December 17, 2025 – Capital Improvement Planning Committee – Video & Transcript
December 17, 2025 - Capital Improvement Planning Committee
All right, I'm calling the meeting of the Capital Improvement Planning Committee to order at 6.02 on Wednesday, December 17th.
6.02 on Wednesday, December 17th.
We are in the Whelan Town Building Select Board Meeting Room.
This is going to be an in-person and hybrid meeting, although all of our voting members are here in person.
And we read this statement.
One may watch or may participate remotely with the meeting link that can be found on the website.
Pursuant to Chapter 2 of the Acts of 2025, this meeting will be conducted in person and via remote means in accordance with applicable law. This meeting may be recorded and will be made available to the public on WACAM as soon as after the meeting as is practical. When required by law or allowed by the chair, persons wishing to provide public comment or otherwise participate in the meeting may do so by in-person attendance or by accessing the meeting remotely, as noted above. We request public comment be limited to two minutes per person. And I'm going to go through the agenda. 6 p.m., call to order, review the agenda for public and any announcements. 6 p.m., public comment and members' response. 6 p.m., continued review of Excel's spreadsheet reflecting consolidated department capital requests for FY27 through FY2031. Potential vote of the committee's position on ranking such requests. 7 p.m., discuss and potential vote on the content of this committee's report to the town manager. 9 p.m. 10, review and vote to approve minutes of December 9th, 2025. 9 p.m., topics not reasonably anticipated by the chair 48 hours prior to posting. If any, and setting times of next meetings. 9 p.m., approximate time of adjourning. And I'll go back. Are there any announcements?
And I said all members who are going to be attending are here in person. No one will be participating in Zoom, double-checking. No one, no members, voting members will be participating via Zoom.
And since we are all here in person, we will not need to do roll call votes. Okay, so public comment. Robbie, is there anybody in the person bundle? We're getting raised. Okay, and that's Carol, who's our liaison. Can we move her over? Yes, sir. Please.
Carol Martin, who's our select board liaison.
Okay, so seeing no public comment, I'm going to move on to the spreadsheet. And I am going to attempt to share that. If you give me a moment. However, I will note for you that I've gotten a couple already of internet unstable messages. So, I'm not going to share it. But to the extent my internet connection is not working, that could be an issue.
What was that? Email a copy to Carol or Brian, just in case they could share a screen from their end. One second.
Good luck with that.
I believe it.
I just tried to open mine up. I can't open it either. Okay.
And I am sending that spreadsheet. Brian, I sent it to you, to Carol, and to Michael McCall. I've also sent it to each of you on the committee. And then I'm going to put that up. We'll go ahead and share screens. I'll attempt to, anyway.
Success. But for the fact that I can't see it too fast. Now, I'm good. Okay. So, I'm going to increase the size to the extent I can. But better.
A bit more toggling, but we can have one. So, I want to thank Brian for incorporating a preliminary rank from each of us on these. And we'll save that and just sharing it with everybody now. But I still, we're going to need to walk through each of them. And I think, given that this is our first year, I think we've said this many times. Since we're doing what we can do, given the short time, we've got a late start, and the short time that we've had information. Well, I think it's fair, given that we're going to discuss each of the projects. To the extent we think there's things that are still missing information, that's what we ultimately are going to have to caveat in our report. So, we're going to make the best assessment we can, based on the information we have, and caveat wherever there's information outstanding that would be helpful when we turn that over to the town manager. Okay. So, why don't we start? And I'm open to suggestions on form of going through this in a different way, seeing as how we haven't done this before. Happy to hear different ways of going through it. But I think, for me, the most orderly way is to go through it in order. Talk about each project briefly, and whether or not anybody has opinions that deviate significantly from the combined rank. And so, I think that's possible, right? If there was a bunch of people who, a couple people who were low, and a couple people who were high, and that ended up at medium. If your view is drastically different, and you want to express that, please do. If not, I think we're going to move on from that particular project. The other thing is, as we go through each project, if you think there is outstanding information that's necessary for a full assessment, right? We make note of that now, so that we can include it in the report. Okay? Does everybody think that approach sounds okay? I'm through the rule. Okay.
All right. Road improvements. We have this medium, and this is, we're looking at 2027 specifically. We can talk about FY28 and out if we get past 27. Anybody disagree, have thoughts on that?
My only comment on that was, well, two comments on road improvements. One was the escalation factor in the out years, which we can talk about later, is 10%, and whether or not that is the appropriate, right, amount of future trend, right? If we want to be conservative in the plan, fine, or do we think it's not conservative? But we can table that until we're talking about the out years. And then my other one was just ranking of road improvements as medium I'm comfortable with. I don't know if that, if any discussion is warranted around the amount of road improvements included for the year, and with the thinking that other monies that were available from Chapter 90, where we're currently at from a SEND perspective, is there any perspectives on amount of funding? Yes, my question for you, Kelly, in terms of tonight's process, at the moment, it appears your primary focus is on the consolidated ranking.
The document you're looking at for the benefit of the others is a template that I pulled from Brian Keveney's Capital Excel spreadsheet, just for FY27. And at the moment, it includes a couple of minor exceptions, it includes all the requested dollars. And so my question, Kelly, is do you want to take this opportunity to both on each line item address the ranking, consolidated ranking, and then talk about how much, if any, if any, dollars end up in our recommended fiscal 27 budget, or do you want to go through all the priorities and then move back to more of the budget side of it? Because it goes to your question you just posed. I, for example, just pick on this item. I think you all were mediums, all four of you were mediums. I was low, and that goes to your point, where I think they have some built-up funds. I have a view generally of what I think should be in the fiscal 27 budget, which could lead to a lesser amount than what's been requested. And it's just a question of process. I think it's more efficient, in my opinion, to talk about both when we're talking about the project, rather than go down the whole list and then come back around for money. And I also don't think that, I think there's a lot of projects where the amount may not be as debatable. So, I would rather do both at the same time, as long as no one has objections to that. I think that makes sense. Because I agree. I mean, I'm looking at some things like loaders or equipment. I don't think there's much you can do on the price. You can't say, well, I'll give you half the price of the loader.
Kelly, do you want to, because I think you understand, based on prior meetings, conversations, I think what you're getting at is, in the past, typically, town manager's budget, the FinCom's budget, have generally included for road improvements what was requested by the DPW. That amount, which I believe we've confirmed, does not include road improvements that are funded by any state Chapter 90 funds that we might receive. And the state Chapter 90 funds have been averaging $400,000 or $500,000 a year. And as an aside, for the benefit of Brian Kepney and the town manager, I have an open question as to whether the town should have in the past been doing something at town meeting to appropriate funding costs that were ultimately reimbursed through Chapter 90, similar to what's done in the school budget, where we get reimbursed through Chapter 70, but we appropriate the entire amount of the operating costs. And I found, I didn't do an extensive search, but Weston and Westboro both have annual articles that ask for, in effect, appropriation authority related to Chapter 90 costs. So I'm just questioning whether we've been doing it right or wrong. And that's not relevant. No, I think that's a side. I think that's... Anyway, so on this item, historically, that first line would have been tracked, sent it through. If you're looking for our individual views, I put it as low, because not that I think keeping the roads up is a low priority. I only had it low in this year, and that's because my instinct is to, because of all the open capital projects and roads are included, just because they have a year's worth of funding already approved, and they have an additional bunch of Chapter 90 money likely coming to fiscal 27. I'd personally be inclined to zero it out, but I also appreciate that that might be viewed as extreme. And so, you know, put half of it in as approved to give them sort of a bridge to then get back on a more typical funding schedule, which I think you may have mentioned at the last meeting as a... I don't think I mentioned it, but it is what was in my head. So anyway, that's why I ranked this low.
Although when, again, we get into fiscal 28 to 31, I bumped it back up the median in all those years. And no years did I put it as high, because I don't rank most of these items similar to life safety, which generally got a high, I think for most of us, high ratings. So anyway, I'd be curious as to how the rest of you, and maybe if I could just at the outset, and I'll stop talking, keep notes. Given where the town is, vis-a-vis its operating budgets, maybe unknowns, given the, obviously, very large project with the MWRA at the Hallowell,
left up to me, I would only put in this year's capital budget high priority items and basically push everything into fiscal 20, everything else into fiscal 28. I'm just from a high level. So you're going to hear from me as we go down these items. If it's not marked high, my instinct is in this one year, given everything that's going on, to push it. And that's in part because of the open capital projects. It gives town staff a chance to catch up on those projects. The DPW is going to be up to their eyeballs with the MWRA project and several other big capital projects that are continuing. And it's not like they can't walk and chew gum at the same time, but they have funding sitting there that they won't get to until the spring. They'll have Chapter 90 money that they could at least advance some of the places they think are in worse condition. But otherwise, fiscal 27 due patching is just how I was thinking about it. But I'm going to stop, keep notes. This is your time to kind of weigh in.
Well, I guess a question I have in terms of processes, we all went high, medium, low. And to your point, Brian, I mean, does high mean that we think that it should stay as is in the fiscal 27, in the amount medium means push out a year and low means push out two years? I mean, I don't think we initially discussed what we mean by. Yeah. My thought was that we were going to, I think, based on our conversation at the last meeting, given where we are in the lateness, was we very well may not have the time to go through all five years. But with actual dollars in every category, we talked last week about maybe trying to do that with fiscal 27. But for me, the ranking was more instructional for the town manager, who then, with the benefit of the finance director and exactly what they want to do and present to the finance committee, would look at our rankings. And that might help inform them as to what gets included or excluded, rather than us necessarily doing all that work for them up front. So that's how I do the ranking this year anyway. I don't know if you felt differently about it, Kelly, or? I think we have to do the ranking at a minimum. But I don't, to the extent we can, I think there's two things I want to do. I want to go through the list, and then I want to look at the totals relative to what was approved in the plan last year for 2027 and see where we can close the gaps. There's two ways to do that, right? There's difference analysis. How much are we different by, let's take out what we need to to get back down, which is impossible in some cases where you have MWRA. There's also a proposal like you just made, Brian, which is don't do anything that isn't high, right? I think there's probably an in-between option, which is do the highs. And to the extent you have things that can be funded with surplus capital or free cash, right, that you have anything left over, you do those. Because we've done the desert approach a couple times, I think, or at least once while I was on FinCom. And that's not necessarily a solution either, right, because not all projects use the same resources. And so I think we can debate that, but I'd like to at least get through them. And if you want, we don't have to go through these in order. We can start with high, right, make sure we agree on the highs, and then go back down through, you know, medium and low and make sure we agree that they're placed in the right place. Or another approach is let's start with the biggest dollars first. Because some of the small ones aren't going to move the needle, but a $38 million water project is going to move the needle. The high school wastewater facility is going to move the needle. So to me, I'd rather expend our energy while we're still relatively awake and focused on the biggest dollar items first. Okay. Yeah, I'd say go with the high. Probably the biggest dollars are all going to be highs anyway, I would imagine. I wouldn't expect the high life safety to, based on how people rank them, I wouldn't anticipate there's going to be a whole lot of conversation other than if there's, you know, any open questions as to the dollars.
Anyway. I don't have a problem with that. When you talk about high dollar, what's our dollar cut? What do we do? We can start with the biggest and work our way down. Yeah. Okay. So that means we're doing MWRI first.
So it's $38.6 million. It blows a hole, right? And everything else on the page. So it's going to be its own article. It has to get done. It's been exercised and reviewed a whole bunch of different ways. I don't see a whole lot of decision-making from this committee in terms of, like, this has to go forward as an article vote for the town.
