's ultimately that's within the selectors purview because ultimately they're going to have to make a decision on whether or not to bring this forward as a dead exclusion question of the town or use a special power that they have to themselves have some or all that put on taxation and if they chose i don't think they're going to do it but if they chose to put all 38 million on the towns back through taxation the annual debt service on that is a million eight or two million dollars a million eight i think after the first year that a million eight heating up capacity that you know as we look at over the next five ten fifteen twenty years is going to impact what other projects potentially have done so we may look at that and say well we understand we don't know part of the process to make that final decision but if we were far enough long we won't be if we were looking out for the next 10 15 years we see a potential new elementary school and we're going to need to fund it there may be one or two other that that changes the answer right it changes the answer on everything right this project changes the answer on the vast majority potentially of what is going to come in front of us correct and and i've seen other communities where the select board used it's not going to use it with special authority because they can change their mind each year and so they might start out saying they will put 100 on the tax taxpayers taxation but then a new school comes down the road three four years and they need the they need the firing capacity for it so they make the decision to undo that and push it back on the waterways and i think arlington actually did that so there's a whole separate debate but you know one we're not going to have the long-term information we need to put that or any of these other projects in that context this first go around and that's unfortunate because you know we're left not really knowing what what's coming because they have collected that information yet right so i think again i think not only for that specific project but for the purposes of at least this initial year making sure there's at least some information that they should have given us that they haven't you know we should push back and say please give us the information um and um and then again i don't think we're we're going to get to fixing the forms until no but we're not but it's it's what's what's critical to me when i look at when i look at this right now that i i want to know right i want to know what the operating costs are i want to know or savings or savings and i want to know the resources that are going to be utilized right how much of the resources are within that 38 million and how much our existing town resources and what departments right and how long do i think they're going to be tied up for right on one of my main beefs on this form is the funding is being requested in 2027 i understand that and i understand we have to approve the funding when do we think we're going to be done with this how long is it going to type like that span how we just talked about status of existing projects i don't have anything to judge whether or not they're on schedule or not on schedule because there was never a schedule for any of them right there is it's just not it's not been disclosed and i'm using it as an example so i don't want to get fixated too much on mwra it's an example on all of these not just mwra right yeah so maybe one thing to consider is some it might make sense for us that threshold of you know this is i don't have two farms but it could be like additional criteria that require any passion threshold for a hundred thousand dollar fiber connection we probably don't need all that detail the resources become less impactful and so i'm used to having essentially a form but i mean past professional you have to ask this extra tab of questions yeah it's true you're on a venture there's an if then yeah and something i do think i mean this this is the worst case of them all right so i think we're missing the assumptions like what are your assumptions and to your point right if if we're saying water cost is potential in this particular example because they chose to write it down that should say currently what is the current water house like it should just be part of the how much is your anything it should be aligned in there including we shouldn't have to look at them somewhere else um it shows that they understand what they're actually asking for the impact of that versus someone coming to put it in the water and we don't know we're picking on this but i think having an understanding what those numbers mean what's the basis for it would be important to your point you know i mean it probably is a different tab for fte like it's probably just an fte tab on the form it doesn't you put too much in one form right you have cost and i'm used to seeing capital expense and fte in the form because while it would all be capitalized that doesn't mean to your point you said earlier it could be expense items for we're paying a contractor to do it paying a pm to do it those aren't those aren't going to be construction costs those are going to be essentially expenses we're paying the town permitting costs and we tend to break them up differently it doesn't matter in the town because we don't appreciate it the same way but it still would be probably more relevant to understanding where the money's going and the phasing of it so i have a question about this too and again we can't can't really use mw or as an example this is too large but for a lot of the uh requests that they fill out um i suspect that some of the things they asked for um i don't want to necessarily call it a wish list but do they need it this year can it be deferred for a year can be between is there a prioritization to to request and i'm not sure if they're asked to do that no so that goes back to i think what brian mentioned earlier and what i've talked about before which is the criteria right but and it was in the guide from the state right right um but my extension of that is right you we need it because right it's a health and safety issue okay what happens if the project has to be put off a year right and obviously health and safety don't necessarily want to put off but is it i'm going to use a vehicle as an example put it off a year i'm going to have you know additional maintenance costs potential downtime that's going to impede the completion of road maintenance right what what are the what are the implications of pushing it off and in previous years on income i've never had for most things unless we specifically asked a good understanding of what's going to happen if we say no right we one year brian mentioned after covet but we just said yep everything that's on the schedule for this year will basically if it's not imminent you know issue it's got to get pushed off a year because we've got so many things in backlog i can't say we have a great understanding when we did that of what the implications we're going to be pushing off but i think that's part of that criteria that we need to be asking for right yeah what's that risk if you don't right it's the cost benefit right like yeah one of the problems with that is i'm kind of speaking against myself is that any department is going to say we're all priority ones i have to have all right or are they going to be honest and say well no this this can actually be deferred you know whatever yeah and i guess i'm not looking for them to say it's it's priority one or it's it can be deferred i'm asking for the narrative like what are the actual implications of deferral right we're going to have a real life example this building is in the five year and it's not in the five year plan it was an award as it got pulled out and put in one of the uh articles down below but in any event the facilities manager i'm sure will come forward and say i need my five and a half million to do a bunch of things and other things in this building um and um he said he got through it with the high school wastewater facility the issue pops back up because there's a request in there which we'll talk about at some point and it again it wasn't as i mentioned last week wasn't in a four five year plan because it got pulled because they were hopeful to do it less costly so it had been a five and a half million it's now four and a half but three five current they've combined two different projects um together so it's conceivable if we looked at all this and before asking the question what happens to be deferred if if we say do we really need to do this wastewater thing in high school in fiscal 27 and they may say yeah the dp says we have to do it and then we talk to the facilities director and say do you really need to put the new roof on this building what happened if you don't said it's going to leak and it's going to cost us under two thousands of dollars and then you got this 38 million dollar project so the problem is we're going to have potentially 38 million for the mwra five and a half million for this building and right now there's four and a half million in here for the combination of the septic for the septic facility um work around and they combine it with athletic fields um because there's a they want to go with a traditional leaching field and then since they're going to be putting it where the athletic fields are they figured if we combine the two projects and that may make sense to combine the project i just don't know how much each costs so that would be the kind of thing we need to kind of pull up but to your point if we say well the dp saying we have to do that the facility or deal with it some way does that mean we say well we've got to put off this building improvements for another year and then we just got to drill down and say you know are we really at risk of issues those are the biggest of all the items i've seen so far and what i've anticipated those are the three biggest items that we're going to be dealing with and not to say we need we don't need to look at all of them through a different prism but those are going to flush out a lot of these um fundamental info requests right it's it's a good point though brian right those are the three biggest and most seemingly most immediate so they're the ones we need to ask to spend the most amount of time and ask questions on it it will flush out the rest of it i just when you start to say them out loud it's like well i think we just cross off everything else because i don't know you're going to have left right and there's risk just political decisions that because there's political risk of to vote because those will all go to the ballot they'll each be their own debt exclusion question potentially and what a voter will know yeah i agree and i think i think it's a great point i think we we already know those are big ones that look like you have to deal with them let's deal with them because i think the phasing of 39 to change very quickly what that means for 27 or 28. i think i would change what you said versus what would cost to defer because that's why everyone's making you the skies on right what i would suggest is what is the current maintenance cost yeah what is the expected whatever time from your state cost if we don't do it instead of because otherwise you're saying it's just it's just a human response that you said i can't deal with right so it's more just and you say okay well it's 300 if we do nothing great we know what that costs we can make a decision i think to your point this is just a year it should have a start date and an end date like an actual pick date i don't know why we make it it's a budget year but it should say we plan on putting resources on january 3rd if approved and this is our end date because i mean you don't see that anywhere in here it just says budget a year yeah there's no milestone yeah it can't be any earlier than july 1st of right right that particular fiscal year but you say that but this very mwra budget clearly is because it must be well i have to add prior appropriations to cover yeah which doesn't build out design right right it wouldn't just you wouldn't know it yeah but if you just read this it says yes construction starts in 27 well then clearly a lot of work happening before you say what what's the earliest date you think you could begin spending the process and again if we have what is this point you have prior funding prior sources of funding yeah but that's also important because we've seen this happen before too right we approve something at town meeting we anticipate that it's going to end up in the next bond issuance and they don't get far enough right with contracting and it doesn't end up in that bond issuance that ends up in the next one that may have changed your decisions about when you slated things right um in in your progression of what was approved so it's i it's to me and we're not going to be there for a while it's a milestone point right it's a it's a high level milestone plan right when are you going to start spending right when are you know when you expect to be right at a whatever ground broken right the various milestones big that are dependent on the type project i mean you said your husband's on the permanent building i suspect they had this conversation many a time well so one of the other things it maybe it's not on this form i would think another thing is i have to tell them to spend the money so when you're 8 million you probably probably will spend it all in one year but i would think you could say you know i'm going to spend 10 the first year 15 what what i think it would be big to do when this kind of tracks to the pool how are we doing on projects how are we executing like we plan to or you just have a giant hockey stick at the end where all of a sudden we're going to spend you know we spend four we're going to spend the last you know 34 million all in the last you know does it make sense or it might be another way to keep people well it does it does matter right so when you're asking what the project is you know the approval is going to happen in year one right but the spend plan matters because you wouldn't necessarily do the bond issuance shouldn't do the bond issuance for the entire project up front because i know but that's what we do it right we shouldn't right yeah so the form none of our companies do that none of our companies issue bonds for things that we're not going to spend for years again there's theoretically penalties and maybe maybe that 30 million you know 32 of it's all hardware we do plan to spend you know that much money up front but it just seems like that would be part of the explanation and maybe again brian i'm going to go read up on all the documentation and history on this and get well versed in what you know makes up that 30 but yeah well with this form i mean as the form states right now it's kind of a misnomer that section says expenditure schedule it's really this form is the way they populate it at the moment is really appropriation schedule yeah so that's the fiscal 27 is if there's a number there that's the year in which the funds are voted and approved attend meeting yeah but that's not i mean so maybe there needs that needs to be there because you need to know when it's going to be brought out to kind of meeting or what budget they wanted in and then you need a then you need a an actual expenditure schedule project schedule it could just be two different sets that makes you a part of the other capital projects it's not going to be part of appropriation it's already an appropriate but it will be part of your spending yeah but like i'll point to like if the navy builds a ship they get approval for whatever billions of dollars it's going to take to build that ship but then each year they'll have the annual budget that goes into okay this is what we're you know perfect yeah yeah so i just feel like i mean again we're spending 120ks of repair growth okay we probably don't need it but it fits into here's your additional task where you need to go and really flush out what you're going to do with those funds that you're going to manage non-appropriately most of these things are absent something strange happening most of these do get spent in the fiscal year yeah as shown here you buy a truck it's done well but we were i mean that's not true either though i mean yeah i mean we just looked at a list of many things that were appropriated and not spent and maybe this is basically some of them maybe change the form of basic matter just as we go through them i mean i'm not suggesting we're cooking here but it'd be someone else's the appropriation year you don't need any of this and this is your spend schedule like this is true because all they really are asking is what is my appropriation year yeah yeah yeah it's two different questions right it's total amount total cost project appropriation year which is a single little bit for each and then there's a spend schedule and then funding sources i don't think asking how it would be paid for is the right question i think um for the department heads it's it's are there any other sources of funds right outside of right it's are there grants are there it's it's trying to ascertain right outside of taxation do you have any other ways to pay for this um and then they're a lot of them are very good at looking for that stuff they are but one of the problems we've had in the past brian is that there's been a the request of the net request right and there's no you guys kind of tease out what the other money was we've had we've had issues in the past of they were counting on a certain amount of money from another source the money didn't come through and then they come back so the understanding of the full cost of the project is always it should always be what's the full cost of the project how much are you looking for an appropriation for which can be two different answers right because we've gotten we've gotten jammed up on that on fincon before right um just for informational purposes just because i have family else doing watch meetings um we have the dbd for us they voted at their last meeting uh believe their vote was that any capital expenditure greater than fifty thousand dollars needs to be funded with borrowing unless for public works folks do it differently so most of their projects generally have been funded with borrowing but they've been having issues where the finance director changed some of their assumptions that they're going to be borrowed and he's put them in as being funded through water rates water revenues or water retained earnings unbeknownst to the board of public works so in reaction to that they've now put a process and now trying to land on top of the town manager the finance director so that that potential will impact us as we again we may have a view if we're going to be evaluating water and who does the borrowing for is the silk slumber does the borrowing for yeah they have to sign off on the volumes just a general question on how costs work rents for the town so can we just put everything on loan like like here's your credit card but here's your loan and then we just pay off the loan not everything so each year apparently there might be a million and a half to two million dollars a year of quote free cash that's utilized to pay projects which is basically operating under spend from prior years okay so like the town i think she wasn't here for taxes yeah the town generally isn't allowed right to spend beyond the budget right so the plan is always you know as you're getting close to the end of the year you gotta scale back and come in under so there typically is funds left over hopefully right that go into the general fund that are known as free free cash and so there's a piece of capital that gets we use free cash to do a piece of it we do um debt as we talked about there are some funds from the ambulance funds so revenues from the ambulance we typically use that to pay for things in the fire department um police department and communication center there is cpa leftover capital so surplus you know we appropriated that list we saw right some of those projects are basically done there's a little bit left we have that capital we can use so the only things that hit tax right now are debt um or what we used to do is we used to have at least a little bit we used to do roads from what we call cash capital which is just to say it's not debt we're going to put you know six hundred thousand dollars on the operating budget right that will fund the road projects and that hit tax but we haven't been doing that for the last several years so but there's limited limited sources right either you're straight up are hitting you're straight up hitting the budget right dollar for dollar or you're doing it as debt right i think maybe if i understand correctly there's also sometimes a delay we may have enough operating cash to pay it to your point a credit card but not really and that issue the bond at a later date so there is some flow in there yeah we're using the general we're basically we're using the general fund there is there is some cases where like oh we've got the budget the budget approved we're starting on the project but we're not going to do the debt issuance until february so they'll use funds to start the project and then technically they're supposed to borrow an interim basis yes so they can use excess funds in the general fund but only through june 30th and then they have to be repaid correct um you know whether in fact people just have shortcut that and there's a form that has to be filled out and the subcord has to approve the form it has to be sent no i don't think they've shortcut it i think they're just doing it within the year i'm not talking about no if it's within the year there's a form that has to be completed the subcord has to sign all has to be sent to dor and i'm not sure i've ever seen you've never seen that done i've never seen the formal part done okay all right i i when you look at munis like the one we were talking about before the second water tank when you look at munis it had a negative under the project capital account that had a negative which meant that the funding hadn't been put in that account yet and yet if it's a negative something that's spent and so my guess is that there are occasions where they're just taking money out of the general fund yeah that's something without doing it the formal way um and it's not supposed to happen in a way so but that's a question we can ask brian kelly we can ask brian that he's now very up to speed on the formal part because that's that was a big discussion um around the current financing plan um but anyway the bulk of particularly larger things to generally get done with okay that's not the charter for this group are we working to build more revenue so that's all passes that's all there's a different set of the eggs yeah