This committee doesn't decide how that's going to get funded, if it's going to be from debt through the water fund, or if it's going to be taxpayer dollars. But either way, it's a burden on the residents of town. So go ahead, Michael. Select Board voted the other night to respond to the Board of Public Works that it'd be funded through the waterways. So it wouldn't be a vote for excluded debt. It wouldn't be through the taxes. So the next vote would then be a town meeting to appropriate for the borrowing. So Select Board made that, made, voted, and that's the decision? That's Monday night. It'd be funded through the waterways. Right. So let me just ask a question. There was some discussion that the finance director, I guess, had led another option, proposed another option, because the town would, no matter where it appears, the town's borrowing money, right? But that the town would put a ballot question on to exclude the debt. The town would appropriate debt service, but would collect as revenue similar to indirect collection of revenue from the water fund for insurance, for example, that it would collect water revenue sufficient to pay the debt service. So the excluded debt would be fully covered, assuming they had raised enough water revenue to cover it. And my understanding was that the benefit of doing it that way, as opposed to just treating it as traditional water debt, which is outside the levy, right, was that if something goes wrong and there's not sufficient water revenue along the way for 20 years, and the town had to fund it through the general fund that that funding would fall within the levy and could therefore negatively impact the operating budgets in those years that that happened. Whereas if you had the debt excluded from the outset, and you were faced with the same dilemma, the town would still fund it, but it would be funding it as excluded debt, which would therefore have no impact. Now, there's no decision made about that. The short answer is they didn't take a position on that, and they still want to hear more information. So I'm just pointing out that it's possible that the financing for this project could be on the ballot as a request for excluded debt, but that was not, it was discussed, but not determined. So for right now, it's the water weights and less this other mechanism, but I think they need a better understanding of what I'm not. I'm just reporting what I heard in the meeting. I'm not saying that's a good idea, a bad idea. One of the concerns, since we're talking about it, which I did provide some background information to the finance director, one of his concerns was that if you treat it as excluded debt, the town approves it at the ballot, and it's fully funded with water revenue, and this is going to be a little bit beyond you too, but you'll get it. And when you do your levy limit calculation, your excluded debt line item, which is outside the levy, will go up by the debt service on the debt, even though it's being paid for with non-taxation revenue. And the finance director expressed concern that over the next 20 years of borrowing, you'd have to be sure that folks didn't use that to fund other things. So I found a DOR document that suggests that you can, when you ask for the ballot question to exclude the debt, you can have that question be net of any revenue that otherwise is, other than taxation, that would be funding that debt. So it's a net request. And so he took that under advisement. So we just need to stay tuned on that, but it could, whether that goes on as excluded debt or not, could impact a couple of the other items in what we're looking at that likely will, or may require, or we may suggest to the town manager, you might consider using excluded debt. And having a big $38 million excluded debt question, you know, could impact how the voters view that. So more than you might have cared to know, but we don't have a lot of time to, you know, try to get our arms around this. But so basically, Kelly, your conclusion with your first four points is, it's going to go forward. There's nothing that this committee needs to do other than be aware of it. And again, it's going to be done as an article. In what we present, historically, a project that size would not have been included in the traditional capital budget that's approved under the Omnibus article. I included it in what we're looking at tonight. Going forward in our report, would you envision pulling that item out or just leaving it in? I would envision anything that's article related being its own section of the report, but not pulling it out entirely because it's going to have to get paid for, whether it's a part of traditional capital or not. I think it's a really important consideration, right? The debt financing on that is debt service of what? 1.2, 1.3 million? 1.9. 1.9. What's the term? 20 years. So 20 years. At the moment, there also is a possibility it could get extended to 30 years, but that wouldn't be at 0%, which a 20-year loan would be 75 basis points or something. Okay. So I think it has to be factored in because even though it's water fund, right? Tell me who in town doesn't have water, right? That they're going to have to pay for. So, okay. Any other comments on MWRA? No. We all have that. I think we all have that as a... Okay. Next biggest is, as a combination, is town's building, I believe. Brian, do you agree? Yes. Subject to what we heard last week, Director of Facilities, about his intention to get back to us and push out to fiscal. Well, he didn't, he wasn't specific as to which years he would push it to. Yeah. But it sounded like all he thought he was going to end up asking for was money to do part of this building's roofs. So that took away. I've not seen any revision to what he has submitted. So, yes, if you look at what's been submitted thus far, it's over $5 million, $5 and a half, if you look at a little piece in fiscal 28. But for the purpose of our discussion tonight, should we assume either he's going to get back to us or we just decide that everything but the roof? So I'm going to, similar to what I mentioned at the beginning of our discussion, my recommendation is that the committee defer all town building projects with the exception of roof amount, which we do not think is final, right? We don't think, we think that requires some revision. My recommendation, my opinion of our recommendation to town manager would be defer everything that isn't absolutely necessary. And we think that's potentially a smaller amount than the roof project that's on here, right? The roof project that is on here was the whole roof, right? 2.8.
And that was the only one that was ranked, consolidated, ranked high. And the only thing you can't discern from that ranking is whether members felt they were comfortable moving forward with doing the entire roof for 2.8 million or were anticipating that we were going to be seeing some smaller number because it was going to be phased. Yeah, I thought whether it's, whether it's the entire roof or phased, I still think it had to be done. So I guess I was, my, my thought was that the full 2.8 is a high priority, but to the extent it can be phased, then all the better. But my thought was the full 2.8 was high. It should be a high priority. Yeah, my ask was slightly different would be that Michael, they identify what has to be done, right? And if there's, you know, 80% of it needs to be done and it doesn't make sense to break it up, right? You go forward with the whole project. But if it's, no, 50% of it really needs to be done and the rest can wait, then we do that. And the condition on deferral is, I think what we discussed when we talked to Michael, which is what is the full cost and full schedule of activities that need to happen at this building to bring it up to a basic standard, right? And we can't, I can't see putting forth a vote on any of the other projects unless they are, we have a view of what it's going to take to bring the whole building up that we can tell taxpayers, you know, you're voting on 3 million. And we expect the total cost, you know, to bring this, to do all of these things, to bring this building up to code to where we want it to be, to be 10 million, and I'm making up numbers, right? I think that that information is required to do anything beyond the must do, right? You would envision our report as to this item, then would highlight for the town manager's benefit, our thinking, which is, we think it makes sense for there to be more discussion amongst those that control the ultimate decision about the future of this building. And if the future of this building is, as this town offices, we want a longer lookout over 10 or 15 years and accumulate anticipated costs over that entire period so that people could put this in context, which, so I think it'd be helpful to have that in the report, such that we're not simply pushing us off. It wasn't a huge part of the 2.8, but I believe in the first meeting with us, he said he included an option for metal roof, which I think he said was $300,000 to $400,000 of that amount. I'd be interested in, you know, calling that out and looking for further rationalization, as opposed to if you're going to be here for the next 30 years, that probably makes sense, but may make no sense if you're not going to be here. Whereas you have to, you have to do the porch on the roof where there's structural issues leave over your office, Mr. Town Manager. So we want to protect your interests. Hope you don't wear a hard hat while you're at work, but, and we obviously don't want, you know, ongoing leaking that creates even bigger issues elsewhere, but sounded like the extent of the phasing was going to be to deal with the side of the building that is over the structural issues so they could address that. But again, since we haven't heard back, you know, I think we're left assuming he's going to do that and we'll find that those, if that information finds its way. The other, the other issue I have here, and I have the same issue on some of the other big numbers, you know, I have great confidence and faith in town employees that they are good and experienced at what they do, that they've thought out and planned these activities and that they have some basis for the amount of money they're asking for. But I also assume that there's only so much time in a day and without actually going through procurement, a lot of these bigger projects could be based on, you know, per square foot estimates based on other experience, plus a significant enough contingency to cover for any other things. But we've not, I don't know what we asked for, but I'm, and this maybe goes to the future as well. In looking at other communities, their submissions to committees like this are much more expensive and actually include much more detail of how they arrive at the ask. And so to a lesser degree, if you take the fire chief's submission on the ambulance, at least he had a one page piece of paper that said, here's what I know the current cost of ambulance is to be, but we know it takes, once you put it in order, it takes a couple of years to get it. We factored in, you know, two years worth of inflation. At least I could look at something and say, okay, I have to assume that there's a state contract or something that you can get an ambulance. He has a pretty good feel for what the figure is. I don't know whether 2.8 million is enough for the roof, whether it's too much, too little. And, and I'll have the same comment on the high school wastewater and the. Yeah. So this is back to, and I don't want to belabor this too long, because we have a lot to get through, but we've talked before about. I may have to step up. We've talked many times before in financing meeting in the time that I was on there and there's a standard, right. For, for doing capital projects of design, build, operate, maintain. My opinion that the way that this is presented is missing the design phase and the design phase should be separate. And the funding for the design phase should be separate. If we're going to spend what is to sums up to over $5 million, I would expect that there's a pretty sizable design project, right. That comes before that. And so I will say if the roof is leaking, the roof has to get fixed and I can, I can see shortcutting that because the roof is leaking, but for the rest of the projects and the same goes for any other large capital project, there needs to be a design phase that's separate and before so that when we ask for the construction phase, we have an informed amount, an informed design. And we've been burned as a town right before when that hasn't adequately happened. So I agree with you, Brian. I don't know if the roof is leaking, I'm not going to say, well, we'll fund the design and you can replace the roof later. Right. Because I don't want to throw good money after bad and have other things be leaking in the meantime. But I agree with that concept generally. And that's the way I would recommend looking at other large projects. And from a diligent standpoint, and I agree with all you just said, from a diligent standpoint, though, particularly on very large dollar numbers, do you think as a committee, if we're going to put forth anything that has numbers in it, do you think we should have at least a better understanding of where the number came from? Yes. And what I suspect we have right at the moment, which actually, what Kelly's point is, you need to have that design first, because that will provide you with a baseline for what the cost is going to be. Yeah. But for purposes of this number, we don't have it. And I think we'd have to, you know, I can ask, we can send a note to Michael to say, you know, what's the basis for whatever his, and I have a note to send him a note on, do you have a revised estimate? And I can ask at the same time, what's the basis for the revising? And I heard him several times mention that he's been talking to a vendor now. I assume it's not gone through any sort of procurement process. So he may simply have a knowledgeable contractor that is helping him out by giving him, you know, per square foot estimates, if looked at the building. I think it would just be helpful if he has something in writing that's from a contractor that says, here's what I would use for an estimate. I personally would just like to get my eyeballs on it and say, well, I know where that number came from. Other than it came from, not that I don't have confidence in facilities directors. To me, it, you know, we're the first trance of this process. And it just seems to me, at least for me to be able to vote on a number. I have to do something more than simply say, well, that's what was requested. Nor do I want to say, well, that's too high to cut it because I have no basis, you know, other than to say, you know, because we have more information, you could phase it. So what, what do you need, as Kelly said, to deal with it? So anyway, I have, I'll ditto that comment on a couple of the other big items. So would you, and I'm happy to do it, would you envision, so again, the report process, would you envision with the memo report attaching fiscal 27 effectively budget when we're done here? And if so, I'd be happy to obviously go back in and prior to the next meeting, move numbers around. Yeah. So I'm trying to make, I would envision it because I think we can do, I think we're capable of doing that based on our discussion. I'm just making notes on the side of sort of, yes, no, maybe so that I, and I'm writing it down too, but just so that we have, I don't want to change the numbers as we're going because I don't want to screw them up. But so I haven't, I'm changing this as I go, but yes, no, maybe. And the maybe here is I think, yes, we support it, but we would like some support for the, for the amount. Right. And my other question was, I couldn't remember if the, the force main tie-in was related to the roof. It was part of the, no, I mean, the, the town, when they put the, the sewer main in, the town has an existing septic field and system. And the town has the right to hook up to the system. So it's been dedicated a certain amount of flow and the town, I don't know if the town is exempt from paying for it, but there's a certain fee that has to be paid by those people that don't hook up. And so up to this point, the town hasn't actually gone through the process of designing what the hookup would be. And then ultimately constructing the hookup. The library just again, I think the design part of it is short money. So I would probably say that's okay, but you know, the construct part of it to me is, well, tell me what you're doing with this building long-term. Yeah. I would argue the same for the design component of it. I don't, I mean, it's just, I think that all the other, I think that all the other things need to need a design component. So I don't, I would delay. Either way, I mean, it's not going to move the needle, but at least from a philosophical standpoint, it would be consistent to lock it out. All right. So I've, I've put no, and you guys can tell me if you disagree, right? On everything other than the roof related to the town building with one other exception I wanted to talk about, which is the town building wall pads, which I think is just a matter of safety and relatively low cost. And that's one I don't want to wait on if possible, because that's being used. And that's, I agree. Any other discussion on town building before we move on?