development actually the council on aging not the building the new one i guess we should bring it out we we were supposed to rent it out but i attempted to ask that question and was told that we're waiting until we understand the council on aging's use of the building but when that was pitched to the town we'll pull it worn up when it was pitched it was pitched as a council on aging and community center with space right that could be used that could be reserved about an event i wanted to have but you might have another route um but you're welcome to go to the select yeah okay i've written down a bunch of notes on the things that that folks have mentioned um as far as specific and we can do this a couple different ways right if you guys want to we can talk about it um but if you want to send me right without copying everybody your questions any specific questions you have on specific projects that i can give to tom holder to prepare in advance but i will let you know kind of generally what we're you know what our general lines of thinking are about what we want to know um but if you have specific questions that would be helpful are you going to write up the questions that you're going to ask him so we can not redone ask those to you oh yeah you don't need to yeah you don't need to regurgitate what we just talked about in terms of but will we see a copy of those questions so i can send you a copy i'll put you guys all in one copy right so that we're not responding um to each other but yeah are you uh done tighter i have only three um yeah sure so under the just again one point of clarification for everybody the dpw excel sheet um just so you're aware the sort of the white column or the first column of each fiscal year is what's in the five-year plan it was they didn't warrant the gray column is what they're now requesting yep and until you get out to fiscal 31 31 which is a gray column which really should be a white column i'm sorry did you get that backwards in the blue column
yeah yeah okay yeah the one at the very right is is the request there was no um yeah there was the fiscal very one wasn't because there wasn't anyway yeah on the transfer station in 27 um one question i have is uh there's a there's some money in the budget the transfer station enterprise fund to have a study done on town white beverage pickup and my understanding is that's starting to come to life and get going and my question would be does it make sense to spend any money um on a new garage replacement for we have that study completed and people have determined whether they want to keep frank's position open or not um so that's one even though it was in the five-year plan that that'd be an example of one where i'd say maybe that one could wait yeah um second one is the that big item um under the dpw uh four and a half million dollars as i was referring to before
so the original estimate was five and a half million just for the high school to basically rebuild what's there uh that got pulled away looking at a more traditional reaching field concept and um in the the non-five-year plan portion of the table there's in fiscal 29 there's a point and a half million dollar number and that point i play about the dollar number was made up of two million dollars for the high school football turf field probably getting redone the high school tournament yeah the football field the one this the artificial turf the one that we just read it uh as we've done a while ago the past two years no like three years ago yeah i'm pretty sure that's what it was for or stadium it said stadium i'm assuming that's the stadium but anyway that four and a half million in that article in that section was for that and two and a half million of that was for uh doing something with the high school baseball fields reconfiguring renovating whatever and as i mentioned before it turns out that where they think it makes no sense to put the more traditional leaching field is where those baseball fields either completely are portion are yeah and so if someone has decided i'm not saying a bad idea that if they're going to be disturbing that area to put an underground leaching field in whatever whatever does it make sense to advance from fiscal 29 to fiscal 27 if you ask for the money to redo the athletic fields what i don't know is if we didn't do that and all we did was the traditional leaching field solution um of the four and a half million let's be asked how much is that versus if you could break that apart yeah that's basically like one is a finish and one's regrade like one's a two different time and then i had one other oh the other but if they right but if they if they put leaching build them they they they have to renew the field like the field will need to get renewed yeah that's what i'm saying i'm sure there's logic i'm sure there's logic to to it um but um but it'll be interesting to see 250 for a video but now it's a million dollars for a review or if the two and a half million official 29 turns out now to be three and a half million for some reason yeah i'd kind of like to know that um so just for now just splitting the number apart um so we can yeah so we're splitting apart the two and a half piece we're splitting apart the four and a half million ask in fiscal 27 between the wastewater and the athletic field okay did i did i the other four and a half i was referring to is in the table for fiscal 29 there's a four and a half million number which is two million for the high school stadium oh and two and a half million was their estimate for what it would cost okay so there's four and a half million of fields in fiscal 29 at the moment at the moment and there's four and a half million for or two and a half million for this project well i don't know of the four and a half million here how much is just wastewater okay yeah yeah and are they simply pulling forward the two and a half million yeah baseball diamonds from fiscal 29 i don't see it in the schedule no if you look at it's not it's not on their schedule but why would it have been in the original plan schedule well it's again it's unfortunately very because the fields are probably in if you have your warrant that there's because the fields are probably in facilities schedule yeah well it was under it was under the section for separate articles and not in the five-year plan and it was excluded borrowing four and a half million fiscal 29 i had to go back dig deep into the detail itself especially to be sure that that four and a half was um and you don't see the high school stadium here because that's the approved plan that was excluded so it was well it wasn't the fin town didn't approve those articles they included it in the table it's i don't agree with it it's the if it's going to be an article we put it down below the line and i at least for our purposes like the plans the plan yes it's going to have to be right we're going to vote on what the plan is and then when it ultimately goes to the town there's chunk of it that's going to go as here's the list of capital projects and there's a few projects that are going to be by themselves but in my mind we've got to talk about the whole right the whole universe is one thing not well you're going to vote on that separately they're going to vote on all of them it's just how it gets separated i don't i've never liked that but i guess and they go back to their plan that it should still be in here or something even though it was voted separate right well the town doesn't actually vote on the five-year plan yeah town doesn't vote the five-year plan but they voted a plan and then they separately list the projects that they know are coming up that they think are going to be separate articles and they layer that at the bottom so will they consider those approved or unapproved well the departments view them as approved so when you read the description what does the town consider them as to be what what fincom considers them as yeah they're just they're on the radar screen yeah so they're to be watched they're not approved right yeah and so the we don't have the school stuff yet but in the um school request last year and in that in this separate article line the two million was described as way of high school phase three stadium profits so it may not be the term no it's not the term phase phase three was the one no it was supposed to be the the baseball fields that was the phase that was the phase that got left off when they when they moved the soft they moved the softball fields to the back they moved the football field over the third phase is supposed to be the baseball field so maybe there's a duplication because the other the other two and a half that i was referring to was under the recreation dpw uh section at least that from a request standpoint it was described as developed rectangles where jv varsity were so maybe maybe there so maybe that's a question right is you had these in your requested but they're not yet a hell of a worthy approval but at least in the future years how much of that is now eliminated because it would be amazing if you went from a two and a half dollar request to five other requests and then four and a half it seems unlikely so anyway for now i think just breaking the point and a half fiscal 27 asked by the dpw apart between yeah wastewater and and the second related question is do they are they going to have to decommission the existing facility and if so is there a cost related to that and the last thing existing wastewater facility maybe maybe they're one maybe they want to but you have to do something that means it's under review by the dp right so i go back to our forum questions there should be a uh a decommissioning question yeah yeah maybe you want to keep it there just in case and just make sure you shut down whatever you have to shut it's probably it may be a matter of if we don't if we don't close it you can run that out for parties
hey they went out the the uh oh in brookline
oh yeah the tours right but you can run it out for parties like the water i can't think of the name of it right where like their old water facility it's like really cool looking yeah the base the base goes there my kids are there yeah i still want to know if they can run a pipe all the way from the high school to the town center wastewater facility through taking easements along the way i just don't know how far they can pump cool anyway the other item that i have at the moment was um this is more background for rescue there there's a bunch of stormwater monies requested in different years and one of the line items is labeled stormwater compliance under 25 000 a year and last year tom was told to put that in his capital budget by the finance director the fincom particularly me pushed back and said that's an operating expense right nothing to do with capital and begrudgingly the finance director took it out of the capital budget and when we took that capital budget he ultimately put it into the operating budget so we just need to make sure tom's aware of that and the finance director obviously is aware of that yeah but other than that i mean there's there is some movement and some things and you know i i think curious sometimes when you see geez we really need you know we really need the equipment age 17 sweeper fiscal 27 for 475 000 and then here every year later uh geez we can do that in fiscal 30 you know so they could move forward certain other oh i get it maybe if you look at four or five pieces of equipment and it turns out some are worse off than others but i just i ask those kind of questions just from a just to get a sense of what's the real process did someone really give thought to and some of his some of those trucks that he pulled forward got pushed back because you see a line item here route 20 rehabilitation design uh the town manager had slotted i think it was 750 000 into fiscal 29 and at the very last minute the economic development committee said we really want to pull that forward to fiscal 26 and the compromise was to pull forward 250 000 which you don't see here because it got into the budget fiscal 26 and he's got the balance of it at fiscal 28 so i'm just under understanding the dollars are the same on that is concerned but understanding yeah sort of ebbs and flows or why something really new is needed now it's not well can you go back to your earlier question there's a whole chunk of information on the tab for the this is a high school treatment plus the field it almost seems the way that what they grow up or write out free is that they're missing two and a half million because they do want to find the two and a half million from fiscal year 30 with their original estimate of the 5.5 million which you know simple math there is okay we're already knowing there and it does talk about uh gene for treatment process through uh high school turf fields well the original estimate to uh rebuild retrofit whatever the existing system that probably never worked right was five and a half million dollars sure sure to do that work but they pull that back come down by two million well they pull that back they're not doing it instead of using that facility let's see if we can get the dep to sign off on a traditional aesthetic system but i guess my point is it would be good to know when they say four and half million break out the four and a half million for me because well that's what i'm saying i don't know yeah i don't know between what it was five and a half to rebuild what's there the building and infrastructure what does it cost to put in a traditional septic system for the high school i don't know because i mean the example would be two million left if you're that if you assume that two and a half million that was in fiscal 29 for the athletic field well that's what they say they're bringing that in the two and so if you started right so they don't tell you what it costs to do the wastewater treatment so that's that's you can either infer that it's you have to infer yes right because you want to ask for four and a half but i don't want to infer i want them to tell you what it is yeah yeah we're going to ask but they come forward and say the fields are really a three and a half million dollar cost and say wait a minute it was two and a half why is it now three and a half are you putting in an extra you know sprinkler system more so the turf i'm reading it the turf comment is not a redo of the turf it's drainage because if you recall after the new turf was put in we had issues with when we have a lot of rain the pellets from the turf turf are draining into into the wetlands so that's a related problem yeah it's a problem they're solving a problem versus redoing them yeah so there may be again the person handling the the subject part of this the town engineer i watched her i thought i mean she's she's very good she's very detailed and so i have no doubt that they've really been working on an outside consultant engineering firm what i have less comfort in really understanding is the field component yeah we have the add-ins and what the trailer yeah
four and a half broken between the cost of building the leech the doing the work necessary something to satisfy the septage issues right rebuilding the field or fields and fixing the issue at the turf field those are really i mean i understand it's all one project but those are really three different things and not that i'm suggesting this for anybody who listens to this tape right you got to deal with the septage issue you don't necessarily have to rebuild the fields but you're going to want to right but they're separate it it may be and they have different lives yeah there may be completely the most efficient way to do this is to do them all at the same time but there's they're separate issues so yeah i mean it is the other concern is it means these projects stay open for the life of multiple projects because it's you know so from a warrant perspective great device approved but should they really be broken into we have a two and a half million dollar subject project we have a two million dollar field project and a two and a thousand dollar turf reformation project that is all approved in this warrant for my project that way we can close the facings of them out and not actually have this bucket of format oh it's something broken we're spending more money on the project than it should you know it's it's it it makes it very difficult it could be different spend is that possible can you have one warrant with segments in it and not make it one very large project you can you can where are you run into where we would argue this with waste when you pull the projects apart what you can run into problems with is you went a little over on the stuffage and you're under on the feel you can't swap between the projects whereas if you do it as one so we've run into this on the schools um where like hey we're replacing flooring in you know several different buildings and we used to do it as all separate projects and then there was a we've gone back and forth a couple times like then there was like just put it all together so that you can sort of continue from one right to the next and if they finish up and and without some leftover they get started on the next one but yeah so there's there's pros and cons to it but i think it's important to know whether whether you do it as one you split it apart it's important to know how much um yeah i'm sure there's a size 10 million dollars to make a conversation if it's you know 10 hundred dollar projects maybe don't care yeah well that also depends on you might have a contractor that does septic but isn't going to the fields and vice versa or you know it might be the same contractor but you know you kind of need to work as a town yeah yeah well and my other question on this one is um not only the decommissioning but the cost of any field rentals or anything you need to do because while you're doing this project you're going to take the baseball fields out of commission much less than anything i'm sure yeah
this goes to the schedule right can you schedule it so that you're not taking them out of commission great for doing it and having it ready in time for the season almost never almost never right yeah two world seasons correct i know yeah so it's okay so those are my questions your questions okay i got them um not to say that there are questions on the other end potentially although there's things that i would have even thought to look for just because it's not transparent that all these little that are hidden pieces yeah not intentionally but which again why it's important particularly the three of you it's important make sure anything and everything you think should be questioned or asked because just raise it because it's just too easy for kelly and i to drop on or pass our knowledge might be helpful because we're in a short-term time crunch here to kind of get things moving along but on a longer term perspective you really need to come up with a thorough process right one that satisfies everybody so i i would ask you know take a look at this in more detail and send me a questions i will send you out like what we have so far um as a bcc and then you can send me back and i'll i'll give tom a heads up and ask him if you can join us at our next meeting um we'll run on a bit behind which is fine on the last agenda item uh sent you a couple of samples uh i said earlier was they're wildly different from each other um and i said you know i think the town of millis is because a former co-worker of mine started there see see i can see and i was like wanting to see what his was um so that was a pretty brief one it's actually probably less not not really anything more than once in my opinion it was currently in the warrant um and so probably looking for something more than that right but not the 38 pages of you know arlington's which i'm imagining you know they're they have more staff more paid staff that um help prepare that i was really just giving it for us there's a wide variety of stuff out there um but i did think arlington had a lot of things that weren't annual they were references like this is what capital like these are like all we were talking about trying to understand here it just it was more of this is debt service this is when it becomes kind of like so that i thought was actually really interesting the good news about that is you can just yeah i'm sure they probably use it from year to year yeah no i had a couple of just again high level questions so millis um it's more of a philosophical question it appears that they either weren't empowered to or didn't want to approve specific projects in specific years they wanted to basically come to an agreement um priorities highest priority yes and then let some other decision maker kind of deal with it which is an approach yeah um i don't think that's our approach no but um on the arlington one you know our the bylaw basically says our report is to be delivered to the town manager the town manager has statutory responsibility for preparing both the capital budget and finding a capital plan presented to the financial budget maybe the same as what they got from the town manager so arlington it seemed like maybe arlington's report was either by i don't know if the bylaw but whether my bylaw had to be delivered to the select board or the town meeting it's not to say that whatever report we create won't be public document but you know we don't need my opinion we don't need if our audience is the town manager we don't need to regurgitate a lot of the generic stuff which would be very helpful for john q public picking it up and understanding the capital project process but if our only responsibility is to provide our input to the town manager our report i think could look somewhat different from arlington agree something a bit more something i agree i i would and i definitely agree for for first year i would i would argue pretty hard even though this is being delivered to the town manager that it be a public document um it's a public document because of a because of a meeting law you see it something that should it's not required but you see it as a as a reporter in the back of the warrant for example because what we think isn't what ends up being voted on by the camera there's the town manager and then there's the fin count yeah so i'm not going to make the call whether or not it's going on the warrant because that's not our call but at the end of the day it i would hope it right it will be because it's going to be a product of this committee which is subject to open meeting law it'll be on the town website and they can decide whether or not they want to use it so i know as a resident i would like it if that explanation was out there i don't know we're not going to get that i don't think we're going to get there necessarily this year but i think it should be and i think i wish we had formed this committee a couple of years ago because we're about to spend right most likely if it's approved more money than we've spent in a couple of decades on a single project so the first line for the report yeah i do think i like it i mean it states all the assumptions that we're using as assumptions yeah right and there's even now we're all still like well we have to ask we have to ask we have to ask well then a year or two years it's different people yeah potentially yeah so just that alone here's these assumptions that were made of the slip capital league i still don't know the answers we're waiting but we don't know yeah so i i agree i think it it's a nice template right here are assumptions that we're using to make these decisions and the rest will begin yeah and i i agree that it has to be drafted with the expectation that it would be attached and as it probably should be i agree it's interesting i mean i didn't spend a lot of time on it but i looked at either the westwood or westford ones and they actually have a report and it's interesting because it's kind of halfway between millis and arlington which is probably where we probably right i don't foresee us doing the bottom section yeah okay i can't remember whether it's millis or arlington but one of them referenced their their ranking worksheet so i went and found their ranking yeah so whichever downloads i'll send it to you tell me oh yeah please and then it may be just a place to start when eventually around two and then after this first cycle we said we want to create those criteria um there's such a lot of information yeah i i kept in sleepless night i kept envisioning it as like um like a net promoter score like it's if you have your criteria and you're they're weighted right a certain way but then you know you don't have to be universal is that is that okay yeah and you just have a bunch of things up and you got five or seven people doing it you got all this up average them all out and you put out their income right there i can't answer many say okay but we have this subjective reason why right so you can see that it's useful yeah okay so we've done a lot of talking what we're going to need to do so i will i will send these questions to tom um and we'll do something feel our way out with tom and then we'll see you in here for the next meeting um to talk to them live either on screen or in the room um but we are going to have to start dividing and conquering from a putting things together so i'm not going to ask this meeting um but i think if you can come back to the next meeting with having spent some time with the reports and there are others out there you can you can google right and the guide that i sent um from the state what are your must-haves right and three to five must-haves that should be in the report um and then i'm going to ask the committee right we're going to decide together what those are and divide and compare i'm going to ask each of you to take a section right of those must-haves and first draft it right like without without the actual information there what would that look like um so that we can not all be on not one or two of us on the hope for um for doing that same as what i've said before from an open meeting long perspective we can't just send that out to the whole group um you can send it back to me i'll consolidate and push it out for our next meeting um for us to be able to discuss but i'll give you another another week so think about what it is that of those items that you think need to be in there what your what your preference is so you know pull brian and volunteer for the thing you're most willing to do so that you don't get volunteered for the thing you don't want to do my normal approach is you all take what you want to do and i'll take whatever it's not except for chairing the scheme included so just to be clear we say report we're talking about the examples you need now right it can be those or you can do it you can do what i did you can just you can google right capital improvement questions yeah yeah the actual warrant i think we talked about this the four pages in the warrant itself at least again i'm distinguishing between this year okay so we don't get our stuff so we already have so i would start with we talked about it i think at an earlier meeting was in the warrant in the report of the finance committee there's sections right that are attributable that are about capital buying vision since those are things that we've already prepared that brian and i have both been involved in the past it's a good place to start because that's stuff at least we've got a framework for putting together the question from there is is there anything in the ones i've sent or other ones that you find online or from looking at the state's guide that you're like i really like this i like i think it's important to have in here and what we can discuss as a group it's important to have and i want it this year and i can do it this year versus it's important to have that that one's going to have to wait until next year right i think if we operate with that basis we'll just have a placeholder yeah because it's not just like yes nice to say or easy to say i want that the actual production of the data that goes into it it's a whole other so graph anything i'm going to point back so we talked about getting a sharepoint so my concern is is that we're going to have our own little pieces of the pie we're going to do it and it's just nice i agree i don't understand how the open meeting laws work when you have a sharepoint because we can just put stuff out there and then you can technically read it so i don't know what we're saying we can't we can't we can't effectively deliberate by sharing our own yeah yeah so this is the problem like you could you could point it somewhere everybody can look at it or a quorum could look at it or even give it all one person have them put it all in one document and then distribute that document technically in advance of the meeting or open meeting it's still the same thing is it just so maybe new ones maybe not but to me honestly i would love to read stuff ahead of the meeting so when i come here i have my questions already go we can have a conversation dialogue where it's fine yeah documents like kelly's sending out in her email well it wouldn't say i have a report like folks hey take a read through let me know if this is yeah but they can't read it and then just talk about it later correct no because if kelly no because of reading it it allows that that's now they no if you wrote her word yourself okay and no input from us and she just wrote a draft here's my outline and she sent that out in advance of the meeting i think that's fine we can't you can't respond yeah but if i took pieces from each of you and consolidated them and sent them out before the meeting that i can't do so like i if you were to issue a piece and you send it to me i would prepare it together have it ready and technically another question two people could technically two people could on this committee could work together yes to share a load but i'll go to the arlington and i'm glad you said we don't have to do that it's like how do we actually how do we this group of folks actually even pull that together because it would have to be during this time right like so what we will end up doing and what we will end up doing is a couple of us once we've got kind of pieces and we bring it together a meeting it would end up needing to be a couple of us right not a horn so only to work on it together and then send it out right at the next meeting so it becomes arlington likely it's the um it's staff right the committee saying what they want the staff's going and putting it together which they can do and they can distribute um as long as the committee is not deliberating on it so that's one way we've done you know brian can send us stuff um but finance director brian yeah brian kevin finance director but so far i've only sent you everything that i've been sending you is already either already a public document or not anything that any of you know any of us prepared it's it's things that have been prepared by staff right um so that is an interesting question certainly in the arlington when you look at the members who prepared a lot of them are town officials and even with uh millis one i think it elicited like the town manager and all other people so it looked like they also had input in the preparation of the report which is to your point so how do we how do we do that if we all have to operate independently it did like get a little confused well yeah i'm used to creating documents that we then hand over to our customer and it's always that one voice like so you know it's just i mean if it's a half a dozen pages to you know a dozen pages maybe it's not just a good deal you literally sit here and be like okay anybody got any problems with like no versus yeah so what you would what we would do right is we have an issue it would become work product of the meeting right and you could still at that point rank and correct me if i'm wrong because then you're discussing any document that's not a public document open meeting ellie said take it home with you if you have any further comments please send those along directly okay she would then make whatever it's got to become a public document first right so okay yeah and there may be another approach and maybe you could talk to the town manager to see if it's possible sometimes if again if you want to give members advance time to look at it to become prepared in the meeting you know discuss it intelligently um you know if you post if you post the draft document on the website in advance of the meeting so it's not quite sharepoint but like because you wouldn't necessarily be able to go in and start editing right and everybody can see it but where they post it and it's publicly available that's part it's sort of like the way the select board does the packet right so yeah that that at least could be done but you have to get the document out there before members can be sharing kind of effectively directly yeah i i'm going to ask a simple question of the town clerk of i send you the agenda to post if i put a document right at the back of the agenda you can post that or is there a yeah yeah i bet when i did minutes sometimes i would attach a document to the minutes yeah um yeah i can't recall we attached them to the agenda i'm sure you could unless you want to you know she'll say why don't you just create a packet like like it's like we're doing just she posts that in the same and she can post that in the same now now they're used to oh yeah they can post it as a separate identified packet but the way they seem to be for a particular meeting if you open up the meeting you'll see the agenda and you'll see the packet and see the supplemental packet all in kind of one place yeah yeah there are things but now now the document's out there um and but it's just it's just something that we need to be cautious about the the biggest issue the town had over the years is doing evaluations of staff superintendent schools to administrative where members would be asked to do their own individual evaluation and give it to some one member to compile everything but then then share they would share that back with the members and it's not out in the public domain that's a problem because as members it's the same as if we're sitting here so we just need to be careful and maybe workarounds that are yeah i don't think you know it was just more there's a lot that we're going to have to pull together yeah relatively quickly and yeah okay we're going to get together for two hours and like squirrels you know pass i don't know no it won't be it won't be able to do it that way no that's what we're just like you know well some meaning if you look at the planning board for example that they literally will spend time in media going line by line through bylaws and other things well and this is where it's like we're not out there and we'll find another workaround but we can't do that you could review independently and then kind of have your own red lines in mind and that's what you talk about like make the document and then again kelly well again consult with the town manager if it's just kelly's work product she could do that and we could come back in and um okay kelly's work product we all need or something she's already done for work products if any one of us if any one of us took out no if you all gave me something and then that's not my work product that's your work product that i consolidated right he's talking about if like you did instead i created the whole thing um and send it out which we do a finance committee report is the chair of the finance committee would write the report send it out to the members and say come to the meeting talk about it and then after the meeting's over send me any edits that you have if there's anything we didn't talk about at the meeting but ultimately the chair ends up and maybe one other member sort of proofing or whatever yeah and then that gets submitted without it yeah going back around the difference being they all have there's a report from the prior year that they start with right and so and we have a little bit of that but because we're a new committee starting from scratch a little bit more of a challenge here um i think but you know certainly i could take and copy and paste out of the morning right the sections that are finance that are capital related and start there um but let's let's start with the next meeting what are the must-haves right now versus the wanna-haves right in the future and we'll go from there right if it if it's like yeah i've got all that at my fingertips and it's easy enough for me to do i'll do it but if it's going to take a little more effort to build out um there's some help although i am hoping that ai will be able to generate some of the template i think the while using pages from the hidden number of work as part of the report as you well know that a lot of the tables come from excel especially people have that kelly put together and you know it's all fine when kelly's here because she knows how everything works but as i think i said one meeting having had to go in at the very last minute and try to figure out everything is working so i can change a table or two before we finalize the importance in the warrant i just was very uncomfortable because it makes sense to the person who puts it together and it's pretty intuitive but still you just don't know and so you know miss kelly hopefully i should change mind as you said you know very briefly that this may be your own year on this committee agreeing to kind of use that for example when none of us might be or some future people are in here comfortable using that so you just need to think about yeah no i would say my hope though is that the my hope is that the town's going to get easy cip up and running and we're going to have it there was never the plan with that spreadsheet be a long-term right solution to doing this there's a better way to do it it's just we don't have staff help right or software help to do it right it's cobbling it together so my hope is that that's not the case going forward um and that you know some of the things in there maybe we decide that we don't need them um right going forward so let's let's start with what what do we think needs to be in the report and we'll go from how how we can produce that and how we can share it um in a way that doesn't violate anything we want going forward that first version of the court is a five year or is it going to be longer it's going to be five and we can speak to the fact that you know i envision a paragraph at the end of this report that talks about the things we intend to do right the the you know in the interest of time that we're a new committee and only have this much time you know this is what we have but our view of the future is to have these additional items okay i don't know how we can go more than five okay okay all right can we review and vote on the minutes of october 15th and one edit for sure okay on page two when we discuss that one about policies the third full paragraph the second last line the t and john's name should be a j and then uh john had one other question that he had sent to me but i wasn't i thought it was covered but if not i can change it um that same paragraph uh said she will also request this when you come to also request the current inventory of capital assets and in your email to me john said we discussed getting a copy of the capital asset inventory is shown by the account pre-audit and the audited capital assets once completed by departments that was underway i didn't know what i had in there was sufficient or whether i was missing something about i think it's sufficient it was two different things two different requests yeah yeah i think i mean i think it's fine
the link to yeah so for some reason it keeps dropping off the lab so so the pediatrician you can't really click on with your computer but if you click on your phone it doesn't you get the page not found again so remember last time like there was no there's a space between any person before i close that space i'll check it again i clicked on it after i fixed it and it worked but i'll double check it okay can i get a motion to approve the minutes of october 15th someone and a second second it's called a tie all in favor all right all right thank you all right and now can we okay so we have a meeting set for the fifth at 5 p.m um everybody good with that so hybrid yes and it um i forget what meeting what room you're going to be in but i'll send out the agenda um do we want to put another one on the calendar did you um we were going to get um i was under this right you're going to get tell me i'm going to give you a copy of what he sent out uh yes i have not asked him yet i have a list of things to ask him for and obviously connected that has everything come back now i thought he said it was three weeks and that was about three weeks ago yeah i'll double check but i'm assuming that's meeting after the fifth of the whoever's next in the list and facilities is the other big one yeah because he'll probably cover on the town facilities in school and it doesn't mean very many other things do we think that facility report that was mentioned from there maybe that happened being in this like what was talking about there's assessment being done at all buildings inside no we haven't all right i'm going to send him along i don't know if it's available yet yeah on the slide board agenda for their meeting for monday night and his update this last time inside
and his uh guidance he's talking about in his report town manager he says on site insight so okay must have something must have it but he's not yet he won't give it to me until i've they've you know discussed it but that's fine i will do a list of things
all right let's though if possible i would like to just at least pencil in another date and i can
reserve room so does the following wednesday the 12th work i will not be able to yeah but i'm i'm getting i'm going out of the country six and don't get back until late on the 11th so okay all right um so that puts us 13th it's thursday we won't be able to have hybrid we'll have to be in person which is a problem if we're going to have staff here does that work for anybody i mean staffing here yeah i mean i can move to the i can support the 13th in person but i didn't know if you meant staff like we're going to have books well if we do it i mean if we do it then it does have to be at five because we have to try and get some books in here i know um michael who does facilities had indicated he would be able to do that um previously it works for everybody i'll at least ask um and i gotta see who's who's next right it's thursday at 5 p.m yeah all right so for agenda items next time um we want to talk about report contents again and i'll keep the agenda item for discussing um departmental and see who else if there's anybody other than um tom who can we have stuff in time and to the extent i get any of these other items back i'll add those
okay can i get motion to adjourn second all in favor all right hi hi all right all right thank you everybody
so going through the agenda we have called order and review the agenda announcements i don't have any um 605 approximately public comment and number's response 615 we're going to review the outstanding approved capital improvement projects that was briefed to the select board when i originally put this together i hadn't looked and didn't realize there's not that much there so that should take 20 minutes but at 635 we can discuss review and discuss consolidate our questions on departmental capital requests the only thing we have so far is department of public works because we weren't able to be hybrid tonight i didn't want to ask