Did you say you were changing them to low? I put, I put no. So basically I'm, I'm, when, when we go to revise, we go to create, okay. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just putting an N wire. And so that when Brian and I go back, I know what to take out, what to keep in. But I want to make sure everybody's in agreement that that's, that's the things we want to keep in from an FYT. 27 standpoint recommendation. Yeah. Wastewater, high school wastewater is the next biggest item. Yeah. Madam Chair, can I ask? Absolutely. The wording in the bylaw has under section 20.3, there's this nice little sentence in the end as determined by the town manager, no capital improvement appropriation shall be voted by town meeting unless, unless the proposed capital improvement is considered in the committee's capital plan, including any and all addenda additions, supplemental plan. So, and I know you will make some recommendations on this. So if you say, you know, you rank something lower or say no to it, it has been considered in the plan. That's all I want to say. So I could say, all right, I appreciate, you know, I agree with you all this, but I think we need to do X. Yes, you absolutely could. Yeah. The, the, my understanding of that intent when, when we were doing it was that there's no late ads to the process. There's no Hail Marys after the report goes of, I'd like this project. That's correct. We talked about that. It all had to be submitted as a proposal upfront so that you looked at it. So it couldn't be like the last minute from the floor or something else. And our, you know, this committee's report to you, which is required by the bylaw will be a public document. And then it'll be up to, I guess, the finance committee as to whether or not they want to share anything from that report in their report. So that follow through with your example, follow through your example, Michael, if we take a position that for whatever reasons, we don't think something should be addressed in fiscal 27 and you have a different view, you're going to put a fort to the finance committee. Um, what we thought about it may or may not impact what the finance committee and ultimately what town meeting thinks about. And I think that would be a fair process, but we're, our report is not required to appear in the town ward. It's simply a public document. I assume we can post it on our webpage. Um, yeah, we'll post it on, I would just say, right. It doesn't start required to be included in anything. I would expect there's going to be residents who, to the extent there are differences might ask that question. So it's in FinCom's yours and FinCom's best interest to explain differences. But I don't think, I don't think when we discussed drafting the bylaw, we anticipated that they would match exactly because we all know there might be differences of opinion. There might be things that change, right. There, there certainly could be circumstances even that, right, develop between the date of the report and the date of town meeting that necessitate differences. It was just trying to prevent the late, um, the late ads of projects that hadn't flushed through the whole process. And there may be, you know, for example, to that last point, there's things there in the JCC. And as you know, the town, um, is joined the Middlesex region, um, emergency communication center. Um, um, and there may come a point as we progress with that timeline that some of the requested capital for furniture and other things may not be warranted. So things could change. And as you know, from our discussions, what, uh, what is I've seen happening, what happened in one town, the reason why we developed a committee like this is because it always came down to the town manager with the assistance of finance director, making all these unilateral decisions on the capital. And my hometown has a capital plan and I think it's valuable to have people that live here and have expertise to give a second set of eyes to some of these things and take a citizen's perspective. So, you know, and it's additional betting, you know, on these requests. I think, again, the reverse, um, in a perfect world, all this process from this point, all the way forward to town meeting should be collaborative. Doesn't mean all the way along that everybody will be aligned in their opinion, either individual members or the whole committee. Um, so, you know, as, as you're sitting here tonight, listening to some of this for the first time, um, if there's something you hear tonight that you feel you need to talk to the chair about that, if we had more information might enlighten us to the point where we might put something different in our report, it'd be better to know that. Exactly. Before we put something in, in writing and out in the public. So. I mean, the town hall is, is a tough one because there's a lot of factors that aren't necessarily on, on there, you know, land, other consideration, where we go, wastewater and, and land that's accessible on a major artery here in town on 20. So a lot of considerations that, that factor into that. Yeah, there's, there are a lot of considerations and we recognize that. I think the, the place I get stuck is when we are going to put forth big dollars that are not all the dollars, right. That we expect to spend, right. And not communicating to the residents, what, what the overall ask might be. Um, and then also not having it phase design and construction. Um, I think it is not a good move when you're spending millions of dollars. So I, I think we told Michael, right. We all know that this building needs work. And really, you know, we commissioned it last year, people to take a look at the building, the envelope, do an assessment of what needs to be done. So we didn't have some of the information to give you the long range, um, forecast and, and, you know, it might be a phased approach if we're going to stay here. So I understand. Okay. All right. You know, before just, just to throw it in, but you know, before the new high school was built, there was a committee and actually I was on it to analyze whether it was better to redo the existing high school and just tear it down and build a new one. I mean, it's a whole committee just for that exact thing. I can see something similar for this building because it's a, it's a big, it's a big issue. And I don't know to the extent that the permanent building committee that we have could do any of that. Uh, I don't know. We, I just know we have a committee and I know our conclusion was to build a new high school, but yeah, I think let's, let's say we got a lot to get through. So let's table it for tonight, but it's, it's definitely a future discussion for us. Um, all right. So wastewater, um, and the fields, I believe are the next two biggest, um, and I'm going to be quiet and let you guys give your opinions and then I'll chime in to the extent I have a different opinion. I mean, I'm still, I think this, the septic system needs to be fixed. I mean, it, it, it's obviously an important issue. I'm still scratching my head about the, the, the fields, um, and whether those need to be done at the same time. It seems logically like they should be, um, is that what we're talking about? Yeah. Did we ever get information about how much we're paying other towns to use their fields? I thought that was an action. No. Um, so why don't we, why don't we separate first? Okay. Let's talk about wastewater first and then make a conclusion on wastewater and then talk about fields. Well, my view is the wastewater I think is important and should be high. Um, again, to me, it's just a matter of economies. I mean, if you're going to be doing that, it doesn't make sense to do the fields at the same time. And that's what I don't understand. Yeah. Liz, yeah, no, I agree. Wastewater needs to be high. We've identified it's, it's been a problem for some time. I think we might pull and take care of it. And I mean, it's wastewater. It's not like it's, you know, a lawn sprinkler system or something, but I agree if the fields feel should be part of that, you know, solution. But at the same time, what I wasn't clear on is how much are we paying out? So are there operating costs that are going out the door and to the extent of how much, because I think that's further motivation to make, I think there's, I think there's a few open questions on the fields piece and that's why I wanted to separate them. And, um, I just, I want to, I want to close out on the wastewater, right? So wastewater has to get done one way or another, whether it's a septic system or a wastewater facility redo, right? DEP, mass DEP has said, you're done, right? You need to stop trucking. You need to get this fixed. So we don't, I don't think there's really much of any choice in that. Arguably there might've been a choice between septic and wastewater, but I believe we asked a question of Tom Holder about that. And my, my read of that was that rehabbing the wastewater plant was both more expensive and not necessarily going to get us, um, anything additional. At some point there had been a discussion about whether or not you could hook up, um, the homes in the Dudley Pond area. Yeah, but they would need additional flow than what it has today. So that's not necessarily a solution to that problem. Um, I think we're at a point where we have, we have to do the septic, um, and comply with mass DEP. And there also is a cost we've been paying for trucking waste off of the site. The reason I'm doing that is because it was less expensive than fixing this problem, but we don't have a choice, right? We've been, we've been told by the state we need to fix it. So Brian, I have really just two questions. One is, uh, mass DP has been requiring the town to do this for at least several years. And so one question would be if we didn't fund this in fiscal 27, because it's just not far enough along, or it may not be far enough along by the time it gets to town meeting, uh, for the voters to be comfortable that they know what the project is and the amount is accurate. Uh, would mass DP allow this, allow the town to continue for one more year with some statement by the town manager that, that there appears to be total understanding and subject to town meeting vote that it'll get done, but we just need more time. Um, so I just want to understand, are we literally at the end of the rope where there's some punitive something or other is going to happen to the town if it doesn't get this project funded and completed in fiscal 27? And then secondly, I had asked a couple of times now, and so far I haven't gotten a response, whether, uh, the town engineer, I've asked it through Tom Holder, whether the town engineer has a, um, a scope of work again, so that we could understand, uh, what, what that $2 million pays for how much contingency that just began at a granular enough level that we can be comfortable. Um, I'm, I'm, I have a total favorable view of the town engineer who I don't know that, uh, she's pursued this option versus what would have been, at least as noted in the last couple of warrants, a $5 and a half million upgrade of the existing facility. So absolutely I'm supportive and absolutely agree with all of you that it's got to get done. Um, I just want to know that, that, that, that we at least have asked that that's, you know, what is the scope? And, uh, thus far I haven't gotten anything back to that question. Um, and, um, I won't get into the fields other than to say in that same question I asked, uh, do you have a site plan that would, um, I went on the web myself and looked at an aerial to see where the existing septic facility is or a septic facility and where it was in proximity to the fields. And so I simply said, well, can you just delineate what is going to be disrupted on the fields that would, would require what land disturbance is going to be required to build out this traditional septic system. So we could be in a position then to evaluate, do the fields really have to get done now? If it, if it's a, if it's a five foot trench, you know, that goes through part of the grass versus, is it going to involve ripping up, you know, the, the ball fields themselves, the dirt fields? I have no idea. Um, and, uh, I got, I got a little bit of an answer back from Tom Holder that, that led me to believe that it wasn't necessarily going to be a major land disturbance, but again, I have no idea. So I simply said, can the town engineer just do a site plan and just demark the area? Um, the second thing I found, which I'm prone to do research when I have nothing else to do, uh, and, and I don't, I don't spend a lot of time with AI. It just happened to pop up on my Google and I'm doing a traditional Google searching was AI came up and said, uh, not good idea to build septic facilities underneath, uh, baseball fields because of the compaction of the soil, et cetera, et cetera. It doesn't allow water to, you know, kind of prickly through. So I, I simply copied that and sent it along to Tom and said, could you ask the town engineer, are, are we even going to get the people to do this? And then, and when he responded, that's when he said, well, I don't think this project is going to disturb the plane, the baseball fields. There's two of them. Uh, in fact, one, they're proposing to relocate to a different corner, which led me to believe that whatever disturbance is going to occur in what is now a grassy area in the outfield, which doubles as a potential doubles as a soccer field. Um, but even that, um, I I'm curious what happens if there's a problem with the leaching fields, if that's where they go and you got to dig up, you've got to dig up the outfield. Are we talking about another whole field project? So I, I just want a better understanding of how much thought has gone into the future of something that fails on the septic system, if you put it underneath the field. Um, and so, cause I don't have any of that. I'm, I, I wouldn't be prepared to, even though I'm, I'm, I'm all for saying we got to do something. Um, I'm just not prepared to say, let's move this forward now until we get some of those questions answered, which means we may simply have to say in our report, we all think this has to get done. We just don't have enough information to tell you that it's got to be done at that price in fiscal 27. Um, is just kind of how I'm seeing it. Now, if we get more information in the next, our next meeting that answers some of those questions, I would get more comfortable. Um, as I have no reason to believe that's not a good number, but, um, I just don't know. So just a quick timeline. When do we submit this Michael? No, just don't. There's a lot of caveats. October 15th is what the bylaw says, but yeah, I mean, we're saying as soon as possible. Yeah. As soon as possible, which. So I feel like, but I mean, I think we're going to have to, and that's why I said at the beginning of the meeting i think we are going to have to say in words something along the lines of we understand this project you know may be necessary and and may be um most efficient to do while doing or right after doing the septic but we feel right we're currently missing which may be resolved by town manager before getting to town meeting i i don't that's i think it's the timeline but when i'm doing like we need more information i'm like well that would be lovely right nobody's saying it wouldn't be but again just trying to couch that up against okay when we actually have to deliver something and recognizing that was a couple months ago so so it's just going to be i think we have to deliver with some caveats and then michael and brian right keveny will decide we've gotten enough information that we feel like we can go forward and put it in and and recommend it or we haven't gotten enough information right or right you know something along those lines but i we have to cut off and say this is where we're at right um so it's like yes to the wastewater in some fashion yeah i'm yes on the wastewater the fields i'm gonna put at maybe yeah right um need more support for necessity yeah efficiency of you know doing at the same time yeah and i'm getting too far off track i'll say instead of out of uh field um you know there we have a moratorium on the turf fields and at some point we're going to have to end up life probably the main field over there and you know people want us to improve the other fields so we one of the fields that we've been told needs work is the uh the baseball fields over there and we're going to look at turning them around so that we can put in the septic and the leach fields and mr holder as he explained to me part of this was you know the economy is a scale that mr carver mentioned it's you know ripping that all up why i sought it and do it and then rip it up again and so i'll work on getting some more yeah he did say in his response to me which i'm happy to share his response i just forwarded it to everybody that on his docket is a hundred thousand dollars to be spent repairing the baseball fields next spring i have no idea what the scope of that is i have no idea if that will put the baseball fields in a condition where uh schools no longer have to rent fields that they're now safe enough to play whether it's the infields until you tear them up and put a septic system under it you you had thousands of not enough yeah i understand and um yeah i have no my own sense was um the schools with presumably input from the facilities department and um recreation had this project out in fiscal 29 or 30 um and that was probably done in a vacuum as to the fact that this other projects were on which again we don't know how much disturbance it's really going to cause um which to me then looks like a convenient way to kind of nudge that project up but uh i posed the question at the last meeting to first being uh uh school business manager you know if this became a priority are you prepared to have some of the other school capital requests that are in this fiscal 27 moved out because there's just not enough room in the budget and there wasn't you know i don't think she had really spent uh time specifically on this field so um i'm not sold on needing i'm sold on needing to do the field at some point uh i'm just not sold on it um for fiscal 27 and um uh so