the head of the department to have to come in so i thought it would be good if we consolidate questions get those to him in advance and ask him if he can come next week let me meet and then 705 review the capital improvement template form which you can actually use the dpw they use the existing form and i think it would be good once we talk about that sort of look at the form and say what else do we think we're going to standard need to know and i'd like us to have a later project around revamping that request and it goes hand in hand with this easy cip software like can we get what we can we orchestrate the things we want and get it in the software so that it can be used and be collected more efficiently going forward i don't think we'll have that for this year and then 725 review the um discuss potential content for the draft report we did send you guys a couple of samples um that was not comprehensive but i tried to pick a couple that were wildly different just so you could see that there was a pretty wide range of um how that's done and i from what i can tell it tended to correlate to size of of town and size of the budget right and likely how many volunteers are involved versus how many staff members um and then 745 we can review both the minutes of october 15th 750 any topics not anticipated 48 hours prior posting and set time for the next meeting and then hopefully by eight we are returning okay so since we are not hybrid and there are no other people here i assume we do not have any public comment all right and then let's that update that i sent you from the select board meeting was not what i was hoping for um i was hoping for a more comprehensive listing of projects i will reach out to calci and see if we can get a more recent except one that's dated in two it wasn't it um did you find something i couldn't find um yeah oh was it in the supplemental not in the okay oh in the packing i want to circulate but i can send it to you after the meeting okay then i missed it um because i i thought the highlighted portion was what they gave um i mean too excited you all can access the kind of website you can pull it up and you can okay so it wasn't in minutes per se because it was an agenda agenda supplemental packet for the agenda that's okay right i guess that's my fault i missed it okay um all right can everybody hold that up
town website select board what page agenda June 16 should be a tab for supplemental packet okay sorry select board support webpage yep then on the right side there's agendas yeah 2025 if you open that up you get to june 16. you can even i think you can usually can you go to the calendar and do it that way yeah you can do it on that little calendar on the right if you click june 16th and then click on the select board but everything from that meeting is on there yeah so while everybody's doing that um i think one of the thoughts i had because i think i've talked extensively about both needing the financial resources and human resources to do this is and i'm not quite sure how to do this yet is how do we assess right the amount of things open in a given department right or managed by a given department and how that affects them i think it probably comes down to talking to the department heads when we talk about the capital request of you know what's what's the timeline for finishing the things that you have how much more capacity do you have right to take on additional projects and some of them it depends right facilities tends to have the projects that are longer in nature right may take more resources as opposed to like dpw needs to buy a truck right that's not necessarily a long run out process or at least i would hope it's not um so but i haven't sort of figured out is how you make that determination right i don't have i don't have enough knowledge of how much much time it takes to do these right and how much how many resources they have and obviously that also interplays with their operating functions not just capital so i don't have clear answers on that but i know that that capacity has to it has to have to be a factor in how we're deciding on products okay clearly if you look at the last page dpw is the one with projects from 17 and forward and the rest of them are at least in the 20s
sorry johnny we're saying so we're on the last page so we pulled up on our computer a package yeah yeah the last page it seems like i don't know why the water fund capital would be that's they're all the oldest that's the water enterprise fund yeah that's a separate sort of accounting uh fund if you will which is why they those are segmented from the other dpw so this isn't a doctrine of your sense no it's just on the left page and where i'm sorry where is it where is it where is it it's on page three at the end of page three oh you have to open the supplemental package oh so oh yeah it's the very first of the supplemental faculty yeah one this morning at one high level comment about this yeah presentation um it's not that it probably is too far off but it's purely a financial representation yeah but how much of sort of an appropriation is left doesn't necessarily give you a sense of where it is actually in the percentage percentage right so i just i just want to caution everybody um when this got put together a year or two ago by the former assistant account manager there was another column off to the right and for each project he had gone and spoken to your point he had spoken to department heads and had just a 10 15 word blip about door about and where it was in the process or if there's anything notable and so those notes hopefully either exist or can find a way into whatever they're right in the spreadsheet before it was pdf done assuming i hope okay right okay so these have like last work done date yeah i'll give you some talk i guess some of these you might have on the bigger projects like the council and aging building
it says it was 99 complete which is probably true it's open uh it's probably down to a punch list and there's probably some reserve funds left you know to address that but um i just want to make that point and then second the other point i'm just not without being last tom holder for example um if you look at the very last the water enterprise one items the last section just as an example um second water tank construction um showed the beginning balance two and a half million which was the first appropriation there was actually an appropriation a year or two before that for design funds yeah that was the first major appropriation to build the tank second tank and then at this past annual town meeting in spring they decided to upsize the tank so they asked another million three or four i think yeah um and so this suggests that it's 97 complete the problem i have with that is one yeah it's not linked to all the appropriations so before we move on liz if you go to the towns thank you here my site yeah there's no email so if you go on the website um go to town wayland and click on boards and committees yeah pick the select board and then there's a calendar kind of off to the right i don't know if it'll show up on the mobile version very well but yeah trying to kind of yeah that's that's it yeah there is wi-fi i've seen it before yeah just picking on that one just by way of cautioning how much faith we should put in this document at the moment yeah i agree with you and so what and i i've experienced this before to brand is when when i tried to do write-ups for new capital going into the warrant right one of the struggles was always when it was additional funding where were the other right how do you give a representation of like gee this is an extra 1.4 on top of and or use fire station 2 right we've given it money three different times giving that full representation of everything that goes so i think the same needs to be true here when giving updates you have a project it has multiple pieces of funding right associated with it they should be captured together and then to your point what's missing from here these percent completes are all based on balance the financial dollars and not work right the state of the work i know that again easy cip which i want when i get up in using it has a module in it right for estimated you know original completion estimated completion and notes update you know periodic like what's the status of the project i'd like to ask you know if we can make sure that what they're planning to do in the future has those components to it not just the financial but the project status notes but in the meantime i think our best path this point in time is when we talk to each of the department heads we talk to them about their about their projects on this list and where they are right where they see you know resources needs being because otherwise i don't know how we make that any kind of assessment on do you have do you have room right i look at all the town it ones and i'm like there's quite a few things on here right um so but that doesn't give me any indication of like yeah we can get through i just finished my point on that one right and the former auditor when you find one item that you sort of focus on and it doesn't make sense that item was supposed to be financed with debt no money had been borrowed yet for that item and it's included in the financing that just is getting done they're doing bonds but the bonds are just sold so they couldn't have spent 2.4 something million dollars because they didn't have the money um so i'm just saying that they could if they advance the money from the general fund right but there's a process for that that they have to go through a funnel so i'm just saying that may be the only one just because i knew from the background and i knew that they hadn't borrowed for it yet and you know when kelsey kept track of that and looked at the general ledger for that development project um she may have misunderstood kind of what was in there so whether there's issues with others in that lineup ultimately it comes back to what you just said at least that's a list of projects we can certainly if you said you want to consolidate questions have department heads prepared to you can either go back to kelsey and say have you you have a side set of notes right that talks about the actual physical completion and discussions you've had or we can alert the department heads when they're coming to meet with us that we appreciate them sort of giving some color um so but that they just that was my caution uh other than that it's a list that i think it's a good place to start so do we sorry i was going to say so with the capital one like 2.4 million as an example isn't that kind of a definitional issue i mean because i was looking at some of the uh stuff from the state in terms of um you know how committees like ours are supposed to perform and they actually have definitions of what's a capital project versus something that's non-capital seems like the library one would not not necessarily be a capital project the way that it's defined in the um capital improvement planning committee yeah maybe arlington one was pretty expensive it has to do this much spend this is the minimum it's not paid it's not it adds light to the to the term you get i think we talked about a lot of that last time it was it was a lot in that document defining what capital is right what was your brad what's your specific concern with the library improvement project well i guess if it's not if it doesn't fit the definition of a capital improvement but it's something that like you said it's it's financed separately is that what you said uh i was referring to the second water tank oh the second maybe second water tank yeah yeah the library one is the lower level mostly it's the lower level improvements which were pretty extensive when you're at the top there yeah the other one so she said like if it's paint but no but if it's paint included like a major reconstruction that it is so the first one's up 2.4 million yeah and the library improvements as kelly was said it did reconfigure inside the library the upgraded elevators yeah i i i feel like that constitutes capital i don't it wasn't just a uh yeah it wasn't just a fair small facelift right um well yeah i guess i guess maybe i'm not even i'm not going to be able to articulate it well but i thought there was something i've read said that if for instance if it's stuff um if it's finance through bonds or or borrowing then it doesn't necessarily fit the definition of a capital improvement it's it's a different sort of improvement because it's financially it's just handled separately or differently i may i may i may i may not i don't i may not be your typically yeah yeah yeah but capital improvements can be funded in many now okay yeah and arguably your biggest capital would have to be done with that right yeah so it's more as john said typically dollars and useful lives uh normal sort of measurement of whether it is or isn't but you will find some items that could be design funds or feasibility study funds that end up getting on the capital list because they're attached to a potential what would be a project as an example of you know i think there was a capital item two or three years ago high school wanted to invest in some math curriculum curriculum and found its way in through the capital budget as opposed to through the operating budget so as to whether this committee calls those things out over time that will be i presume things we have to talk about okay so i have one note i would make this one yeah it's a very long time to settle all of this but what i would say is if someone's requesting new capital and somehow the project name is overlapping they should have to defend why they're still open capital i think i think that could be a very right so if they're asking for more money to do um fine protection it doesn't really matter so you know why if you have an open project why are you asking for more money to do something similar like what is the system yeah i think i think you're right john i think it comes on a couple different flavors there are times that it has been intentional that there was going to be at the outset the project was broken into three pieces you know phase one phase two phase 38 we're going to request it in three different years right that was the plan all along and i think if you do that right at the outset the question is okay what constitutes the need right yeah it's in the plan but what needs to be done in phase one in order to start phase two is it you must spend all the money is it you must have spent a certain amount of money is it is it a progress milestone right like when we hit this milestone in the project that's when we approve the next phase i think that has to be done at the outset for anything new um and then in the case of we ran out of money right or the scope changed same thing you still have to do though like well why did we run out of money why did the scope change if for no other reason than from a learning perspective of what could we have done better right at the beginning and i think there's brian there's a few real good examples of projects that have happened like that over a number of years um and the question i always have is would the voters have approved the project had they known that it was going to cost two plus four plus five right when they voted on it originally right versus you got halfway through and you're pot committed and now you've got it now you've got to spend it and what as committee i feel like that is our responsibility try and prevent that as much as possible there are some things we can't circumstances happen i get it um but i think the goal should be you know we're trying to avoid that right we planned appropriately for the project we've budgeted appropriately for the project that we're not coming back for additional funding but in the meantime i agree with you and i've got my notes here on on what we need to ask for um i think anything that's on this list should be grouped you know by project up all the funding items that belong in the same project to the extent there's more than one and then we need additional information on actual status of the project not just how much money's left you know we used to do that in a way which if you had a project and you said okay just go change i mean any of the reasons you just wanted to add more money we would say that it's this project dash one so that it grouped it even though it wasn't meant to be it might be i mean this is account numbers there's no project numbers so yeah they don't to my knowledge don't use project numbers the one big spreadsheet i sent you i tried to institute something like that i did like a an abc like if you added to it it became you know abc so that you could connect them but so more complicated question yep how do we know all these projects are still approved so once town meeting has approved them they're approved but funding-wise it could get delayed or no it could say we had this approved we're not going to delay that project so the town has approved so the voters have approved this expenditure of the funds if i brian you can correct me if i'm wrong about this but my understanding is the decision on whether or not to spend those funds right or to halt the project would lie with the select board or the relevant board in question so that we have had situations where the town approved the use of funds for a particular project but something happened circumstances changed and we've halted a project um and in some cases even return the funds right maybe it was became obsolete it wasn't available like there were there have been that has occurred but as far as the tap that once the town meeting approves the project the funding theoretically exists it may require debt right and if you haven't issued the debt you have to have so funding approved but i'll say funding available correct yeah i asked sorry like the it projects are so old i mean either someone just quit or decided not to do it so the question i mean and it leads to that big questions so maybe it's not just a question for it it's a question that's like for itself have any of these projects been put on hold for something because there should be a whole status yeah i think covid covid put a whole bunch of projects on hold and um it's got i said that i mean most of that stuff has to be done via contract and contracts ultimately have to be executed and most contracts get executed by the town manager uh and some of them find their way up to the select board um and you know there have been plenty of times where select board might ask a question before they approve the assignment of contract money's approved but they have a rational question um sometimes it may be do we have enough to complete the project or maybe they're you know a good example is the infamous dam that it's yet to be built um all the money's not been approved the town to go to a loan but we're still trying to get we got a state grant we're trying to get the federal grant but it's unclear we may run out of time to spend other federal funds which goes back into why we that holds that yeah and so the town manager in front of the select board saying we're going to have to make a go no go decision and so that decision is going to be made at the select board um and there it's really just we pulled out waiting for the federal grant or we proceed not to that we change our mind about product but i'm sure over time there have been projects that turned out not to be needed and you know you point to i.t if there's an i.t project that's five years old three years old it's probably updated technology at this point and it's probably not enough money which is it goes back to my earlier comment about right when you approve a project if unless you approved it unless it was budgeted right knowing you weren't going to do it for a couple years and you included some incredible inflation in there right a lot of projects that got approved there isn't going to be enough money to do them in the way they were intended which means one of two things will happen right either the project will get scaled back right to fit within the budget or there'll be a subsequent request right for more money and again these are the things really as a committee i'd like to try and start to prevent right as much as possible i guess i guess that raises a question in my mind then you know our charge is supposed to be sort of uh capital projects going forward but you know say you take one that's from 2022 285 000 it's 51 percent complete are do we have any responsibility or should we have any responsibility to ask okay so what's up with that project and is it going forward or so i i think where our responsibility lies relative to that you guys are all free to to opine or disagree is if we're going to give more money to the it department in the five-year plan right can you actually achieve these projects in the years that they're slotted in if there's this many projects left like that's why this is important because if you've got a whole slog of projects and they're not done over a period of time i don't have a sense of what's your run rate how fast are you going to get you're just three years behind and you're always going to be three years behind or you're three years behind and you're catching up at a rate of you know two to one and therefore we can put more projects on but i don't think it's responsible from a taxpayer standpoint right to be adding more projects to the mix if they're not going to get done because again it goes back to that i'd like when i decide on a project right as a voter that i had a full picture of how much was going to get spent when it was going to get finished well i think that's the key part of this is that it worries me this is the debt service we're making assumptions on a capital plan based on how much debt we can have and how much money is available if someone decided to go execute those projects then debt service that wasn't as planned for we're trying to move into play a project that we were expecting it yeah so in the model that i is in that big spreadsheet i have all these slotted in probably as they're going to get issues as debt or as early as possible so they are in the in the projection the thing is they might ultimately end up pushing out um but they are in there but that was an issue when i first came on fincon was like oh here's the debt schedule that's the stuff that's already been bonded and here's the stuff we're asking for but there was a piece in the middle that was missing that was projects that were approved but not bonded yet um so that's in there now um but it's it's important so the bonds they're just doing out of for example um or with respect to projects approved two years ago town meeting and it's passed them as an example but i look at it at 17 there's no reason if that came up and i was supposed to be bonded saying well we could slip in there correct yeah i mean again most most of the folks and again they go through this i think we talked about this at one meeting closing out capital and then largely as projects actually are billing but there's money left appropriation left and so you can ultimately grab that back and you apply it to other projects but presumably and that's generally uh that that's led an effort led by the finance director presumably while he's going through that he's trying to ferret out are there projects that are just never going to happen because you could then clock right now once it's appropriated my guess is most department heads are not going to really want to say it's never going to get done and so that's something that you know we should we should pick a few examples perhaps in it maybe one of them uh and it's you know we have a new it director so he's not going to know about you know he may know about those projects but he i just i i do think it's going going to be difficult for us to only get a piece of it i mean if this is a partnership with finance i think this gives us more ability to push back with an asset status and say well close these let's move with new ones right because i assume it's not a priority that i have to write again as all the things that are on that list i'm assuming so i do mean it's not a big list and i just it it's to me it seems like a fundamental thing that has to get done how do they know what they're going to do if they don't even know what's happening to these projects and you just raised a good point which you could also add to this um is what the funding source big group funding source was so it's helpful to kind of understand where the money was supposed to come from um and i can add if it was actually if it was dead if it had been issued yet yeah okay so i think this will be our sort of starting guideline for when we're talking to departments having i think it is an important almost first step to talk about the projects they currently have what the status is and i'll see first if kelsey already has it so that we can not waste time if it already exists but if it doesn't i do think that that's something we want to be able to do with the fundamental as we're deciding on additional projects yeah yeah where you'll find this you go to the town website yep select board webpage yep on the right side you see the agendas down there's a june 16 agenda item 25 and then there's two or three entries one of which is supplemental packet and that's very important i can send out a link to it too after school
any other comments on on that before we move on to the next agenda item i don't got some notes for kelsey but i'll check in with her
and i'll just move um and i didn't look exhaustively but the uh the design funds for the mwra hookup margin were found on this list that funding was not two years ago that funding was not included in the five-year capital plan this past year the extra funding was so so again i there's still possible a project the first of the original design funds come from no that was for the emergency hookup okay the uh the first the initial design funds was part of the yeah it was a capital budget i guess they both were in the capital but it was over a two-year period so i just wasn't sure why that wasn't i'm sure it didn't have been really and it was so large it's been held off and that's an example unfortunately it's on the front end two years ago when that first came to town meeting to get permission to go through the process of the mwra the estimate for the project was 14 to 22 million and then it was up to 34 million and then due to some additional contingency
funding we're hoping to get it's now up to 38.5 million so as kelly would say you'd rather want to know that before you go down but you can see over just a two-year period of time it's a wildly escalating cost and hopefully it's settled down at this point all right anything else i'm going to raise on on that and i know you just got into it liz so i'm sorry no no i i guess through is tom coming no not tonight okay yeah because we're not we're not hybrid tonight so okay i didn't want him to have to come and i also because this is our first time looking at any of these felt it was better if we got our our ducks in a row figured out what we want to ask and also give him the chance to if we have questions i can send them to him in advance and give him a chance to get his answers together versus just doing it on the spot yeah so this goes to the uh i'm sorry you're talking about the next it tops yeah and i'm going out of order than no no that's what we're going next yeah i just want to make sure there was nothing else on the wasn't wasn't labeled terribly well if you're referencing the fact that there were side-by-side columns and approved or requested or whatever is that what you're referring to um this is a dbw request yeah the dbw so there's a couple of days before how is it going to be funded loans for everything not necessarily no but so when that so let me back up when when the departments ask they do not know where the funding source for the money it's going to be that is typically brian keveney as finance director takes the pass of like hey where is where should this come from um so we don't ask the departments to do that because that's kind of beyond their scope um but your question is that each of tom's request so that it was in the budget or that it is yeah we'll quote it was in the budget but it was being financed by a lot or there might be uh you know sometimes it was general law yeah so that's what i want to talk so in in these forms right so i think i told you guys early on in the meeting i don't like the form that we use yeah um i don't think that in fact i mean the the time managers said he doesn't like it would like to discontinue using it so part of what i want to talk about is what's the actual information that we need from the department heads in order to evaluate requests versus what they're giving us yes there's a funding source section but my my instruction when i first joined fincom was to ignore that because the departments don't actually know where the money's going to come from and that ultimately comes from brian keveney so i ignore that section in their cips what i'm usually looking for is the actual description of what the project is the project just description and justification um and then after that the dollars and when they're planning they're asking for it usually though they're only filling out the cip form the form itself for the next year's projects and then they're slotting in um just project names and amounts for anything beyond the next year so it's it's pretty limited so i this is not finance is my area of expertise um and what i would hope we've got a few people on the committee perhaps that have more expertise in like what are what are the typical things that you would want to see in in a form and i i'm going a little bit out of order because i said we talked about dbw and talked about the form but i think they couldn't go hand-to-hand so we can probably do them a little bit at the same time what time one um first first is that fiscal 25 to yeah yeah yeah no so what we're looking at we're looking at the form yeah so i would look at yeah so the one i'm looking at is the mac is the first project he has is the number 40 back slot loader dump truck i picked on the nwra oh yeah if you went to the biggest one well because it says yes it's in the capital plan well and this is so problem number one when the department head is answering they've asked for it before that doesn't mean it made it into the warrant and so when we ultimately when fincom ultimately puts together the warrant i would if i were doing it i would change that to
well i would change it to no except if i'm putting it in the warrant we would have updated the capital plan to put it in um so okay i guess it is in the approved capital well again if you look at the warrant there's a table that is a bunch of numbers above the line there are numbers that the fincom and ultimately approved for recommendation at town meeting and there's a few lines below that upper section of that table that reference potential projects that are funded through separate articles because they're okay yeah one-a-kind very large and so in this case we're talking about the mwra we purposely put a line item before it put tbd as to the amount because it has a range and it's changing and there was a difference of opinion on the fincom as to whether that meant it was in the five-year capital plan or not we didn't vote the amount of money when we took our vote on the five-year plan that's all interesting and that's what the fincom has historically done i think this group presumably has to come to its own decision on what is it going to put forth as a five-year and ultimately longer capital plan and should things be in or out and i think when we get around another agenda and talk about other communities and reports you know to me we should put request for information here that will ultimately make our job more efficient and easier and if ultimately i'm not sure we're going to get there this year um due to timing but if ultimately our plan is as recommended by that capital planning document you sent out and as appears in some of those reports if the goal is to develop a set of objective i can't develop an objective criteria it'd be nice to kind of you know have that criteria at least from a department head standpoint filled out we could then decide ourselves as we you know hear it described and some of this so some of the information here probably is part of that criteria but i don't think it's all in there i agree and um i look like the cat is all the canary it's because i totally agree yeah my i i think that what we are requesting from the departments should be strictly the information necessary to make a decision which the criteria has to be a part of making that decision because otherwise i don't know how like how we prioritize so that's what's important you know that's what i think is important to be in what we're getting from from the departments i'm less concerned with them knowing or filling out was it in the capital plan before right to me that's the committee's job to know whether it was in the plan before right what was approved um so i'm completely with you i think that's where we ultimately need to end up whether or not we can get there this year is going to be a challenge right and i brian and i had a conversation earlier just for this year i think we're going to have to reduce expectations to probably not a whole lot more than what has been done in the past but laying out what are the things that as soon as we get done with that right we're looking to improve for going forward i just given that the short time frame we're going to have we're not going to be able to boil the ocean here and fix um you know all of this but i think i like that we're thinking about it now before we have all the capital right so that we can we can be ready to implement that afterwards and it's something you can set um that that's where we go we can set that expectation with department heads as we even have a town manager just saying once we get yeah take care of the next 30 days or whatever um we're going to spend some amount of time on the process and etc and just just stay tuned because you're part of that what's it's interesting because you know some of them i'm assuming uh the requests are pretty straightforward it's probably like a lump sum amount for a piece of equipment or a truck or something like that although even even that is going to have maintenance issues but when i look at the big one like this mwra it says consortium 38 million but then they check off things like um will it additional um will it request personnel impact personnel and they said no i mean how can that be i mean if you're going to be doing a capital project there has to be some sort of ongoing personnel cost um and it's just one lump sum number 38 million i don't know how we one year for one year and i don't know how we're supposed to assess whether that's reason or not when we know that there's a lot that goes into there's design costs there's architectural costs there's construction costs and then iron dollar costs and if none of that is broken out how are we supposed to assess right assess that now we're in particular is by watching a whole bunch of meetings over the last two years have taken place yeah and um again out of all the projects we're going to be asked to assess in the next 30 days unfortunately that's the largest one and again i think we're going to have to do we review our role as to that project in the next 30 to 60 days because it's on its own it's been on its own glide path and equally i think we have to make a decision um are we are we de novo reviewing uh 27 28 9 30 or are we accepting the fact that that the thing that the old process including the fincom's recommendation to town meeting sort of blessed those already and unless there so if someone comes in and says okay i have the same number that was in the plan and it's now in my little form here so you're going to tell me you're going to be reopening and looking at that again i think we just need to decide how are we going to be doing that or for this cycle are we just going to say let's just focus on substantive changes within those four years and then really spend time on kind of the fifth year but everybody may have their own opinion on that yeah i i think we have to focus most heavily on the first year right and we do have to give a little bit on a little bit extra on the next year just because to the extent and maybe just all the changes because to the extent the changes are significant that's going to have a real budget impact um and obviously the the fifth year being added in so i think it's going to have to be for this year it's probably going to have to be a change analysis like okay how much changed dollar wise and why um and is it you know yeah the dollar amount stayed the same but the 20 projects i had before are 19 different projects right i think that we've got to do a little bit of due diligence on why right it changed and how reliable this process is right if it changed significantly from one year to the next so this kind of goes to my earlier comment and maybe it's just easy but in none of the tags did it indicate there are any prior funds and we'll you know since we're picking on the you know the mwra tab you know in the comments below more details it says early design which would seem to indicate their previous funds spent on it that were captured here but they're not the priority yeah and then the other thing is the flip side so things are going to extend like what they often do you know how are we capturing to say okay we initially need five million then you know they're free and then you know we don't just need more cost tbd until we do phases one and two we don't have a better clarity with that so i think when we talk about how we can make this more informative so we're making comprehensive decisions it's yeah tell me what you spent today and i don't know if there's a way to capture that it sounds like we don't uniquely the way i've done it for the warrant as i've gone back through prior warrants and pulled it out um which is not effective yeah um but it it so there's at least two problems with what the current process is right one is not everything you need is here two is there's some things in here actually there's three yeah there's things here that you don't need that aren't filled out correctly right and so you wasted time is wasted putting something together it's not going to use um and then the third is there are legitimate things already on the form that aren't filled out that are needed right so it's you're not you're not in compliance with what's here and the form isn't getting at what we necessarily really need so that's a great example is of mwra yes money has been approved it's not in the prior debate column money will be spent right for um operating costs but there's no indication of what that right what that means money resources will be spent in order to implement a project of this size how much of those resources are included in the project cost versus how much of that is resources that are existing town resources and that's a really important distinction because you've got an owner's project manager in the 38 million okay you funded that right that in theory that resource is going to be available because you're paying for it but how many people in the dpw and in town manager's office are going to need to devote x number of hours to getting the contracts executed in order to be able to do this and how many other projects do they have to do within their day is that feasible so it's all of those things none of which are captured here right one more thing i think you could say try at least putting uh you know bogey guess it says increased cost for water what is that monthly increase is it annually increase and semi-annually at the moment soon become quarterly about but how much so so we when we're thinking about and we might not have any i can answer your questions but but but i think your point is well taken that for those for those of you that haven't made it part of your life to track that particular project unfortunately i had to um you know you're looking at this so on i really there's a lot i don't know about this and that answers that's correct from the dpw's perspective they believe more than enough people have been tracking this project and we're just yet one more as i heard them say when there were some meetings we're just getting another stop along the way that i'm sure they would prefer not to have to spend any energy getting us up to speed on the project that said i don't think this committee should um deny itself the opportunity uh i would shouldn't vote it for this committee to exist so tell me i would encourage just because it's available i would encourage on that project specifically that if you go to the dpw website you have a separate tab just for this project there's a bunch of information there you could read you could you just had a recent public um so i would say it's not just this specific example yeah this is my example well yeah in this example there's other instances really saying across the grow up costs it's going to go down but there's no that's it okay well i'm talking i mean it gets back to like we were talking about the you know the uh the senior center and how nobody thought to include maintenance costs you know so it's just what is this ongoing cost help us understand yeah and make sure that they're doing the exercise to think about it yeah and listen i understand right that this you know this is on its own fly path right and has been but the expectation both as a resident and a member of the committee that that information should be able to be summarized in one page in order to be submitted right so that we can make a decision and then communicate that to the town because i know there's all kinds of meeting right there's all kinds of meeting notes and there's all kinds of summaries but at the end of the day right it goes to town meeting and it has to get explained in a relatively brief period at town meeting and so we ought to be able to get it in that format right yeah i don't know if they started they have to this is going to be dealt with a separate article not through the capital budget is the intention and as a result they're going to draft a warrant article in the next 30 to 60 days that one article probably has to be you know more than three pages and that's going to effectively be what you just described yeah i know that said which is all the reason that could that information could be yeah they could do it now and provide that to us and again using it as an example um if there are other i think you're going to there's questions with it yes it will involve our cost or some savings could be nice to then quantify that and say correct here's how much yes and why um we say be nice but we were asking for 30 million dollars i think it was a requirement yeah that they give the details as painful as it is to do for the 19th time however right i don't know the other side of this process right yes just you know what you just give me the money i think that's but unfortunately right like are there costs are there savings it has to be more than yes yes there's you know what are you expecting and then maybe there's a threshold but it's great with this you have to report it right i have a hard time believing you're going to go from a four facility to one and not impact personnel like that huge red flag in my mind right it doesn't mean you're not going to deploy them for this project but is that what's happening yes and when is that going to happen right so there's 27 yeah well i will say on that in order to proceed with a project with the construction of a project generally you have to the town has to have approved the whole amount so and they will likely go out and bond it right and i mean i think part of this discussion is we're not trying to correct her past behaviors we're just trying to look forward and say okay how can we make this better and that's kind of the i know what i have to fill out my request investment for my company and then you know kind of block finance through okay this is how i'm going to use those funds so to ask the town to do that yeah again i i i think telling these could this be the first question of tom holder right just because of sheer magnitude yeah um i'm just preparing you for the they'll do it but because they have to do it anyway produce the warrant article but um you know it's it's it's it's been difficult along the process just because doing anything through the municipal process in multiple committees is just difficult and frustrating and i'm sure they've told their story enough times but again yeah i heard him say oh there's just another i i understand it brian but the bottom line is right this this project right eats a lot of capacity so it by definition has to have that that additional level of scrutiny and i understand how hard missful how hard it is to do projects municipalities but we haven't spent this much money on a project right what since we've built the high school right so it is warranted and it has it has real concrete costs for operating not just to the resident in the terms of their own water rates but to the town because we use water as a function of the town right so there's a cost there there's an operating impact from the change right in the use of the existing wells to remember what that takes for people they have it it just it should be right again i i'm just i'm just yeah i don't really want to be offended by your fellow citizens