i'm not sure we're going to end up voting an actual budget for fiscal 27 at some point if we do um as a placeholder i may ask that um members be given the opportunity to pull out an item or two for a separate vote because i'd hate to vote against i hate to vote against a complete capital proposal just because of one item and this happens to be that item for me well that's consistent though with that i think you know i mentioned to you brian separately which is given how many big given given the size of and large projects that we have that are on top of right what was the capital plan um i could see a world in which the septic the things that have to get done are a part of a combined capital vote which is what we typically do right list of we've seen 25 30 projects and the fields are an article right which is separate um and i would say our vote i could see our vote being if we're going to vote a budget in a consistent fashion right so these are the things that go in the capital budget for fy 27 here are these couple of larger projects we're going to vote on separately address it right and i do and i have a note here to make sure we find out if or see if we can find out
the cost of field rental that's happening right now i think another component of of it is michael you just mentioned it if in the cost of doing the septic system i'm going to make up a number there's two hundred thousand dollars to resod reseed after you've torn it up and that could instead be right you could spend 200 and not have fields or you could um offset right that's a cost that you you wouldn't spend because you're going to redo the fields right that's an important piece of information for people too like are we just going to throw 200 000 to put you know throw some grass seed down and then still not have a field we'd rather do something else maybe yeah i would obviously that example i know where i would come out on it but um it's not going to be that easy uh but i'm also focused on how much debt particularly if it's not excluded debt does the town take on having just gone to the town through the special election to get five and a half million dollars removed from levy debt um and so again that may be one of those things that all we can do is explain it in words as to what some of the things that you need to consider are okay um now that we've done those what's our next next i guess hard to read it from we might need to go back to just going down through this and a little bit i think um um yeah i probably just i just probably just let me just go through it then line by line from this point from this point okay some of them will be able to just skip apart going hit going down which ones are i do that eyes first yeah through the highs first all right so let's go down to make sure there's no issues or questions particularly as a voice for the dollars yeah so we're going to start it's it's really an it um and i'm going to look at it in total um for a minute here because i think we have most of the it projects labeled as high three of them labeled as high so cyber security firewall replacement and public safety regional emergency system the amounts on those are 250 100 and 150 respectively um i my personal opinion is those all right need to be done it director told us they need to be done but i also understand why those are critical right to town operations that we have modern cyber security firewall and why the public safety regional emergency system as we heard from the it director and fire and police right is a component of being able to to move forward with our um joint jcc so any any go ahead just give you an excellent hb you could scroll over on the firewall replacement supplement fiscal 24 yeah i put these numbers in columns that either they were included in the five-year plan in those columns or i just put them in a place that i think might make sense but again we'll have to talk about that in this case i put a hundred thousand dollars in the capital stabilization fund as the funding source and the only reason is because my recollection is that one of the uh priorities of using that fund was for supplementing prior appropriations that that was kind of one of its purposes uh but as i said uh ultimately we may not have any real input as to where things actually get funded yeah i'd like to focus right now on yes or no okay and then when we've got our yes and no narrowed down right we can look back at at funding sources i don't know that we necessarily get to make that decision but we'd like to try to fit it in um any any the only lingering question on the public safety regional emergency system was just to triple check that that is not duplicative of anything that's in the police um requests as relates to or the gcc requests yeah i thought when we talked to it we asked that specific question and it was different like it was the it was the technology infrastructure that needed to be built out versus pieces of equipment yeah i believe so but yeah yeah i mean that's really where everybody seemed to come out on that and then while we're there because there's only two more in in it um website redesign and video monitoring we had as medium you know everybody well again the consolidation medium uh myself included um having said that uh having just before i got here watched some news about brown brown university not having video cameras in some of their older spaces um um all it takes is one incident that you wish you had video equipment yeah i i kind of if i get a mulligan i might myself bump that up to high so i have the same that was why i wanted to go over these while we're at it i have the same thought and not just because of brown but also because of things that have happened in our own town where video equipment would have at least um maybe maybe prevented it from happening because people would have known it was being watched but also being able to actually um catch people who are were vandalizing our buildings um so i i would change this to high we have implemented just recently when i first came here we didn't have video surveillance and from all the reasons that you've stated here um to protect the public check staff um variety of reasons um yeah my feeling is i i think i probably put medium on that in the thought that thinking that it could be pushed out a year or so but um kelly i i i don't disagree with with what you just said and and i'm perfectly comfortable having that as a high priority as well i put it in the same category when we were talking about radios right i i don't want to be here and find out that the reason we couldn't know something or stop something is for surveillance any thoughts i mean i nothing less than medium um i do think sometimes if we're using it as a deterrence you know sometimes you know often or you know it's the best defense if you're being a bit proactive there um i guess i'm not clear where we have cameras currently and where we would be in the hallways we'd be back putting new cameras all those bubbles this would be just for this building though um then we're going to be looking at right things there's also a fiber ring project and the idea is at some point all these cameras will be visible through dispatch so if there is an incident somewhere we can call those up so it's we put some thought into this not necessarily the conversation for today but i think it gets back to is it a phased approach this is a phase this is so this is phase two i don't think you can see it um no i have to go into the other tab yeah you can it's up in the top if you look on it right now so if you look in the excel
not that long ago we didn't have cameras even on the exterior of some of the buildings and there's been a phase to add some not all right um so this is this is another phase of that project okay so i i could be swayed to make it high uh again wouldn't want to bless the medium but if we have to pick and choose and i'm not quite sure where it still might you know i think there's some other things that are more immediate need i'm gonna put it on a yes and leave it at at medium it's not huge no it's not huge dollars but i'm gonna i'm gonna here's what i'm well you have it pulled in from another so i'm gonna just say medium high to make me come back to it but um there have been instances in town where had cameras been in place that yes we would yeah it might have been a good deterrence for if something's happening let me ask a administrative question of our zoom participants how is the audio quality carol and brian it's good well good great thank you it was better last night for the flight board audio is perfect sorry okay thank you so we spent a lot of time we did a couple of dry runs in here with the audio um with it and i met today with wake cam and it and facilities about how we're going to improve in the former coa for future meetings there um and what i've been informing the madam chair about is apparently they are over at this new coa and they can't get the microphone working so i have my it director coming in to go over there i was going to leave go over try and assist there's a panel on the wall it's it's a nice system but i don't think they maybe receive an instruction on how to use it so we have some people did they have to shut down their meeting no no apparently everybody can hear them um online it's just they have a big enough crowd and they can't hear all the way in the back of the room so they need to get somebody to activate the speakers in the back oh i see okay all right thank you okay um website redesign and migration we have as medium and i don't have any reason to change that um michael's gonna be like no i'm just wondering how much i know it's it's been a in there for that right now yeah um that may be something that does change because um without getting into too much detail we currently use civic plus and they are ender-lifing the version so they're they're doing some level of upgrades that we're working on currently so there may be that number may be revised but yeah well we're gonna do what we're gonna do if that's something that you revise that's something you revise i would just i would i would urge and i know we just got an it director there's a lot of projects outstanding and so if it's end of life there's not a lot you can do about it but i would encourage making the way through the it projects right before we we give too many more um and the vendor is going to do the upgrading migration and um a management analyst communication coordinator is working with the conversion of the content over so um as you said some of these numbers may change between now and town meeting solid that's another question of the town manager uh casey has to run out can you go to the um field maintenance line item which is right after dpw since we didn't get a um yeah cip from your department we just want to see if you're expecting you're gonna ask for the 100 grand that was in the plan so you know it's funny i had my time here and my time my other communities did not submit a town manager's cip request however i if you recall two town meetings ago uh mr bernstein got up and asked about you know could we commit monies he wanted to create a separate committee and we as we went into last year's budget i worked with mr keveney and we we believed we had enough money to start putting money towards fields maintenance because mr doucet um working with ms bernard felt if we had a certain amount we could start upgrading some of the uh you know sometimes especially in road maintenance you do best first you take the fields that are close to being good and you fix those they're kind of a low hanging fruit before you do a complete makeover so to go out and fix some of the um uh the sprinkler systems and make some of my repairs so we committed to doing that and i committed to trying to put a hundred thousand in year over year over year uh i left the finding the funding source to mr keveney but i can giving us a verbal cip that yes you want a hundred thousand dollars and you want to request a hundred thousand for each of the five years yes not increase but just a hundred thousand yes i i agree we have to bring up these fields if we're going to shut down some turf fields we're going to have to have these other fields we're just flying in the dark so no and so yeah well i normally would say that that's i can get you and then you know i can put something in if that helps no i we can add it in um i think my feeling on that is well there are other field right things that we have questions on and i would put it a low priority i think a hundred thousand dollars is short money to try and approve improve the condition of fields that we do have and arguably is what we should have been you know should have been doing all along i do have a little bit of a question on how much of it is capital versus should be part of an operating maintenance budget and whether or not it belongs here or it belongs as um additional money in i think dpw cares for the fields they do maintenance i to answer your question i think this is more sticking money in to make those upgrades of the irrigation systems and things where we can the ones that they just do set help target some so gave him this money to go out and make those improvements and then i agree the operating year-over-year maintenance and things that should be in their operating budget so i don't know for example a hundred thousand that tom holder referred to is going to be used to repair the baseball fields of high school i don't know if that's the source of that money or not but no but i saw i mean whether or not i saw somewhere a list of what was done with a hundred thousand given last year and i actually thought it was a pretty extensive list compared to what we pay for on a lot of other things i thought they they managed to improve quite a few um situations so i we had we had two people uh even though we didn't we didn't have uh we weren't sure it was going to be requested we had two members put this as a low priority one member put it as a high priority and uh myself and you kelly didn't rank it because we weren't sure it was going to be in the plan um i hear you saying that at the moment relative to other things you would rank it uh low no i rank it high oh you would rank it high yeah because i think it's what my opinion is it's what we've been asking or what i've been asking the town to do all along which is to look for the small dollar ways you can improve things before we get to uh two million dollar replacements right of fields okay so you're high i'm gonna i'm gonna say um medium uh i i'm on board with needing to spend money on the fields for the reason you just stated which on a consolidated basis i would make this a medium item just to be able to keep it in the context of all the other projects okay so we got the answer that it should be in there as requested and i actually put the number in and uh now we have a ranking for it and uh i'll go back and update the master file okay thank you for taking that out of order yeah we're taking that out of order but i'm i'm not going to rank it i'm not going to give it a yes or no because we still have a lot of highs to do um back to the highs okay so we're in police we're gonna do police fire and jcc um the in-car replacement and computer replacement was because uh but you're the police chief had it in the wrong year you actually have my 28th that's what's happening yep so i think see we have traffic signals dash cams let's do those two first um so that was 50 and 100. anybody have any disagreement with high on both of those no yeah okay good all right then furniture and radio system upgrades let's do furniture first we have low as anybody yeah i can't of all the things we have on the list it's like as long as we don't create uh i mean i ranked it low but as long as we don't create uh medical issues that cost the town a lot of money because people are sitting in chairs that uh like these missing leg no i i again for now relative to everything else it's okay i go with no and the radio system and equipment upgrades we have as high yeah and i think the only issue there was the uh i mean on the plus side the chief said the police chief said that um he either had already for fiscal 27 applied for a grant state or federal i don't remember um and uh i'm assuming that he would intend to do the same in the out years we're just looking at 27 but uh it wasn't as clear to me as you move out in the five-year plan which we're not doing right at the moment so i'll mention that when we get to but for fiscal 27 sounds like they need this to make sure everything's up to snuff when they make this transition over to the yeah one thing i have a note on though is i would like it if and i can send an email to police fire schools and i.t i would like to see the comprehensive plan of what we're spending on all components of the radio system including radios how many radios is that gonna i i'm feeling a little discombobulated about how many different places there's money related to i think all related to similar things maybe not the same things and just understanding right it's 200 000 a year because we're buying we're phasing in enough you know a certain number of people per year and eventually we're you know at the end of five years everybody's going to have new equipment or is you know is there different components happening in each year so well i think to your point if you tack on dpw police and then the school radio system you're looking at you know it's over just shy of 700 million so but then there's additional and there's additional monies and those were phases right like i remember schools saying schools was phasing but i'm not sure if police they were getting recommendations from yeah police so and then we all talked about it should own this or someone consolidated yeah i just would like to see the i would hate to see this in the plan as four different requests when they're all related to this and say it's this request and here's the bend of the departments who are going to have pieces of it i think that's i for one again it's just again doing diligence um i looked at another community that just announced a federal grant for 43 handheld radios and i think i worked it out it was like eight thousand something dollars a radio i have no idea what one of these handheld radios costs walkie-talkies whatever i would just like to know i assume there's a state contract of some sort that they use to purchase them but um just from a diligent standpoint you know those are big numbers i'd like to be able to say well that's 60 radios or 40 radios yeah i agree that's the same the same feeling one last point in that but also if schools not complain was that they have radios that don't talk