and your town staff when for sure but i think the point is if that keeps happening that goes to the very point that the forums would be completely because if the forum had the information that we're all asking for they're going to have to explain themselves they may have to offend it that's and i completely understand i think it's because it's not being documented properly which kind of goes back to your original point or discussion of what do we need to do with the forum either in terms of getting compliance with the forum or adding additional information and i think i think compliance with the forum would be better if there was completely overhaul right which is it's it's asking for stuff you know if i'm tom holder and i see the section on you know funding services like i don't know i'll just check one like how would you know that that that one again i think we've talked about it um i alerted folks because part of our decision process ultimately is um funding capacity and in particular debt funding capacity and there's been an ongoing debate over the course of the last six months anyway as to whether the town through taxation should bear some or all of the cost the price of 30 billion project versus putting all or some of it on water increases in the waterways ultimately most of the same people pay for it but not necessarily it's not identical yeah and that's ultimately that's within the selectors purview because ultimately they're going to have to make a decision on whether or not to bring this forward as a dead exclusion question of the town or use a special power that they have to themselves have some or all that put on taxation and if they chose i don't think they're going to do it but if they chose to put all 38 million on the towns back through taxation the annual debt service on that is a million eight or two million dollars a million eight i think after the first year that a million eight heating up capacity that you know as we look at over the next five ten fifteen twenty years is going to impact what other projects potentially have done so we may look at that and say well we understand we don't know part of the process to make that final decision but if we were far enough long we won't be if we were looking out for the next 10 15 years we see a potential new elementary school and we're going to need to fund it there may be one or two other that that changes the answer right it changes the answer on everything right this project changes the answer on the vast majority potentially of what is going to come in front of us correct and and i've seen other communities where the select board used it's not going to use it with special authority because they can change their mind each year and so they might start out saying they will put 100 on the tax taxpayers taxation but then a new school comes down the road three four years and they need the they need the firing capacity for it so they make the decision to undo that and push it back on the waterways and i think arlington actually did that so there's a whole separate debate but you know one we're not going to have the long-term information we need to put that or any of these other projects in that context this first go around and that's unfortunate because you know we're left not really knowing what what's coming because they have collected that information yet right so i think again i think not only for that specific project but for the purposes of at least this initial year making sure there's at least some information that they should have given us that they haven't you know we should push back and say please give us the information um and um and then again i don't think we're we're going to get to fixing the forms until no but we're not but it's it's what's what's critical to me when i look at when i look at this right now that i i want to know right i want to know what the operating costs are i want to know or savings or savings and i want to know the resources that are going to be utilized right how much of the resources are within that 38 million and how much our existing town resources and what departments right and how long do i think they're going to be tied up for right on one of my main beefs on this form is the funding is being requested in 2027 i understand that and i understand we have to approve the funding when do we think we're going to be done with this how long is it going to type like that span how we just talked about status of existing projects i don't have anything to judge whether or not they're on schedule or not on schedule because there was never a schedule for any of them right there is it's just not it's not been disclosed and i'm using it as an example so i don't want to get fixated too much on mwra it's an example on all of these not just mwra right yeah so maybe one thing to consider is some it might make sense for us that threshold of you know this is i don't have two farms but it could be like additional criteria that require any passion threshold for a hundred thousand dollar fiber connection we probably don't need all that detail the resources become less impactful and so i'm used to having essentially a form but i mean past professional you have to ask this extra tab of questions yeah it's true you're on a venture there's an if then yeah and something i do think i mean this this is the worst case of them all right so i think we're missing the assumptions like what are your assumptions and to your point right if if we're saying water cost is potential in this particular example because they chose to write it down that should say currently what is the current water house like it should just be part of the how much is your anything it should be aligned in there including we shouldn't have to look at them somewhere else um it shows that they understand what they're actually asking for the impact of that versus someone coming to put it in the water and we don't know we're picking on this but i think having an understanding what those numbers mean what's the basis for it would be important to your point you know i mean it probably is a different tab for fte like it's probably just an fte tab on the form it doesn't you put too much in one form right you have cost and i'm used to seeing capital expense and fte in the form because while it would all be capitalized that doesn't mean to your point you said earlier it could be expense items for we're paying a contractor to do it paying a pm to do it those aren't those aren't going to be construction costs those are going to be essentially expenses we're paying the town permitting costs and we tend to break them up differently it doesn't matter in the town because we don't appreciate it the same way but it still would be probably more relevant to understanding where the money's going and the phasing of it so i have a question about this too and again we can't can't really use mw or as an example this is too large but for a lot of the uh requests that they fill out um i suspect that some of the things they asked for um i don't want to necessarily call it a wish list but do they need it this year can it be deferred for a year can be between is there a prioritization to to request and i'm not sure if they're asked to do that no so that goes back to i think what brian mentioned earlier and what i've talked about before which is the criteria right but and it was in the guide from the state right right um but my extension of that is right you we need it because right it's a health and safety issue okay what happens if the project has to be put off a year right and obviously health and safety don't necessarily want to put off but is it i'm going to use a vehicle as an example put it off a year i'm going to have you know additional maintenance costs potential downtime that's going to impede the completion of road maintenance right what what are the what are the implications of pushing it off and in previous years on income i've never had for most things unless we specifically asked a good understanding of what's going to happen if we say no right we one year brian mentioned after covet but we just said yep everything that's on the schedule for this year will basically if it's not imminent you know issue it's got to get pushed off a year because we've got so many things in backlog i can't say we have a great understanding when we did that of what the implications we're going to be pushing off but i think that's part of that criteria that we need to be asking for right yeah what's that risk if you don't right it's the cost benefit right like yeah one of the problems with that is i'm kind of speaking against myself is that any department is going to say we're all priority ones i have to have all right or are they going to be honest and say well no this this can actually be deferred you know whatever yeah and i guess i'm not looking for them to say it's it's priority one or it's it can be deferred i'm asking for the narrative like what are the actual implications of deferral right we're going to have a real life example this building is in the five year and it's not in the five year plan it was an award as it got pulled out and put in one of the uh articles down below but in any event the facilities manager i'm sure will come forward and say i need my five and a half million to do a bunch of things and other things in this building um and um he said he got through it with the high school wastewater facility the issue pops back up because there's a request in there which we'll talk about at some point and it again it wasn't as i mentioned last week wasn't in a four five year plan because it got pulled because they were hopeful to do it less costly so it had been a five and a half million it's now four and a half but three five current they've combined two different projects um together so it's conceivable if we looked at all this and before asking the question what happens to be deferred if if we say do we really need to do this wastewater thing in high school in fiscal 27 and they may say yeah the dp says we have to do it and then we talk to the facilities director and say do you really need to put the new roof on this building what happened if you don't said it's going to leak and it's going to cost us under two thousands of dollars and then you got this 38 million dollar project so the problem is we're going to have potentially 38 million for the mwra five and a half million for this building and right now there's four and a half million in here for the combination of the septic for the septic facility um work around and they combine it with athletic fields um because there's a they want to go with a traditional leaching field and then since they're going to be putting it where the athletic fields are they figured if we combine the two projects and that may make sense to combine the project i just don't know how much each costs so that would be the kind of thing we need to kind of pull up but to your point if we say well the dp saying we have to do that the facility or deal with it some way does that mean we say well we've got to put off this building improvements for another year and then we just got to drill down and say you know are we really at risk of issues those are the biggest of all the items i've seen so far and what i've anticipated those are the three biggest items that we're going to be dealing with and not to say we need we don't need to look at all of them through a different prism but those are going to flush out a lot of these um fundamental info requests right it's it's a good point though brian right those are the three biggest and most seemingly most immediate so they're the ones we need to ask to spend the most amount of time and ask questions on it it will flush out the rest of it i just when you start to say them out loud it's like well i think we just cross off everything else because i don't know you're going to have left right and there's risk just political decisions that because there's political risk of to vote because those will all go to the ballot they'll each be their own debt exclusion question potentially and what a voter will know yeah i agree and i think i think it's a great point i think we we already know those are big ones that look like you have to deal with them let's deal with them because i think the phasing of 39 to change very quickly what that means for 27 or 28. i think i would change what you said versus what would cost to defer because that's why everyone's making you the skies on right what i would suggest is what is the current maintenance cost yeah what is the expected whatever time from your state cost if we don't do it instead of because otherwise you're saying it's just it's just a human response that you said i can't deal with right so it's more just and you say okay well it's 300 if we do nothing great we know what that costs we can make a decision i think to your point this is just a year it should have a start date and an end date like an actual pick date i don't know why we make it it's a budget year but it should say we plan on putting resources on january 3rd if approved and this is our end date because i mean you don't see that anywhere in here it just says budget a year yeah there's no milestone yeah it can't be any earlier than july 1st of right right that particular fiscal year but you say that but this very mwra budget clearly is because it must be well i have to add prior appropriations to cover yeah which doesn't build out design right right it wouldn't just you wouldn't know it yeah but if you just read this it says yes construction starts in 27 well then clearly a lot of work happening before you say what what's the earliest date you think you could begin spending the process and again if we have what is this point you have prior funding prior sources of funding yeah but that's also important because we've seen this happen before too right we approve something at town meeting we anticipate that it's going to end up in the next bond issuance and they don't get far enough right with contracting and it doesn't end up in that bond issuance that ends up in the next one that may have changed your decisions about when you slated things right um in in your progression of what was approved so it's i it's to me and we're not going to be there for a while it's a milestone point right it's a it's a high level milestone plan right when are you going to start spending right when are you know when you expect to be right at a whatever ground broken right the various milestones big that are dependent on the type project i mean you said your husband's on the permanent building i suspect they had this conversation many a time well so one of the other things it maybe it's not on this form i would think another thing is i have to tell them to spend the money so when you're 8 million you probably probably will spend it all in one year but i would think you could say you know i'm going to spend 10 the first year 15 what what i think it would be big to do when this kind of tracks to the pool how are we doing on projects how are we executing like we plan to or you just have a giant hockey stick at the end where all of a sudden we're going to spend you know we spend four we're going to spend the last you know 34 million all in the last you know does it make sense or it might be another way to keep people well it does it does matter right so when you're asking what the project is you know the approval is going to happen in year one right but the spend plan matters because you wouldn't necessarily do the bond issuance shouldn't do the bond issuance for the entire project up front because i know but that's what we do it right we shouldn't right yeah so the form none of our companies do that none of our companies issue bonds for things that we're not going to spend for years again there's theoretically penalties and maybe maybe that 30 million you know 32 of it's all hardware we do plan to spend you know that much money up front but it just seems like that would be part of the explanation and maybe again brian i'm going to go read up on all the documentation and history on this and get well versed in what you know makes up that 30 but yeah well with this form i mean as the form states right now it's kind of a misnomer that section says expenditure schedule it's really this form is the way they populate it at the moment is really appropriation schedule yeah so that's the fiscal 27 is if there's a number there that's the year in which the funds are voted and approved attend meeting yeah but that's not i mean so maybe there needs that needs to be there because you need to know when it's going to be brought out to kind of meeting or what budget they wanted in and then you need a then you need a an actual expenditure schedule project schedule it could just be two different sets that makes you a part of the other capital projects it's not going to be part of appropriation it's already an appropriate but it will be part of your spending yeah but like i'll point to like if the navy builds a ship they get approval for whatever billions of dollars it's going to take to build that ship but then each year they'll have the annual budget that goes into okay this is what we're you know perfect yeah yeah so i just feel like i mean again we're spending 120ks of repair growth okay we probably don't need it but it fits into here's your additional task where you need to go and really flush out what you're going to do with those funds that you're going to manage non-appropriately most of these things are absent something strange happening most of these do get spent in the fiscal year yeah as shown here you buy a truck it's done well but we were i mean that's not true either though i mean yeah i mean we just looked at a list of many things that were appropriated and not spent and maybe this is basically some of them maybe change the form of basic matter just as we go through them i mean i'm not suggesting we're cooking here but it'd be someone else's the appropriation year you don't need any of this and this is your spend schedule like this is true because all they really are asking is what is my appropriation year yeah yeah yeah it's two different questions right it's total amount total cost project appropriation year which is a single little bit for each and then there's a spend schedule and then funding sources i don't think asking how it would be paid for is the right question i think um for the department heads it's it's are there any other sources of funds right outside of right it's are there grants are there it's it's trying to ascertain right outside of taxation do you have any other ways to pay for this um and then they're a lot of them are very good at looking for that stuff they are but one of the problems we've had in the past brian is that there's been a the request of the net request right and there's no you guys kind of tease out what the other money was we've had we've had issues in the past of they were counting on a certain amount of money from another source the money didn't come through and then they come back so the understanding of the full cost of the project is always it should always be what's the full cost of the project how much are you looking for an appropriation for which can be two different answers right because we've gotten we've gotten jammed up on that on fincon before right um just for informational purposes just because i have family else doing watch meetings um we have the dbd for us they voted at their last meeting uh believe their vote was that any capital expenditure greater than fifty thousand dollars needs to be funded with borrowing unless for public works folks do it differently so most of their projects generally have been funded with borrowing but they've been having issues where the finance director changed some of their assumptions that they're going to be borrowed and he's put them in as being funded through water rates water revenues or water retained earnings unbeknownst to the board of public works so in reaction to that they've now put a process and now trying to land on top of the town manager the finance director so that that potential will impact us as we again we may have a view if we're going to be evaluating water and who does the borrowing for is the silk slumber does the borrowing for yeah they have to sign off on the volumes just a general question on how costs work rents for the town so can we just put everything on loan like like here's your credit card but here's your loan and then we just pay off the loan not everything so each year apparently there might be a million and a half to two million dollars a year of quote free cash that's utilized to pay projects which is basically operating under spend from prior years okay so like the town i think she wasn't here for taxes yeah the town generally isn't allowed right to spend beyond the budget right so the plan is always you know as you're getting close to the end of the year you gotta scale back and come in under so there typically is funds left over hopefully right that go into the general fund that are known as free free cash and so there's a piece of capital that gets we use free cash to do a piece of it we do um debt as we talked about there are some funds from the ambulance funds so revenues from the ambulance we typically use that to pay for things in the fire department um police department and communication center there is cpa leftover capital so surplus you know we appropriated that list we saw right some of those projects are basically done there's a little bit left we have that capital we can use so the only things that hit tax right now are debt um or what we used to do is we used to have at least a little bit we used to do roads from what we call cash capital which is just to say it's not debt we're going to put you know six hundred thousand dollars on the operating budget right that will fund the road projects and that hit tax but we haven't been doing that for the last several years so but there's limited limited sources right either you're straight up are hitting you're straight up hitting the budget right dollar for dollar or you're doing it as debt right i think maybe if i understand correctly there's also sometimes a delay we may have enough operating cash to pay it to your point a credit card but not really and that issue the bond at a later date so there is some flow in there yeah we're using the general we're basically we're using the general fund there is there is some cases where like oh we've got the budget the budget approved we're starting on the project but we're not going to do the debt issuance until february so they'll use funds to start the project and then technically they're supposed to borrow an interim basis yes so they can use excess funds in the general fund but only through june 30th and then they have to be repaid correct um you know whether in fact people just have shortcut that and there's a form that has to be filled out and the subcord has to approve the form it has to be sent no i don't think they've shortcut it i think they're just doing it within the year i'm not talking about no if it's within the year there's a form that has to be completed the subcord has to sign all has to be sent to dor and i'm not sure i've ever seen you've never seen that done i've never seen the formal part done okay all right i i when you look at munis like the one we were talking about before the second water tank when you look at munis it had a negative under the project capital account that had a negative which meant that the funding hadn't been put in that account yet and yet if it's a negative something that's spent and so my guess is that there are occasions where they're just taking money out of the general fund yeah that's something without doing it the formal way um and it's not supposed to happen in a way so but that's a question we can ask brian kelly we can ask brian that he's now very up to speed on the formal part because that's that was a big discussion um around the current financing plan um but anyway the bulk of particularly larger things to generally get done with okay that's not the charter for this group are we working to build more revenue so that's all passes that's all there's a different set of the eggs yeah