to each other the frequencies are not correct so we definitely want to make sure that doesn't we don't go buy this whole slew of new radios and run into the same problems yeah hopefully they're buying all through the same procurement process see this is where you would follow oh yeah yeah although cursing was talking to a vendor so yeah i i will send i keep making more notes of like they may not have this information but i'm going to continue to let me write the report but i'm going to ask it okay fire uh and apart fire department yeah fight uh yeah fire department um so the ambulance at 6 15 i think we already talked a little bit about what the basis for that was we have dive equipment uh it's that at 25 we have the shift officer command vehicle at 80 000. so why don't we do those three so i don't any disagreements on the two highs the ambulance and the dive equipment no no and brian keveney can i ask a question on the on the ambulance if go ahead is that something we we typically we have it in debt we would typically do that in debt and then the ambulance fund would pay theoretically pay the debt service or is that a the ambulance fund makes a contribution to the general fund which kind of covers the debt service so their current contribution every year annually to the general fund is for an indirect charge to really just help support the general fund budget in addition to that they're paying the debt service on the 950 000 truck we bought back in like 2016 or 17. so this particular one here i believe last year was less than the 6 15 and it's we had it in the plan as you see by levy debt because the ambulance fund we rated it down to the point where it was too low we already have a five-year plan to allocate a lot of his capital into it so okay to answer your question we have done that in the past and we are doing that but this one isn't mapped in to take debt service out at this point so i said another way we we don't think the ambulance fund can support the additional that can can support the additional debt on top of what it's already giving to the general fund and on top of uh the debt service on the fire truck yeah for just give me one second so be about so it'll be 6 15 so i mean if this is a five year if we do five years in this one i don't think bond council will let us do seven but if we did five it'd be about 123 000 a year just in principle alone and so with principle you're probably talking maybe 150 160 000 that might be just a bit too much yeah maybe down the road we can do that and we can do that down the road that the ambulance fund can pay more but adding another 150 they're already paying around i believe about 450 000 to the general fund annually to throw on another 150 maybe not for 27 but maybe we can map it in for 28 in 29 particularly as you heard from brian we're heading into the override years and we need to look at every penny that affects levy debt so it is possible in a couple years we could switch that to being funded by the ambulance fund if their revenues go up and they are going up we could possibly do that yeah we we heard from the fire chief too though there is some downward pressure on their on their fees again right from uh medicare so i don't i don't want to count on that um right i don't think anybody can count on it it'd be nice if it happens but i don't think you can count on it the problem with this is that we appropriated in 27 it's a matter of time even get the truck we're looking at like two years now i believe we just got the ambulance truck and we waited over two years so we actually you don't want to get in the case where you're issuing debt you're paying debt for something you haven't even got so we may be issuing this debt i don't know when it depends upon when neil thinks we're going to get it from the manufacturer so at this point it's still going to be levy debt yeah so we'd approve it but not necessarily issue it until we get closer to when it's going to be delivered yeah because there's like a two there's over a two year wait yeah okay all right thank you
all right dive equipment no one had any any concerns on that it was a small office i can't it's 25 000
okay shift officer command um command vehicle again i think it ended up medium in my mind probably others just because it i suppose there's a life safety element to it that if that trips officers gotta have a dependable vehicle to arrive on scene of some incident but i guess my view is relative to the other things that that just seem one notch down is kind of how i looked at it i agree i thought it was something you could probably defer to you but if they came back and told the town manager it's got 135 000 miles it's on its last legs yeah we're never sure when we turn the key it's going to start and then i think we'll leave that becomes probably to the town manager yeah um if that needs to be modified okay um okay i want to do since we did police and fire i want to do jcc which is down why i put it at the others am i missing when we did jcc think did we already oh because it was separated okay never mind no no it was it was i got it sorry because i just screamed nope you're right okay so we're going down the list um we're at facilities so the first one is cpw facilities rehab and upgrades i don't have an issue with medium here yeah medium he's right uh transfer station low five hours no issue with that either i think we've heard general agreement from tom holder who's trying to shift ownership over to facilities um and from michael feya that while it needs to be done they agree that probably makes more sense to wait for the town-wide trash pickup study to be completed before worrying about spending more money that the transfer fund doesn't have yeah yeah um all right i've already moved on sorry um public safety building hvac upgrade when much was this this was 250. i don't remember um michael having sort of strong like this one's bro i heard more about the school's broken hvacs than i did about or call more of school's recovery yeah my sense is he's still i mean he's made great progress getting a lot of problems completed but i think he still has yet to go and i have no doubt that if something really really needed the attention he would he would highlight it um and um i think this one was just in the plan and i'm sure over time money has to be spent as we see later in his five-year plan request just kind of town-wide roofs or whatever yeah so i kind of put it in that category until someone tells us you know it's broken yeah can't be fixed yeah agreed all right all right high school so now we're down to facilities that are school projects um why don't we try to do let's do highs first so we had the middle school rooftop air handling units and exhaust fans as high and that was 500 000 any degree it should be high any brian anything from you no um and then let's do let's do the safety and security um communications first because we already talked about it on police and fire um any i know we we still i have to make a note yeah we just need more money i think but we that request should come from kirsteen directly to uh cover whatever they thought they needed to do and i think it was second and last phase um and again if we don't have that we would simply in the text of the report say yeah we think this is an area that should be done all at one time yeah just given the risk inherent risk not doing it okay so i'm going to put it as yes but i have a note to she was going to get us a better number for the total right um and then the pre-k elementary literacy curriculum we have is high um i mean my feeling on that was that i want to make sure we're encouraging the submission of grant funding and i don't want to lose grant funding because we don't appropriate the amount of money right needed to do the other side and i think that was why i asked the question specifically of were you going to do this right do we need to do this regardless of whether we got the grant and the answer was yes um any and just as a reminder uh the schools did get the grant of 300 some thousand but they can't access the grant unless the town matches right so i think from my perspective that put in a high category um albeit as you heard me ask about as i did a couple years ago in the math curriculum still not quite comfortable that it's a capital item per se but um i think at least precedent was established a little bit by the fincom by approving the math curriculum and it's again it's needed and their operating budget is not likely in a place for fiscal 27 to be able to absorb this cost so i uh i've ranked it high which i think everybody did maybe for other reasons but um yeah i would feel differently um if we go to do this next year and there's another request for curriculum surprise right that wasn't in the five year i think i made pretty clear my opinion that if these are things that we need we got to at least try to plan for them right um not the year that they're happening but and they'll have as you heard brian kevin say for a bunch of years starting fiscal 20 there's likely overrides needed so there'll be um opportunities for the school to make the case for their operating budgets and again my instinct is this more belongs in an operating budget but for now it i i think there's components of it that are operating when you have to replace you know the consumables i'm not my and i wasn't necessarily right um supportive of it as capital when it was the math curriculum but i was later convinced i wasn't there for that actual vote um i think the the foundation of setting it up and the material everything that comes with getting it implemented right does have a long user life has a longer user life so i can see the argument that it's capital um i just it's more intangible capital and tangible capital but nonetheless i agree that it i mean to the extent has that a useful life if you will i mean it does seem capital i guess i'd be concerned to what you were saying kelly if they came back with the same number next year for the same thing well wait a minute we already or another it's it's other curriculum and the part that i and i mentioned it to the schools when they were here that was a specific and it wasn't christine wasn't here so you can't write but it was a specific request and question of the schools of how many other curriculums need to be replaced and when should they be in the plan should they be in the plan and they're not in the plan right and we went and applied for a grant so clearly we knew we needed it right it's just that's the part that bothers me like i want to see these planned out if they are if they're needed not coming in at the last and she may come back to us and say um oh i was just focused on fiscal 27 we've talked about and we need yeah this one on fiscal 29 i mean i think we've set the tone for that is changing next year yeah for more information you need to have more comprehensive plans so all right let's um let's do the mediums for schools um and just i'm gonna go through these quickly run through them and i'm gonna sort of collectively if anybody has different opinions with them being mediums so high school building improvements was 87 000 um the district-wide repair replacement of dryways and sidewalks was 444 000 elementary installation of hvac air conditioning was 540 000 yeah i think that one as an example there was an overarching acknowledgement that the schools are in the process for long-term planning study that encompasses what they want to do with elementary schools generally which i'm assuming will come to a head sometime in the next 12 months and um again you'd hate to prove and spend money on something that unless it's actually needed today you might make kind of like transfer station thing you'd rather have that benefit the knowledge of that so some of these are things that um and just for the record i am the school representative on this committee but as i heard kelly say to the finance committee when i asked the question uh to represent fincom's point of view on this committee the answer was um i'm your eyes and ears and i'll report back but i'm a member of this committee and i kind of feel the same way as to school items so i'm not necessarily necessarily here to advocate uh for the school items and so there are a number of things here that you know repairing roadways and things or whatever the reason i say at the very outset of this conversation i think i would limit my focus generally to high impacts to high priority stuff and if the roadways need a couple of blacktop patches to get through another year until we have a better sense of what the town's overall financial picture is looking like and what this elementary school study comes out and says so a number of these i ranked medium with the thought that i'd be prepared to nudge some of them out and also to make room for these two high priority requests that weren't in the plan uh sometimes you have to right yeah pick and choose i don't disagree brian but i would say um i was the elementary installation and i have to be careful if it's installation of new hvac or if it's replacement of of broken hvac i could and the town manager can make this change if it's replacing hvac so that whatever i'll use claypit as an example can be used as the summer right for the summer programs right then i have a different opinion than if it's adding hvac where there wasn't hvac before um so that's one i could i could probably be convinced if it was there was an imminent need um in a particular building but otherwise i agree with with what you're saying like i don't think we can completely stop if something's broken and michael said right i think he said claypit right there was you know four years on the roof but one right one working or something like that where i wouldn't want to be in a situation where there's no working um and then waylon although this will date me but we didn't have air conditioning in our schools or our high schools so yeah or my house yeah i and that was the other i agree with you and i thought the same thing because we're not texas yeah it doesn't it doesn't date you brian because the same was true in my school in fact i think it still is true today in the school i went to so um but i sometimes when it says hvac air conditioning i have to ask the question is it strictly air conditioning or is it the the air handlers right that are necessary for heat to move right so it's quality that differentiation i'm sure everything these days is tied to enhanced learning all i thought about was getting out of that hot building we used to have classes outside when it's hot yeah and this but that's my other reason like if a if a building's being you know you didn't go to school in the summertime typically if the building's being used in the summertime yeah i don't know for another purpose that's that's that's can be a priority okay whalen high school and middle school ceiling and wall repairs any concerns with that as medium yep okay um middle school roadways and sidewalks we also have as medium 431 and district-wide flooring um 215 um so i'm i'm okay with all of those being medium i would just ask to the extent we slot these right if there's room in and i don't know that there will be in free cash or surplus capital that we consider we go back and consider you know tackling you know a couple other projects just to to not you know take so many away we do have five school buildings right and they're worth quite a bit right in total and to only be spending right we should we should have some consideration to how much it costs to maintain all those buildings right no and again the schools have over the years have made the point that that unfortunately they've had to remove from their operating budget a lot of repair dollars that um that need to be redirected to the educational aspects um and so they're they're through that deferred maintenance it's led to probably more of a need for some of these things and so uh i suspect uh if they had their druthers they would be looking for even more money but um again i'm just i think at the end of the day we just need to every year has its own context yeah what we're looking out at is now finally to become i think clearer to those that serve in town and town management that uh we really need to be carefully thinking through all of these things and deal with those things that really have high impact need to get done uh maybe flexible but just be careful which is what i think we're trying to do you actually raised a good point um brian that i add to my note um i do would like to have an opinion from michael on faya on maintenance budget right both town and schools and whether or not um there's a an issue there from a deferred maintenance not not capital but just maintaining things and is there something that needs to be addressed and i know it's not you know given being up against the the levy not a good time but i i do struggle with funding capital while underfunding maintenance and so i would like an opinion from him on are we are we shorting maintenance and then that's ending up costing us right multiple multiples of that from a capital standpoint because if it is i think we have to it's my same comment as i had on the fields like if there's short money that can avoid large-scale problems we should be addressing that first yeah i mean i think i agree the having been on the budget working group the schools in their at least very preliminary iteration of the fiscal 27 budget did include a a good substantive number for building repairs they've included that in their budget maybe not at the same level that have been currently in their preliminary budget fiscal 27 but as the school year goes on and they they you know like last year uh special education very quickly was a million four over what was there to fund it in the budget so they had to put on a spending freeze and my understanding is one of the first places i've heard the superintendent say that's one of the first places they go to grab appropriation out of their total budget is building repairs and and he acknowledges that and it's always a pillar of their this presentation is maintaining facilities so i think they all agree with what you just said i think they're gonna they're trying again in the fiscal 27 budget to ensure that there's enough money in there to start to address it the other thing i'll say is during one of our working group meetings and if carol martin's still on she certainly can speak to it because i thought it was she that brought it up was um if there was um sufficient deferred maintenance that is more repair type maintenance that typically wouldn't appear in a capital budget um given where the operating budget is looking like is there some rationale for bundling um repair dollars and turning them into a capital budget request um and i think that's what i heard her asking and and i have my accountant's view of that which is operating expenses shouldn't be funded through the capital budget um but for now i think the schools totally agree with you it's just i think they've had trouble not using those monies yeah i and this has come up before and it's not within my purview but this is you know the discussion before has been structurally changing right where the maintenance dollars right live right do they live in unclassified and we've done this with utilities right we've done it with other things so that that's not a decision that gets to be made anymore right maintenance comes maintenance comes out of a maintenance budget and it doesn't get commingled with other things because it's just it's hard it has historically been hard and i don't think it gets any easier going forward okay um so we're down to
water fund other than mwra right yeah i think i i had that i had a little lower than most everybody else had high and my recollection is that tom holder said that particular water line has been failing they've had a number of failures on it and it really needs to get done and i think they already spent their design money from fiscal 26 so uh i had no problem with it others giving it a high ranking
pretty sure everybody else yeah when i hear that there's failures in water means
actually it was you and we have that reversed i had it as low you had a medium i guess i rate it high we had three highs and two mediums which turned into a high but it is i guess my rationale then for taking it high was it was i'm mentioning that it's been failing and i i agree it's a water main you know you get water means breaking wreak havoc and so
many people spending 38 million on yeah to get quality water having it go through a pipe with holes in it no thanks um i wish they didn't cost as much as they do but all right and then there's vehicle at medium
um now that's coming those are all brian kevenny you taught you said this before but i think in an email right water water retained earnings isn't sufficient right anymore we have to go to borrowing that is correct there is no use of retained earnings for the operating budget or capital budget
except okay so but if it's borrowing we expect that then the rates have to support it yes right right yeah yeah this borrowing for the benefit of brad and liz and the public is uh is outside the levy to the discussion uh so it's town debt but it's water funded brian do you brian o'herley do you know have you watched dpw have they voted on or on yes is it dpw or the water like have they voted on their projects for the water fund and yes uh tom holder met with us before board of public works had reviewed the capital requests with him he went through the these requests they approved them just for fiscal 27 he didn't ask them for a vote um subsequent four years yeah i this is i only i just struggle with water only because ultimately they will vote it at town meeting but they the they have to decide whether or not that can go right if they can manage it within the rate with and what they're gonna have to do to rates so uh ultimately yes and and if it can't get covered with rates which is an issue the finance director has um is that that could lead to a town general fund subsidy because the debt has to be paid um they've historically brian correct me if i'm wrong they've historically been able to pay all their debt service you've never since you've been here you've never had to provide the water fund with a subsidy correct uh no but dor is threatened in the past that the uh the water fund would need a subsidy from the general fund it almost happened with the fiscal 26 recap we had to have a summer meeting with the dor in the board of public works um that was based more on the level of retained earnings it was based on the fact that they needed a nine or ten percent increase in revenue and they did not have a rate increase and when they voted that in june i immediately called dor because i knew dor would have a real problem with that so dor agreed that they will go along with the rate increase as long as zero the dbw or board of public works claimed that there was going to be an escalation in billings well we haven't seen that through five months so dor sort of gave them a pass um and did not require a subsidy but dor can step in in december when we're doing the tax recap and mandate a subsidy in the form of free cash or tax from the general fund and that's exactly what we're trying to avoid but that's an issue you've been uh focused on now for a couple years anyway and and we'll continue to focus on but um yeah but ultimately um they've always managed to cover that through setting proper rate levels i would i would disagree with that they've been able to cover make their payments obviously they've made their payments they've had enough revenue or cash or fund balanced in my view they have not set rates properly um enterprise fund they were four million dollars today they're 1.4 yeah i stand corrected they they've covered it but not necessarily out of uh current watery water revenues yeah that's a better way of saying it yes madam chair yes carol thank you carol martin and like remember the select board i am also the liaison to the board of public works and the water commissioners and their philosophy you asked a question about whether this truck could this vehicle could be funded through um retained earnings or through um debt and they have uh have historically followed a process and i believe just voted that they will fund via debt all capital projects that are greater than um five five thousand dollars and i forget how many years five years so this truck i believe that they would be anticipating this vehicle would be in um debt yeah i understand that carol i think i would just comment and it's similar to a discussion we had about the roads a few years ago if you start doing everything with that that works at the beginning right as as a you have an amortized value that you've got to get into rates but if you you know if you're all your trucks are over five years and you've been putting them in as debt for five years after five years you're going to have the same amount of money that you need to get out of rates right as if you had never um if you had never funded as debt so it becomes becomes a problem pretty quickly if if you can't cover it in rates and just sharing their philosophy yeah i got it but i think at the moment anyway brian you're maybe for different reasons you're you're on the same page with the board of public works as to these couple items for fiscal 27 funding them through debt yeah i mean i i did this plan last year i mean i've done the last seven years of them and i told um dpw probably i don't know three years ago when cliff lewis was the chair that everything going forward on capital needed to be from um debt in no more use of retained earnings there was there was one year we did use retained earnings a couple years back only because um they were getting reimbursed 139 000 for lead pipe so since they were getting that reimbursement from the state we did use retained earnings so tom holder and i made it clear to cliff lewis a few years back that it would be absolutely no more use of retained earnings in the capital budget uh so everything everything probably three four years ago was always by debt but to kelly's point uh uh if you think about how the town treats police cars which i don't know what a police car costs 50 grand it used to be 50 it's probably those those those are run through the operating budget because they get replaced pretty frequently and so while i i think you're talking about using retained earnings they could pay it out of water revenue just by you know they'd have to increase the rates a sufficient amount to cover the cost of the truck at sixty thousand dollars in a single year right so those are your three choices you borrow it yeah yeah we've done that in the past actually we've used water revenue in the past to do that in in you know probably prior to 2020 we did that but to carol's point the board of public works did recently vote as a policy matter from their board they didn't they didn't want they wanted everything capital related to be borrowed yeah they also they also voted as a policy to use retained earnings to fund their operating budget which we're absolutely opposed to okay all right well that's that's outside our yeah we're gonna purview but sorry we spend time on our monday so all right uh we have two projects left uh wastewater low pressure low pressure sewer was it replacement yeah this is this is the design of the the line that runs up and down route 20 and uh yeah different places that's been there for 15 years maybe plus or minus yeah and uh i think what tom holder suggested was that at some point in the next x number of years route 20 is going to get ripped up and put back together again uh hopefully at the state state's expense and he wanted to be in a position to have both designed the replacement and uh actually be prepared to have the money to construct the replacement uh and and so i think that's intelligent way to approach it and i also generally don't say no when somebody says they need to do something related to the sewer because i don't want the implications of that not happening okay and then the transfer station was duplicate this was duplicated we've already the garage replacement we've already talked about it um yeah and they uh here um the only other discussion point is that um in the request that came in through the dpw and through facilities so it was duplicated and so obviously we knocked out one of those anyway we're going to defer it secondly but thirdly it really is a transfer station enterprise fund expense and so as a budgetary matter it really needs to be reflected which is why i put it down in the enterprise fund line item so when we put our report together depending on what tables we have that's what the finance committee did with it yep so i was wrong because we we started below dpw um maintenance yeah so field maintenance we agreed um i believe you're going backwards well i we because we started so i just want to go back up to the top and do the rest of good roads yeah so roads sidewalks are not high on anybody's list yeah so roads we said i'm gonna i'm gonna put that at a maybe because it was a question of is there enough philosophically how do you versus something yeah how do the other two of you feel about the concept of each and every year they make an ask for money for the roads and they ultimately use it and i suppose you live on a road that gets redone you you like it but uh how do you feel about picking up i think budgetary constraints i think you must have to take a pause i feel like every the 38 million really i know we talked about this is going to be its own kind of standalone item it's just makes a lot of these seem like nice to have but i agree you know i'd rather maintain something you can't buy a partial vehicle but maybe again there's a partial budget so maybe don't do all the maintenance yeah let's i'd like to take another look at what tom sent dollars wise where and just kind of map out where that runs out like based on his historical spend brian right and include chapter 90 and include chapter 90 and like this does what he have get him through and it's tough because it's not half years because they don't they don't do roads all year long but does it get him through half of fy27 and then there's another budget gets him to the right end of the fiscal year because i don't see any benefit in having x ahead of yeah just kind of what's been like yeah and i i don't see a benefit of that because we're paying that gets paid for right in advance of being used so i don't i don't see a benefit to that um and then sidewalk would love sidewalks to be designed and constructed but it's again i think on a relative basis i might suspect people just said relative to all this others yeah stuff it's a nice down in whalen there are three sidewalks i mean no yeah again the only i'm being considered yeah the only exception i guess to that would be if there were something that um you know was uh safety related um
handicap accessibility related that uh you know was important again to protect human travel uh and and uh but so maybe through more detail there there could be a rationale but i think as a just generally improving sidewalks that are passable but maybe not in the best of shape um didn't seem as high a priority as most of the other requests yeah the only exception i would say is i think you think i remember this except i dropped my kids off at school but i know if you're within a certain mileage of the school you can't get the bus and you either have to be dropped off or walk and that might be the only exception where i'm like okay those in decent shape people actually have to use them you know a good chunk of the year yeah i but that's i live within that mileage of a school and there is no world in which they're giving me a third they're i'm getting a sidewalk okay yeah that's that's i will leave i i would say given the priorities we leave it at no and this is if it's a healthy issue right that michael and and brian um can reinsert it i think we have to have some lows because i think you said at the i put every vehicle as a lot is there a lot yeah and so i struggle a little bit with that because i i agree with you general but i also don't want i'm not going to say that just having a low but no no rationalize your way on that on that on the dpw vehicles i do the the heavy equipment right where tom is saying right this is breaking down really i can't use it right they have to deliver their service right they've been what we're paying dpw to be there and not carry out services that they need to carry out so i would i would say on the equipment right i might go back to tom and say right you've got let's look at what he has for dollars right yeah my logic was there's a lot of them some of the lows will make it some of them won't so yeah none of the none of the lows will make it we will run out of money before so i would say the highs make it in media some of the mediums will make it in i don't know that the lows will make it before i forget can i just make an administrative note here to the rest of you um i inadvertently put uh the comment there moved to fiscal year 30 on the wrong item it belongs on the street sweeper okay i've changed that in my file but just if anybody get got confused by that okay i agree with what you just said as to the particular equipment requests that he's got here based on his discussion with us most of these things sounded like there was a pretty darn good reason why they he needed to move them up i realized he wouldn't have it was to move them up yeah so that's where and i don't know that we're going to be able to completely get through this um tonight without brian you or i going back and sort of reworking the numbers and see where we land but i think there's there's probably room for some of the mediums right to come in i'd start with the highs again depending what your target is the answer is yes i mean we're not eventually we can scroll down to the very bottom where i did a variance comparison to what's in the five-year plan for funding but before you do that um can you just go down a couple the sherman's bridge um the discussion there is um there had been a request for uh in the five-year plan for 630 thousand dollars we understand that if all goes well the state's going to cover that cost and if there's any other additional costs that can't be covered by the state uh tom holder felt that he had uh sufficient excess chapter 90 money that could be used uh the only reason i would need need to discuss was it wasn't he wasn't sure whether uh you needed a appropriation vote at town meeting uh to be able to this goes back to my initial account by accessing both chapter 90 funding generally and whatever program under which the state's going to cover the cost as to whether the town needed to appropriate the money even though the state was ultimately going to pay the cost either through chapter 90 or otherwise the chapter nine i i okay so that that's a question that is we have zero it's likely going to be a zero in what we present well it's my understanding that they they're going to you know in-kind donations of materials and uh their contractors so i i don't know that but i think if we're going to use chapter 90 money or whatever other place the state's providing this money if it's outside chapter 90. so it's just you just want to make sure for town meeting purposes and getting the right action in front of town meeting that it simply not just be zeroed out because the state's going to pay if um you know like like a matchable like a grant situation we had last year with the stormwater asset management fund you know the town had to appropriate the full amount even though we were we had been approved for a grant for 60 percent of the cost and and uh so that's the reason i put it needs discussion here um um stormwater system yeah that one the reason i think it could be pushed out i think it's absolute priority yeah it has to do this stuff but uh and brian kevin you can correct me if i'm wrong they have at least a couple fiscal years worth of unspent appropriation on the open capital list as well as this grant i just mentioned its purpose was to do an asset management study and report on culverts and yeah pipes and things so it kind of made sense to me to maybe just nudge that because he had funding in his request every other year yeah so i was thinking you might nudge that into fiscal 28 so you might have 28 29 each having a request but it wasn't necessarily needed for fiscal 27 because they'd never get around to spending it and probably shouldn't spend a lot of until they get the study done that that was at least my thinking for um but but i think again if we don't comply with the stormwater regs there's bad financial things that can happen to the town yeah so i don't think we have much question we have to do this work question why you said we were going to get out of here at 9 30 tonight but here we are 9 30 yet but it's 8 it's 8 17.