development actually the council on aging not the building the new one i guess we should bring it out we we were supposed to rent it out but i attempted to ask that question and was told that we're waiting until we understand the council on aging's use of the building but when that was pitched to the town we'll pull it worn up when it was pitched it was pitched as a council on aging and community center with space right that could be used that could be reserved about an event i wanted to have but you might have another route um but you're welcome to go to the select yeah okay i've written down a bunch of notes on the things that that folks have mentioned um as far as specific and we can do this a couple different ways right if you guys want to we can talk about it um but if you want to send me right without copying everybody your questions any specific questions you have on specific projects that i can give to tom holder to prepare in advance but i will let you know kind of generally what we're you know what our general lines of thinking are about what we want to know um but if you have specific questions that would be helpful are you going to write up the questions that you're going to ask him so we can not redone ask those to you oh yeah you don't need to yeah you don't need to regurgitate what we just talked about in terms of but will we see a copy of those questions so i can send you a copy i'll put you guys all in one copy right so that we're not responding um to each other but yeah are you uh done tighter i have only three um yeah sure so under the just again one point of clarification for everybody the dpw excel sheet um just so you're aware the sort of the white column or the first column of each fiscal year is what's in the five-year plan it was they didn't warrant the gray column is what they're now requesting yep and until you get out to fiscal 31 31 which is a gray column which really should be a white column i'm sorry did you get that backwards in the blue column
yeah yeah okay yeah the one at the very right is is the request there was no um yeah there was the fiscal very one wasn't because there wasn't anyway yeah on the transfer station in 27 um one question i have is uh there's a there's some money in the budget the transfer station enterprise fund to have a study done on town white beverage pickup and my understanding is that's starting to come to life and get going and my question would be does it make sense to spend any money um on a new garage replacement for we have that study completed and people have determined whether they want to keep frank's position open or not um so that's one even though it was in the five-year plan that that'd be an example of one where i'd say maybe that one could wait yeah um second one is the that big item um under the dpw uh four and a half million dollars as i was referring to before
so the original estimate was five and a half million just for the high school to basically rebuild what's there uh that got pulled away looking at a more traditional reaching field concept and um in the the non-five-year plan portion of the table there's in fiscal 29 there's a point and a half million dollar number and that point i play about the dollar number was made up of two million dollars for the high school football turf field probably getting redone the high school tournament yeah the football field the one this the artificial turf the one that we just read it uh as we've done a while ago the past two years no like three years ago yeah i'm pretty sure that's what it was for or stadium it said stadium i'm assuming that's the stadium but anyway that four and a half million in that article in that section was for that and two and a half million of that was for uh doing something with the high school baseball fields reconfiguring renovating whatever and as i mentioned before it turns out that where they think it makes no sense to put the more traditional leaching field is where those baseball fields either completely are portion are yeah and so if someone has decided i'm not saying a bad idea that if they're going to be disturbing that area to put an underground leaching field in whatever whatever does it make sense to advance from fiscal 29 to fiscal 27 if you ask for the money to redo the athletic fields what i don't know is if we didn't do that and all we did was the traditional leaching field solution um of the four and a half million let's be asked how much is that versus if you could break that apart yeah that's basically like one is a finish and one's regrade like one's a two different time and then i had one other oh the other but if they right but if they if they put leaching build them they they they have to renew the field like the field will need to get renewed yeah that's what i'm saying i'm sure there's logic i'm sure there's logic to to it um but um but it'll be interesting to see 250 for a video but now it's a million dollars for a review or if the two and a half million official 29 turns out now to be three and a half million for some reason yeah i'd kind of like to know that um so just for now just splitting the number apart um so we can yeah so we're splitting apart the two and a half piece we're splitting apart the four and a half million ask in fiscal 27 between the wastewater and the athletic field okay did i did i the other four and a half i was referring to is in the table for fiscal 29 there's a four and a half million number which is two million for the high school stadium oh and two and a half million was their estimate for what it would cost okay so there's four and a half million of fields in fiscal 29 at the moment at the moment and there's four and a half million for or two and a half million for this project well i don't know of the four and a half million here how much is just wastewater okay yeah yeah and are they simply pulling forward the two and a half million yeah baseball diamonds from fiscal 29 i don't see it in the schedule no if you look at it's not it's not on their schedule but why would it have been in the original plan schedule well it's again it's unfortunately very because the fields are probably in if you have your warrant that there's because the fields are probably in facilities schedule yeah well it was under it was under the section for separate articles and not in the five-year plan and it was excluded borrowing four and a half million fiscal 29 i had to go back dig deep into the detail itself especially to be sure that that four and a half was um and you don't see the high school stadium here because that's the approved plan that was excluded so it was well it wasn't the fin town didn't approve those articles they included it in the table it's i don't agree with it it's the if it's going to be an article we put it down below the line and i at least for our purposes like the plans the plan yes it's going to have to be right we're going to vote on what the plan is and then when it ultimately goes to the town there's chunk of it that's going to go as here's the list of capital projects and there's a few projects that are going to be by themselves but in my mind we've got to talk about the whole right the whole universe is one thing not well you're going to vote on that separately they're going to vote on all of them it's just how it gets separated i don't i've never liked that but i guess and they go back to their plan that it should still be in here or something even though it was voted separate right well the town doesn't actually vote on the five-year plan yeah town doesn't vote the five-year plan but they voted a plan and then they separately list the projects that they know are coming up that they think are going to be separate articles and they layer that at the bottom so will they consider those approved or unapproved well the departments view them as approved so when you read the description what does the town consider them as to be what what fincom considers them as yeah they're just they're on the radar screen yeah so they're to be watched they're not approved right yeah and so the we don't have the school stuff yet but in the um school request last year and in that in this separate article line the two million was described as way of high school phase three stadium profits so it may not be the term no it's not the term phase phase three was the one no it was supposed to be the the baseball fields that was the phase that was the phase that got left off when they when they moved the soft they moved the softball fields to the back they moved the football field over the third phase is supposed to be the baseball field so maybe there's a duplication because the other the other two and a half that i was referring to was under the recreation dpw uh section at least that from a request standpoint it was described as developed rectangles where jv varsity were so maybe maybe there so maybe that's a question right is you had these in your requested but they're not yet a hell of a worthy approval but at least in the future years how much of that is now eliminated because it would be amazing if you went from a two and a half dollar request to five other requests and then four and a half it seems unlikely so anyway for now i think just breaking the point and a half fiscal 27 asked by the dpw apart between yeah wastewater and and the second related question is do they are they going to have to decommission the existing facility and if so is there a cost related to that and the last thing existing wastewater facility maybe maybe they're one maybe they want to but you have to do something that means it's under review by the dp right so i go back to our forum questions there should be a uh a decommissioning question yeah yeah maybe you want to keep it there just in case and just make sure you shut down whatever you have to shut it's probably it may be a matter of if we don't if we don't close it you can run that out for parties
hey they went out the the uh oh in brookline
oh yeah the tours right but you can run it out for parties like the water i can't think of the name of it right where like their old water facility it's like really cool looking yeah the base the base goes there my kids are there yeah i still want to know if they can run a pipe all the way from the high school to the town center wastewater facility through taking easements along the way i just don't know how far they can pump cool anyway the other item that i have at the moment was um this is more background for rescue there there's a bunch of stormwater monies requested in different years and one of the line items is labeled stormwater compliance under 25 000 a year and last year tom was told to put that in his capital budget by the finance director the fincom particularly me pushed back and said that's an operating expense right nothing to do with capital and begrudgingly the finance director took it out of the capital budget and when we took that capital budget he ultimately put it into the operating budget so we just need to make sure tom's aware of that and the finance director obviously is aware of that yeah but other than that i mean there's there is some movement and some things and you know i i think curious sometimes when you see geez we really need you know we really need the equipment age 17 sweeper fiscal 27 for 475 000 and then here every year later uh geez we can do that in fiscal 30 you know so they could move forward certain other oh i get it maybe if you look at four or five pieces of equipment and it turns out some are worse off than others but i just i ask those kind of questions just from a just to get a sense of what's the real process did someone really give thought to and some of his some of those trucks that he pulled forward got pushed back because you see a line item here route 20 rehabilitation design uh the town manager had slotted i think it was 750 000 into fiscal 29 and at the very last minute the economic development committee said we really want to pull that forward to fiscal 26 and the compromise was to pull forward 250 000 which you don't see here because it got into the budget fiscal 26 and he's got the balance of it at fiscal 28 so i'm just under understanding the dollars are the same on that is concerned but understanding yeah sort of ebbs and flows or why something really new is needed now it's not well can you go back to your earlier question there's a whole chunk of information on the tab for the this is a high school treatment plus the field it almost seems the way that what they grow up or write out free is that they're missing two and a half million because they do want to find the two and a half million from fiscal year 30 with their original estimate of the 5.5 million which you know simple math there is okay we're already knowing there and it does talk about uh gene for treatment process through uh high school turf fields well the original estimate to uh rebuild retrofit whatever the existing system that probably never worked right was five and a half million dollars sure sure to do that work but they pull that back come down by two million well they pull that back they're not doing it instead of using that facility let's see if we can get the dep to sign off on a traditional aesthetic system but i guess my point is it would be good to know when they say four and half million break out the four and a half million for me because well that's what i'm saying i don't know yeah i don't know between what it was five and a half to rebuild what's there the building and infrastructure what does it cost to put in a traditional septic system for the high school i don't know because i mean the example would be two million left if you're that if you assume that two and a half million that was in fiscal 29 for the athletic field well that's what they say they're bringing that in the two and so if you started right so they don't tell you what it costs to do the wastewater treatment so that's that's you can either infer that it's you have to infer yes right because you want to ask for four and a half but i don't want to infer i want them to tell you what it is yeah yeah we're going to ask but they come forward and say the fields are really a three and a half million dollar cost and say wait a minute it was two and a half why is it now three and a half are you putting in an extra you know sprinkler system more so the turf i'm reading it the turf comment is not a redo of the turf it's drainage because if you recall after the new turf was put in we had issues with when we have a lot of rain the pellets from the turf turf are draining into into the wetlands so that's a related problem yeah it's a problem they're solving a problem versus redoing them yeah so there may be again the person handling the the subject part of this the town engineer i watched her i thought i mean she's she's very good she's very detailed and so i have no doubt that they've really been working on an outside consultant engineering firm what i have less comfort in really understanding is the field component yeah we have the add-ins and what the trailer yeah
four and a half broken between the cost of building the leech the doing the work necessary something to satisfy the septage issues right rebuilding the field or fields and fixing the issue at the turf field those are really i mean i understand it's all one project but those are really three different things and not that i'm suggesting this for anybody who listens to this tape right you got to deal with the septage issue you don't necessarily have to rebuild the fields but you're going to want to right but they're separate it it may be and they have different lives yeah there may be completely the most efficient way to do this is to do them all at the same time but there's they're separate issues so yeah i mean it is the other concern is it means these projects stay open for the life of multiple projects because it's you know so from a warrant perspective great device approved but should they really be broken into we have a two and a half million dollar subject project we have a two million dollar field project and a two and a thousand dollar turf reformation project that is all approved in this warrant for my project that way we can close the facings of them out and not actually have this bucket of format oh it's something broken we're spending more money on the project than it should you know it's it's it it makes it very difficult it could be different spend is that possible can you have one warrant with segments in it and not make it one very large project you can you can where are you run into where we would argue this with waste when you pull the projects apart what you can run into problems with is you went a little over on the stuffage and you're under on the feel you can't swap between the projects whereas if you do it as one so we've run into this on the schools um where like hey we're replacing flooring in you know several different buildings and we used to do it as all separate projects and then there was a we've gone back and forth a couple times like then there was like just put it all together so that you can sort of continue from one right to the next and if they finish up and and without some leftover they get started on the next one but yeah so there's there's pros and cons to it but i think it's important to know whether whether you do it as one you split it apart it's important to know how much um yeah i'm sure there's a size 10 million dollars to make a conversation if it's you know 10 hundred dollar projects maybe don't care yeah well that also depends on you might have a contractor that does septic but isn't going to the fields and vice versa or you know it might be the same contractor but you know you kind of need to work as a town yeah yeah well and my other question on this one is um not only the decommissioning but the cost of any field rentals or anything you need to do because while you're doing this project you're going to take the baseball fields out of commission much less than anything i'm sure yeah