you think my 9 30 was optimistic or i didn't know if that was a typo the other way i thought anyway let's keep going because there's a lot of stuff here i thought i was being optimistic um okay so the rest of them there's radio system upgrades and several vehicles um like i said before i i struggle a little bit because i think when tom asks for vehicles he's been very judicious about moving them around until right he absolutely needs them because they're either in a state of disrepair not being able to be used or you know significant amount of time offline having said that however yeah go back to the street sweeper which once you move the comment to the right place that was something he thought he needed in fiscal 27 and now he's moved that out to fiscal 30 but he's he's he's done free he's done triage and said we'll figure out a way to make that thing so i'm just saying not not everything he asked for absolutely has to be done i i i agree that's an example i just i want to give credit and i you know because he does do that swap versus just asking for it as well i mean maybe i have to go back to him to say you do the fire asking for you get to what do you think is the priority yeah right so he's got the swap loader is 370 and then he's got the john deere loader is 325 and the dump trucks 150 those are the three he's actually asking for right yeah and dollar wise plus or minus it it balanced out with what was in the five-year plan between what he moved out and pulled forward so i think that's what you're pointing out that's part of his thinking but again just because something was in the five-year plan for fiscal 27 doesn't necessarily mean this no i agree it's gonna yeah i think i went medium on it for i guess just the general concept that again if you're if we're tight on budget dollars you push a vehicle out for a year but but to your point if you think he's really been judicious over the years and he really does get the maximum amount of time out of the vehicles then yeah i'll i'll do this right mass come right what what are the implications if these are not replaced each of them are not replaced this year one of them was going to fall apart yeah and so that would be the
and mr time manager you may find when we're done our work you may have a bunch of department in sitting in front of you going through exactly the same process as you've gone through in prior years making their case for why we don't know what we're talking about so sure you're prepared for that but uh i presume this committee gives you some cover
and i apologize for those who may be watching it uh at home um in addition we've had a an audio problem the microphones were locked up and somebody uh we had to get somebody over at the coa for the planning board meeting and then um we the town worked on a joint community statement today with the school department and went out and then we had some technology problems with the third party server posting those to various social media outlets so the reason i keep going in and out is i'm talking to facilities it and a number of different people to get these all resolved sorry but i've been able to hear enough from the hallway you know get our report no i appreciate your understanding that
what we do here is it's fluid you know we we get when there's always something going on in town well what we i envision doing right michael's we're going to give you our ultimate determination of high things that we think need to be funded yes and then the mediums which we think if there's room they can be funded and lows we we don't think um should be a priority um right now so would it be again i just keep control of the spreadsheet what you could do is send me this back after the meeting yeah your sidebar notes yeah question would it be helpful for me this is brian kevin's standard form template would it be helpful for me on this particular one for fiscal 27 to resort uh the capital requests into sort of the high ones at the top of the table and and then everything following that or just keep it to keep it the way it is keep it i think keep it the way it is for now so i will finish putting these in sort of my next column of my spreadsheet i'll be able to pivot do a pivot table off of okay then the problem with this spreadsheet is that because there's breaks in it you can't easily filter off of it you can't there's you can't do a lot of functionality off of it so i'd like to be able to do it a little bit okay i think we've been through them all brian you mentioned going to the bottom right which was sort of looking at the variance to plans right and
again for those of you here in the room uh maybe you can make it can you make it one size smaller just so you could um no that's fine okay we'll go horizontally first yeah so uh this the blue her five-year capital plan was the numbers that appeared in the five-year plan that appears in the fincoms report and the 2025 atm warrant and so all i'm doing here is to accept we included all the requests with a few exceptions where we knew something shouldn't have been asked for uh we knew it was going to be a zero i took those out just and they're identified below uh and said okay if everything got approved how would that relate to both in total and by funding source what was otherwise shown in the five-year plan for fiscal 27 and so the red numbers are the uh positive or negative variances that if if one approaches is saying we need to recommend something that fits within the blue horizontal line at least in total and ideally in funding source what do we have to take out to get there and we've already talked about a number of things that i'm sure once they come out assuming that's what we ultimately decide but out meaning move them forward um we'll close that gap pretty quickly um um and a couple of big ones like the first excluded column the large chunk of that to kelly's earlier point uh the field portion of two and a half million dollars she's saying we would probably present as not part of the capital budget and it would be its own separate article which we we would render a advisement a recommendation on so that would immediately come out as a reconciling item if you will even though it's really there because it wasn't officially included in the five-year plan that the town saw um did i hear you right when you said earlier that you put them in the columns you know whether it's going to be excluded levy but it might not be the final column it lands in yes okay did i just are we within budget on any of the uh these are on others yeah i think so we can go across so when i looked at the spreadsheet the blue looks like there were manual entries as opposed i couldn't see the formula that generated yeah i pulled those out of the five-year plan table the warrants on the 2025 warrant okay so that's when you look at the 2025 warrant right those were the amounts that were in the the five-year plan for fy 27 um it wouldn't necessarily list be an issue if we had something in excluded debt that wasn't levy debt right but the fact that we're over on you know both right we've got an extra nine and a half million dollars of borrowing there alone yeah um and then we've got you know free cash cap stabilization we're over on um bar we water enterprise because of mwra um right that's going to amount to a pretty significant all the way to the right is the total the variance is you know 48 million but i mean what i what i then did is if you then go straight down from there go go back to the 48 million horizontally go back to the 48 then scroll straight down you'll see i pulled out the larger items that that keep going down i pulled out the larger items that are going to be done through articles um to get to the real variance that i was i would say real variance between what was in the is that really only 800 okay when you take away the town building the fields project the septic project and mwra all of which were in the fincom's report below the line if you will from yeah the five-year plan that was voted on by the fincom town meeting doesn't vote on the five-year plan so fincom took a vote and then it could spread in some lines below that table and then in the text these other larger projects so on a relative basis year over year table to table for typical capital items that the fincom would put in the capital table um at least last year anyway wasn't always that way it's 800 some odd thousand dollars and so if you knock out the transfer station at 450 000 that cuts that in half so we're really not that far off it just means we got to deal with these big items in some fashion well unless we want to go lower than unless we want to go as i was speaking we want to go below recommend something below what was in last year's five-year plan because of the yeah i think the problem is right we could we could go below but we've identified of these big projects right we've identified mwra some part of the town building roof the septic field need to be done and so that it's it's huge dollars right across those projects it's really hard to say we're going to do all of those big projects on top of what we had in the plan which was my issue as brian already knows with the plan being laid out that way because it was fairly maybe it wasn't certain but it was pretty pretty strong likelihood we were going to have to do some of those big projects right in fy 27 so i i think these are the hard choices right and i i would say we lay out a plan that is doing the highs and what that looks like financially and then
we can debate right if we take the mediums and that's a it's a stack on right like here's if you did all the mediums how much you stack on or maybe it's you do half the media right you you take the mediums and break them into two categories but i think you're out of money when you get done with the with the highs because now these are all projects that potentially are excluded right well not all the the two high school projects are but the well actually no the first one now is going to be funded by water rates yes but we still have to do the borrowing so are you concerned about the amount of borrowing we're i am concerned about the taxpayer burden right whether it's through taxes or water rates that we're asking residents to pay significantly more so i don't whether it's personally whether it's excluded or it's water rates or it's regular irrelevant to me it's one pocket or the other yeah no because it's coming out of my same pocket regardless of which of those things we decide to do oh i said whether you call it but yeah yeah you know i get it um yeah your your description is voter fatigue or taxpayer fatigue i understand given given the scope of these projects if they all in fact move forward this upcoming time meeting i think i believe really puts pressure on going through the normal ask of what even though a bunch of things moved around even if the dollars were about what was in the five-year plan for fiscal 27 it just doesn't feel right to me i mean i think the things that have to get the attention these big items have to get the attention and i think it to me it would be fair to the taxpayer to say you know we just need to come forward and ask you for the really important things now and then deal with the rest of it in the next four years because we're going to have operating overrides to deal with in the next four years but the problem is we're not unique in this and i'm not saying that's you know i circulated and i had it shared i think on our town social media the mma came out with a report that they did in conjunction with tufts university called the perfect storm saying how a lot of towns running into issues um budget shortfalls and it's in part due to how um proposition two and a half works but to kelly's point it's okay if the proposition two and a half and allow you to raise taxes you're raising taxes on people and you're you're concerned about the cost of everything a lot of our costs are going up health care everything we don't necessarily have control over that and there is a cost to deferring maintenance these are all things we have to consider you know um i get it it's they're very important considerations we can't dance around the you know the pfas problem can't you know we're going to have some other types of problems over 195 main street because we have we're going to have to do some type of mitigation over there eventually you know we've got another report the other night there's things that just come up that we're going to have to deal with we might be able to imagine are there dollars you're foreseeing needed for fiscal 27. not right now because we still have to finish our phase two report and get into phase three but there may be something needed in 28 or in order to develop that site there's probably going to be some remediation and maybe a subsurface ventilation system if somebody's going to put a slab over there um what else lost my train of thought after the day we've had i know yeah i think you know your point is that no but i mean there might be certain things you know maybe you can get an extra year out of a cruiser or an extra year out of some items some things you won't be able to defer too far even if you know they're high or low you might be able to make some adjustments but i think the other issue we had michael is that um and i understand what the bylaw says my my view was we were going to be spending a lot more of our energy and i'm sure we will uh in the new year on 10 to 15 year long range planning and uh some of these items you know really need to be viewed in the context of a 10 to 15 year plan and so one of the reasons i think stepping back and only dealing with high priority and again you may have different information by the time you need to get done putting together your actual recommended budget but the more you can defer this year the more information will be available both to this committee of putting things in their context um and um and and yeah you don't want to inadvertently cost yourself a bunch of money because you deferred something um but um and i look at the open project list and it'll be a progress that's been made still there's a heavy heavy load of projects for fiscal 25 and 26 appropriations that have to get done and um and then some big potential projects here um i just think staff is still pretty stretched um so anyway i i think i think all we can do is yeah i would i would i mean we're going to make a recommendation michael and obviously you're entitled um right to change that recommendation and we understand why you might i'm with brian i still would like to see the capitalists while we've been making progress shrink down a bit more and if we think right we go through the projects and then maybe that's the way you look at mediums and you say well i'm going to do the mediums that are relatively easy to get done right lingering out there for three years and i'm going to leave the ones that i've got resources tied up finishing existing projects and they're not going to get my my thing is if you're not going to get to moving the project forward in fy 27 then it shouldn't really go in the fy 27 budget right if you're not going to be have resources here to get to do procurement right and get it get it going then why would we tie that up ahead of time so that maybe that's the way you differentiate you know mediums but you're going to have a better sense than we are at this point hopefully it's better in the future of you know i've got certain people who are overextended and there's no way i can put another procurement project right versus keep going back to tom but like it doesn't take that much to buy a truck and i'm sure staff i never had an employee worked with me that would tell me maybe i had a few i can't do that right so i understand that town staff wants to advocate and and tell you yeah they can get it done but all we can do is look backwards in time and say well albeit great progress has been made that there's still a lot of work that has been funded and brian just did as you know brian just did the financing for fiscal 24 some fiscal 24 and 25 projects just got done in november so those projects couldn't happen anyway unless because you have the money so um i i just think this may be a a breather year i don't know i feel this way philosophically about each and every year going forward but there's just so many moving parts um financially for the town that it just seems like the easier pitch to town meeting would be we really have tried to be thoughtful and swim back cut back on some things we were planning to go forward with these are the important things we have to get done uh maybe not the fields but no yeah there are a couple of and and the and the high item high priority items and yeah there are a few other items in there that can get done quickly i mean that's i think that's the rationale it's not i don't sense anybody here thus far as a you know don't spend at any cost type i haven't heard anybody say you know i'm just not a big fan of spending capital money i think everybody has been you know thoughtful on how they kind of approach it and and unfortunately while we had great meetings with town staff they were very short uh there's probably a lot more information that could have been helpful to us that they weren't asked to you know send in um which would have helped us yeah i mean that's on that's on the again late breaking of the committee being created yeah approved and do i want to do we all want to change that going forward and develop a better right request form with a more request form yes communities start earlier you know like late summer when they're on their capital plans we would we would have to start earlier to meet in october 15th to meet the bylaw right late summer probably isn't even early enough traditionally since i've been here or what i saw my predecessors do it was starting in september so in order to do the type of analysis that you've been alluding to would almost have to start july august time frame and you know or alternatively you start right as soon as you finish this report you