this goes to the schedule right can you schedule it so that you're not taking them out of commission great for doing it and having it ready in time for the season almost never almost never right yeah two world seasons correct i know yeah so it's okay so those are my questions your questions okay i got them um not to say that there are questions on the other end potentially although there's things that i would have even thought to look for just because it's not transparent that all these little that are hidden pieces yeah not intentionally but which again why it's important particularly the three of you it's important make sure anything and everything you think should be questioned or asked because just raise it because it's just too easy for kelly and i to drop on or pass our knowledge might be helpful because we're in a short-term time crunch here to kind of get things moving along but on a longer term perspective you really need to come up with a thorough process right one that satisfies everybody so i i would ask you know take a look at this in more detail and send me a questions i will send you out like what we have so far um as a bcc and then you can send me back and i'll i'll give tom a heads up and ask him if you can join us at our next meeting um we'll run on a bit behind which is fine on the last agenda item uh sent you a couple of samples uh i said earlier was they're wildly different from each other um and i said you know i think the town of millis is because a former co-worker of mine started there see see i can see and i was like wanting to see what his was um so that was a pretty brief one it's actually probably less not not really anything more than once in my opinion it was currently in the warrant um and so probably looking for something more than that right but not the 38 pages of you know arlington's which i'm imagining you know they're they have more staff more paid staff that um help prepare that i was really just giving it for us there's a wide variety of stuff out there um but i did think arlington had a lot of things that weren't annual they were references like this is what capital like these are like all we were talking about trying to understand here it just it was more of this is debt service this is when it becomes kind of like so that i thought was actually really interesting the good news about that is you can just yeah i'm sure they probably use it from year to year yeah no i had a couple of just again high level questions so millis um it's more of a philosophical question it appears that they either weren't empowered to or didn't want to approve specific projects in specific years they wanted to basically come to an agreement um priorities highest priority yes and then let some other decision maker kind of deal with it which is an approach yeah um i don't think that's our approach no but um on the arlington one you know our the bylaw basically says our report is to be delivered to the town manager the town manager has statutory responsibility for preparing both the capital budget and finding a capital plan presented to the financial budget maybe the same as what they got from the town manager so arlington it seemed like maybe arlington's report was either by i don't know if the bylaw but whether my bylaw had to be delivered to the select board or the town meeting it's not to say that whatever report we create won't be public document but you know we don't need my opinion we don't need if our audience is the town manager we don't need to regurgitate a lot of the generic stuff which would be very helpful for john q public picking it up and understanding the capital project process but if our only responsibility is to provide our input to the town manager our report i think could look somewhat different from arlington agree something a bit more something i agree i i would and i definitely agree for for first year i would i would argue pretty hard even though this is being delivered to the town manager that it be a public document um it's a public document because of a because of a meeting law you see it something that should it's not required but you see it as a as a reporter in the back of the warrant for example because what we think isn't what ends up being voted on by the camera there's the town manager and then there's the fin count yeah so i'm not going to make the call whether or not it's going on the warrant because that's not our call but at the end of the day it i would hope it right it will be because it's going to be a product of this committee which is subject to open meeting law it'll be on the town website and they can decide whether or not they want to use it so i know as a resident i would like it if that explanation was out there i don't know we're not going to get that i don't think we're going to get there necessarily this year but i think it should be and i think i wish we had formed this committee a couple of years ago because we're about to spend right most likely if it's approved more money than we've spent in a couple of decades on a single project so the first line for the report yeah i do think i like it i mean it states all the assumptions that we're using as assumptions yeah right and there's even now we're all still like well we have to ask we have to ask we have to ask well then a year or two years it's different people yeah potentially yeah so just that alone here's these assumptions that were made of the slip capital league i still don't know the answers we're waiting but we don't know yeah so i i agree i think it it's a nice template right here are assumptions that we're using to make these decisions and the rest will begin yeah and i i agree that it has to be drafted with the expectation that it would be attached and as it probably should be i agree it's interesting i mean i didn't spend a lot of time on it but i looked at either the westwood or westford ones and they actually have a report and it's interesting because it's kind of halfway between millis and arlington which is probably where we probably right i don't foresee us doing the bottom section yeah okay i can't remember whether it's millis or arlington but one of them referenced their their ranking worksheet so i went and found their ranking yeah so whichever downloads i'll send it to you tell me oh yeah please and then it may be just a place to start when eventually around two and then after this first cycle we said we want to create those criteria um there's such a lot of information yeah i i kept in sleepless night i kept envisioning it as like um like a net promoter score like it's if you have your criteria and you're they're weighted right a certain way but then you know you don't have to be universal is that is that okay yeah and you just have a bunch of things up and you got five or seven people doing it you got all this up average them all out and you put out their income right there i can't answer many say okay but we have this subjective reason why right so you can see that it's useful yeah okay so we've done a lot of talking what we're going to need to do so i will i will send these questions to tom um and we'll do something feel our way out with tom and then we'll see you in here for the next meeting um to talk to them live either on screen or in the room um but we are going to have to start dividing and conquering from a putting things together so i'm not going to ask this meeting um but i think if you can come back to the next meeting with having spent some time with the reports and there are others out there you can you can google right and the guide that i sent um from the state what are your must-haves right and three to five must-haves that should be in the report um and then i'm going to ask the committee right we're going to decide together what those are and divide and compare i'm going to ask each of you to take a section right of those must-haves and first draft it right like without without the actual information there what would that look like um so that we can not all be on not one or two of us on the hope for um for doing that same as what i've said before from an open meeting long perspective we can't just send that out to the whole group um you can send it back to me i'll consolidate and push it out for our next meeting um for us to be able to discuss but i'll give you another another week so think about what it is that of those items that you think need to be in there what your what your preference is so you know pull brian and volunteer for the thing you're most willing to do so that you don't get volunteered for the thing you don't want to do my normal approach is you all take what you want to do and i'll take whatever it's not except for chairing the scheme included so just to be clear we say report we're talking about the examples you need now right it can be those or you can do it you can do what i did you can just you can google right capital improvement questions yeah yeah the actual warrant i think we talked about this the four pages in the warrant itself at least again i'm distinguishing between this year okay so we don't get our stuff so we already have so i would start with we talked about it i think at an earlier meeting was in the warrant in the report of the finance committee there's sections right that are attributable that are about capital buying vision since those are things that we've already prepared that brian and i have both been involved in the past it's a good place to start because that's stuff at least we've got a framework for putting together the question from there is is there anything in the ones i've sent or other ones that you find online or from looking at the state's guide that you're like i really like this i like i think it's important to have in here and what we can discuss as a group it's important to have and i want it this year and i can do it this year versus it's important to have that that one's going to have to wait until next year right i think if we operate with that basis we'll just have a placeholder yeah because it's not just like yes nice to say or easy to say i want that the actual production of the data that goes into it it's a whole other so graph anything i'm going to point back so we talked about getting a sharepoint so my concern is is that we're going to have our own little pieces of the pie we're going to do it and it's just nice i agree i don't understand how the open meeting laws work when you have a sharepoint because we can just put stuff out there and then you can technically read it so i don't know what we're saying we can't we can't we can't effectively deliberate by sharing our own yeah yeah so this is the problem like you could you could point it somewhere everybody can look at it or a quorum could look at it or even give it all one person have them put it all in one document and then distribute that document technically in advance of the meeting or open meeting it's still the same thing is it just so maybe new ones maybe not but to me honestly i would love to read stuff ahead of the meeting so when i come here i have my questions already go we can have a conversation dialogue where it's fine yeah documents like kelly's sending out in her email well it wouldn't say i have a report like folks hey take a read through let me know if this is yeah but they can't read it and then just talk about it later correct no because if kelly no because of reading it it allows that that's now they no if you wrote her word yourself okay and no input from us and she just wrote a draft here's my outline and she sent that out in advance of the meeting i think that's fine we can't you can't respond yeah but if i took pieces from each of you and consolidated them and sent them out before the meeting that i can't do so like i if you were to issue a piece and you send it to me i would prepare it together have it ready and technically another question two people could technically two people could on this committee could work together yes to share a load but i'll go to the arlington and i'm glad you said we don't have to do that it's like how do we actually how do we this group of folks actually even pull that together because it would have to be during this time right like so what we will end up doing and what we will end up doing is a couple of us once we've got kind of pieces and we bring it together a meeting it would end up needing to be a couple of us right not a horn so only to work on it together and then send it out right at the next meeting so it becomes arlington likely it's the um it's staff right the committee saying what they want the staff's going and putting it together which they can do and they can distribute um as long as the committee is not deliberating on it so that's one way we've done you know brian can send us stuff um but finance director brian yeah brian kevin finance director but so far i've only sent you everything that i've been sending you is already either already a public document or not anything that any of you know any of us prepared it's it's things that have been prepared by staff right um so that is an interesting question certainly in the arlington when you look at the members who prepared a lot of them are town officials and even with uh millis one i think it elicited like the town manager and all other people so it looked like they also had input in the preparation of the report which is to your point so how do we how do we do that if we all have to operate independently it did like get a little confused well yeah i'm used to creating documents that we then hand over to our customer and it's always that one voice like so you know it's just i mean if it's a half a dozen pages to you know a dozen pages maybe it's not just a good deal you literally sit here and be like okay anybody got any problems with like no versus yeah so what you would what we would do right is we have an issue it would become work product of the meeting right and you could still at that point rank and correct me if i'm wrong because then you're discussing any document that's not a public document open meeting ellie said take it home with you if you have any further comments please send those along directly okay she would then make whatever it's got to become a public document first right so okay yeah and there may be another approach and maybe you could talk to the town manager to see if it's possible sometimes if again if you want to give members advance time to look at it to become prepared in the meeting you know discuss it intelligently um you know if you post if you post the draft document on the website in advance of the meeting so it's not quite sharepoint but like because you wouldn't necessarily be able to go in and start editing right and everybody can see it but where they post it and it's publicly available that's part it's sort of like the way the select board does the packet right so yeah that that at least could be done but you have to get the document out there before members can be sharing kind of effectively directly yeah i i'm going to ask a simple question of the town clerk of i send you the agenda to post if i put a document right at the back of the agenda you can post that or is there a yeah yeah i bet when i did minutes sometimes i would attach a document to the minutes yeah um yeah i can't recall we attached them to the agenda i'm sure you could unless you want to you know she'll say why don't you just create a packet like like it's like we're doing just she posts that in the same and she can post that in the same now now they're used to oh yeah they can post it as a separate identified packet but the way they seem to be for a particular meeting if you open up the meeting you'll see the agenda and you'll see the packet and see the supplemental packet all in kind of one place yeah yeah there are things but now now the document's out there um and but it's just it's just something that we need to be cautious about the the biggest issue the town had over the years is doing evaluations of staff superintendent schools to administrative where members would be asked to do their own individual evaluation and give it to some one member to compile everything but then then share they would share that back with the members and it's not out in the public domain that's a problem because as members it's the same as if we're sitting here so we just need to be careful and maybe workarounds that are yeah i don't think you know it was just more there's a lot that we're going to have to pull together yeah relatively quickly and yeah okay we're going to get together for two hours and like squirrels you know pass i don't know no it won't be it won't be able to do it that way no that's what we're just like you know well some meaning if you look at the planning board for example that they literally will spend time in media going line by line through bylaws and other things well and this is where it's like we're not out there and we'll find another workaround but we can't do that you could review independently and then kind of have your own red lines in mind and that's what you talk about like make the document and then again kelly well again consult with the town manager if it's just kelly's work product she could do that and we could come back in and um okay kelly's work product we all need or something she's already done for work products if any one of us if any one of us took out no if you all gave me something and then that's not my work product that's your work product that i consolidated right he's talking about if like you did instead i created the whole thing um and send it out which we do a finance committee report is the chair of the finance committee would write the report send it out to the members and say come to the meeting talk about it and then after the meeting's over send me any edits that you have if there's anything we didn't talk about at the meeting but ultimately the chair ends up and maybe one other member sort of proofing or whatever yeah and then that gets submitted without it yeah going back around the difference being they all have there's a report from the prior year that they start with right and so and we have a little bit of that but because we're a new committee starting from scratch a little bit more of a challenge here um i think but you know certainly i could take and copy and paste out of the morning right the sections that are finance that are capital related and start there um but let's let's start with the next meeting what are the must-haves right now versus the wanna-haves right in the future and we'll go from there right if it if it's like yeah i've got all that at my fingertips and it's easy enough for me to do i'll do it but if it's going to take a little more effort to build out um there's some help although i am hoping that ai will be able to generate some of the template i think the while using pages from the hidden number of work as part of the report as you well know that a lot of the tables come from excel especially people have that kelly put together and you know it's all fine when kelly's here because she knows how everything works but as i think i said one meeting having had to go in at the very last minute and try to figure out everything is working so i can change a table or two before we finalize the importance in the warrant i just was very uncomfortable because it makes sense to the person who puts it together and it's pretty intuitive but still you just don't know and so you know miss kelly hopefully i should change mind as you said you know very briefly that this may be your own year on this committee agreeing to kind of use that for example when none of us might be or some future people are in here comfortable using that so you just need to think about yeah no i would say my hope though is that the my hope is that the town's going to get easy cip up and running and we're going to have it there was never the plan with that spreadsheet be a long-term right solution to doing this there's a better way to do it it's just we don't have staff help right or software help to do it right it's cobbling it together so my hope is that that's not the case going forward um and that you know some of the things in there maybe we decide that we don't need them um right going forward so let's let's start with what what do we think needs to be in the report and we'll go from how how we can produce that and how we can share it um in a way that doesn't violate anything we want going forward that first version of the court is a five year or is it going to be longer it's going to be five and we can speak to the fact that you know i envision a paragraph at the end of this report that talks about the things we intend to do right the the you know in the interest of time that we're a new committee and only have this much time you know this is what we have but our view of the future is to have these additional items okay i don't know how we can go more than five okay okay all right can we review and vote on the minutes of october 15th and one edit for sure okay on page two when we discuss that one about policies the third full paragraph the second last line the t and john's name should be a j and then uh john had one other question that he had sent to me but i wasn't i thought it was covered but if not i can change it um that same paragraph uh said she will also request this when you come to also request the current inventory of capital assets and in your email to me john said we discussed getting a copy of the capital asset inventory is shown by the account pre-audit and the audited capital assets once completed by departments that was underway i didn't know what i had in there was sufficient or whether i was missing something about i think it's sufficient it was two different things two different requests yeah yeah i think i mean i think it's fine
the link to yeah so for some reason it keeps dropping off the lab so so the pediatrician you can't really click on with your computer but if you click on your phone it doesn't you get the page not found again so remember last time like there was no there's a space between any person before i close that space i'll check it again i clicked on it after i fixed it and it worked but i'll double check it okay can i get a motion to approve the minutes of october 15th someone and a second second it's called a tie all in favor all right all right thank you all right and now can we okay so we have a meeting set for the fifth at 5 p.m um everybody good with that so hybrid yes and it um i forget what meeting what room you're going to be in but i'll send out the agenda um do we want to put another one on the calendar did you um we were going to get um i was under this right you're going to get tell me i'm going to give you a copy of what he sent out uh yes i have not asked him yet i have a list of things to ask him for and obviously connected that has everything come back now i thought he said it was three weeks and that was about three weeks ago yeah i'll double check but i'm assuming that's meeting after the fifth of the whoever's next in the list and facilities is the other big one yeah because he'll probably cover on the town facilities in school and it doesn't mean very many other things do we think that facility report that was mentioned from there maybe that happened being in this like what was talking about there's assessment being done at all buildings inside no we haven't all right i'm going to send him along i don't know if it's available yet yeah on the slide board agenda for their meeting for monday night and his update this last time inside
and his uh guidance he's talking about in his report town manager he says on site insight so okay must have something must have it but he's not yet he won't give it to me until i've they've you know discussed it but that's fine i will do a list of things
all right let's though if possible i would like to just at least pencil in another date and i can
reserve room so does the following wednesday the 12th work i will not be able to yeah but i'm i'm getting i'm going out of the country six and don't get back until late on the 11th so okay all right um so that puts us 13th it's thursday we won't be able to have hybrid we'll have to be in person which is a problem if we're going to have staff here does that work for anybody i mean staffing here yeah i mean i can move to the i can support the 13th in person but i didn't know if you meant staff like we're going to have books well if we do it i mean if we do it then it does have to be at five because we have to try and get some books in here i know um michael who does facilities had indicated he would be able to do that um previously it works for everybody i'll at least ask um and i gotta see who's who's next right it's thursday at 5 p.m yeah all right so for agenda items next time um we want to talk about report contents again and i'll keep the agenda item for discussing um departmental and see who else if there's anybody other than um tom who can we have stuff in time and to the extent i get any of these other items back i'll add those
okay can i get motion to adjourn second all in favor all right hi hi all right all right thank you everybody