start with okay let's talk about your what's next well what's what's in your future plan what's in your fy28 plan and and take a little more time right with each department head over a longer period of time right not a rush period and by the time you get to the fall right you got a pretty good understanding of the background of what everybody's looking for and why and it's not such a heavy lift exercise right crammed in at the end well i think it allows more give and take i mean because a lot of these items really don't have a lot of information out if you have an opportunity to go back to a department head and say well you said this and let's let's talk about that one well and most of them don't develop overnight right they weren't they that's the idea that a piece of equipment is going to be at the end of a useful life you know how old it is you know roughly it might move up or down a little bit but you know that's going to happen right that's that's going to happen or software is going to hit the end of useful life stuff like that so all right system sorry um okay and and i know there's a software system that you are using to track open projects um we did get something uh a former staffer started it and we think there may be some limitations we may wind up trying something different going forward but we have something now but we think that we may want something a little more robust there may be that what kelly just thought about that that generally at least i thought it was generally going to be focused on managing projects and making information easily accessible to people whether that same software could house what you're talking about is more forward-looking well easy is supposed to be the forward-looking information is that what you're talking about replacing or are you talking about something else i'm not sure because i i haven't been using it that much i got involved initially when we were helping them uh populate with the data and i don't know if it as it's starting to be used if it will deliver everything that we may have been told that would so i'm just reserving the right to say that it might not do everything we thought you know it was picked a couple years ago and so we started using when i existing projects need to be tracked going forward until they're done which i presumed it would do right um and maybe we're talking about the same thing i'm talking about other future projects that haven't yet been you know formally approved by the town to at least again have a depository real time for department heads to have that information so that maybe you don't need to necessarily call staff in all that freedom if you can just go to a depository of you know they're keeping track of their yeah tom tom typeson you know oh you know just got the word this trucks to himself you know this truck's gonna need to be replaced much sooner than i thought yeah i don't easy cip was supposed to be like these are the projects i've i've put they're in the plan right and you keep adding years and you can also use status on right this status of a approved project where it is but um yeah it may not do everything i mean i had one done all of it so capital planning capital planning tool yeah the idea was that if you had a central tool that the department heads could use it right independently right add their information in and then those who are users of the system can just pop in and say okay this is what you know dbw is looking for right and when and i can i can look at their requests but okay yeah all right we've talked about fy 27 i think the next step there um and i'm not i'm not looking for a vote i don't think tonight because i think we need to put this into it we've talked through everything maybe we have general agreement i think we need to put it in a format that breaks it right the highs as slotted the mediums and the lows um and then uh that would form the basis for the tables in our report but i think we can vote on that when we've got it summarized with dollars okay um for fy 28 through fy 31 we tend not to get as detailed but i do think we need to take a stab at slotting um well maybe we don't because we talked about doing high medium low um there's a couple of ways right we could go about it we could do high media i don't know if that i did i tried to do high medium low on the out years everybody did everybody did and so exactly go to the second tab or yeah so this is the tab that everybody um sent me their individual rankings and then each one of the years has a consolidated ranking and there's only a couple that absent you want to go through each line item right now and just to make sure anybody that might have an issue with what the consolidated result was um needed discussion yeah i think for for purposes of the out years we go with the consolidated ranking as opposed to worrying about starting to put numbers in yes um different places and then to the extent there's any that we need discussion we just talk about those so fiscal 28 we talked about the hundred thousand fields the only one that needed any discussion we talked about that right no especially having nothing in fiscal 29 30 um a small item
there's an item that needs discussion sorry lower level improvements at the library is only sixty thousand dollars um it only needed discussion because one member didn't rank it and there were two mediums and two lows so i just didn't put anything in there fine they just see we didn't rank it it might have been me it might have been me i think my i was either lower i didn't do you want to make a judgment now which one is it the uh lower light level improvements in fiscal 30 60 000 ask and which which line item is it so it's the row is um row 74 column af my reason for putting low is i just didn't know what it was because i thought we were doing the lower level improvement so i wasn't sure what 60 thousand out that far yeah you and i you and i put low and liz and john put medium and and you you had an unclear which i may have forgotten to highlight that one well i think i if it was unclear i think i put because i didn't know what it was is that in this current year no it's fiscal 30 and i didn't all right yeah sorry it's it's you can't see the top yeah um i think i think that that's because i didn't understand what that was i couldn't recall a discussion about it or yeah we didn't we didn't get into a discussion with the department heads necessarily on every item in the four years after fiscal 27 to my recollection right so i i agree with kelly i i also thought they just spent in or in the process of spending a lot of money doing improvements to all levels in the library and it just wasn't clear that they needed to spend more money relative to other items but in any event if you i tried to put low
had another note on fy 31 active shooter equipment two highs two mediums one blank
by 31. yeah that was again you brad it was just unclear and again i may or may not have highlighted that one for you when you went back you took me sorry no there were two highs and two mediums on that one yeah good yeah sorry about that i think i'd put a medium on that one
not marking these prime so i'll let you up
don't see any other ones then but had the uh uh i want to just flag one large one that i um i'm pretty sure i ran say low and again it has to do with the transfer station um million eight and fiscal 31 two of us ranked as low three of us ranked as medium which is how it ended up being ranked medium for fiscal 31. um i just can't ever fathom spending i can't fathom spending four hundred fifty thousand dollars at transfer stations but i just can't fathom spending a million eight you might recall that tom holder this request was a 450 000 to do a sound like a prefab like replacement building uh michael feya's view was you needed 450 000 to repair what's there and design something that could be built in fiscal 31 at a cost of 1.8 million um so it clearly was a disconnect there but um you know i just because the consolidated result came out at medium i thought i'd speak up and just say at a minimum i would if we get around to putting dollars out there i would kick that one out to fiscal 32 just because it's it needs to get resolved but other than that um unless we said unless anybody sees a consolidated ranking that um is particularly objectionable uh if our current plan at the moment is not to submit other than the rankings uh i think they're ready to you know they're ready to be included in the report for those two changes three changes i'll change the fall field for the field maintenance line item i'll change all those i agree any disagreement no no so same same comment though i would like to see it summarized have everybody see it summarized to vote on um so the question in that regard is uh obviously i'll update this just as a source document um so the version whatever um for the report and i'm happy to take a stab at it do you want me to create a eight and a half by eleven table of sorts to uh summarize sort of by fiscal year the rankings it can simply be referred to in the text as a attached table because i don't i mean you can attach this yeah i think we could i think could provide this obviously no you could attach the the project name amount requested amount requested and maybe department and then just these are the highs these are the mediums these are the lows the lows i i would like to so i'm gonna i would like to finish a report with the rankings and our commentary and deliver that to michael i would then still like to continue after we've done that with further like trying to see how this all slots out dollar wise um but i'm just i'm weary leery of time here right um we want to not provide um i think we can i think we can 27 because it's it's already i'll move the numbers around in that based on this discussion um because we discussed at a public meeting i can recirculate that to the members from an administrative over meeting law perspective and the follow-up yeah here's the revised version um any other comments people might have are going to have to wait for the next meeting yeah that sound right i agree with that yeah i think that gives right we've already done the work they may not agree with it but it gives you fy27 which is the most important right for getting a budget put together and tweaking for budget and then we can continue working right give give the out year high medium low but we can continue working on further refining that there's a little bit more time um it's still part of a public meeting we could still share but um i just want to make sure we're getting them enough to work out fy27 and so is our report going to contain the the sort of the budget analysis that we had at the bottom or it's just going to be the the rankings for fy27 what i was saying was i think because brian's already slotted things if we take the way i think i recommend we do it is we take the highs with the columns across of the categories and what they total to we do the same thing for the mediums and low right and so there's an ability to be like all right i'm doing the highs and i'm taking these ones off a medium right um and yeah maybe there's some rejiggering that has to happen but if you start with that you start with high you're going to see you're already right have a lot of dollars tied up so you don't you don't want me to
you don't want me to change any of the specific requests that are in what we looked at in the first tab simply restructure it so that it's high medium and low that's what i think and then at the next meeting i said earlier because i as i thought about it yeah okay no i got it okay i will do that and um but the other the other one we're looking at right there will kind of stay the same uh except that i'm going to create a uh sort of hopefully an eight and a half by eleven summary of the of the rankings for fiscal 28 through 31. yeah and we'll look at it and if people yeah and i would say there's no reason well i i can't remember you you distributed this out tonight to the members right i did uh did that go to all the ex-officio members do uh no i did it to us um brian michael and carol okay people who are here um so i'll again i'll make whatever edits required to that document and leave it to you as to when and how you want to disseminate it share that with the other ex-officio members um
because there's you know hopefully useful information in there that town management the finance director can refer to or use uh but we just need to simply continue to modify it we'll just have to keep distributing out new versions to people yeah so maybe for now we'll keep it until we have our next meeting maybe i would like to keep it till our next meeting because i would like to see it before we go okay sending it off to everybody uh other than me is there any homework for others uh yes i need to put everything into that i haven't done yet into the spreadsheet that i have um just to make sure that flows through all the other i don't know that it's homework for next time but i'd like to be able to eventually give fincom all the charts that they need and that's why i said we can keep working on stuff after but i need to do that um and then brian i will if you put together the charts um i can start drafting the narratives some of the narratives we talked about is there any parts of that that can be a further broken up or do you kind of have in your mind no i think we can break it up i just it might get on unruly yeah i think it's going to become a much shorter report than what perhaps we originally envisioned for this year yeah and um again we have a couple of exhibits that can be referred to in the text and then you're highlighting kind of those areas that we're not quite certain on and then then the question is what what is it we will be voting on whenever we get to the point of voting on something is it voting on basically the report i think we're voting on the report and as long as the report is from my perspective as long as the report is is separating out these large article type projects then um i'll figure out how to work my way around that okay i'm open to suggestions on that but i i think if the narrative of the report is separating and has has appropriate narrative around the concerns with some of those projects i would hope you know we can still but we're not necessarily recommending everything but we are saying what what we think falls into the high medium low and and separating out you know yeah i mean it would be helpful for me and i know you we're working obviously and i i well i have made a one reach out to tom holder i i i don't think we want all members any members other than the chair if we can help it requesting information from town staff but in the interest of time um um question is you know someone needs to reach out to kirsteen to see when and if she's going to have any revision to her so i wrote down everything we talked about meeting are you going to take her outreach i'm going to send one email to all of which are basically the ex-official members here's what we need from every what we would like from everybody with the understanding that whatever we don't get we're not going to be able to pass judgment on we're not yeah we'll leave open in the report right this is you know we feel more information is needed on this area before you know a final decision can be made that's the best we can do at this point and that's just be sure that's going to cover a little better idea of the question i asked tom holder a little better idea of the scope and estimated cost buildup for the high school wastewater facility um a little site plan of some sort showing kind of where what portion of the athletic field is going to be disturbed by that project so we can visually get a sense of you know what real impact is it having um those are really the two big items that i'm you know i'm not prepared to say i'm all in on when i'm all in on the wastewater facility except that getting done i'm just not sure i'm there of recommending a dollar number and the fields i'm just i'm not sure i'm prepared to say it should be advanced are you are you comfortable because i'm you know getting all of this i don't want to necessarily put a burden on on folks to turn something super fast are you comfortable saying sort of a cap putting a caveat on it saying leave this project needs to be done right subject to additional documents receiving additional documentation of the scope like something along those lines i just we got to cut it off no i agree so if the report ends up saying you know we're just unable well we think this needs to be done in the wastewater facility septic um we're just not quite there yet as to recommending it for the specific dollar amount something like that yeah but i'm just one member i mean if everybody else is comfortable then i just need to you know figure out how i approach you know whatever approval you're asking people to give okay um all right but i think the rest of the items we seem to all be in the same way point okay so and unfortunately john wasn't here hopefully he'll be able to watch the tape and uh i forget i disagree with all of it yeah sure that's exactly what he's going to do
okay so brian you're gonna you're gonna re-summarize i'm going to send you the what we my notes from tonight you're going to re-summarize those two tables i'm going to send an email to the various department heads with the open questions and start to draft the narrative around some of the items that we think need a little more narrative discussion um to include in the report and we also are going to include i don't think that we're going to include in the report the work brian did on standing capital our open capital as well and i'll take some in the next draft some from your um intro and put that in as well okay um anything else we need to do tonight i the only other thing that i had on the back of my mind brian a hurley he was you had a question for brian keveny i thought around projects that have been have proceeded before the debt it's it's not necessarily within our purview but um brian when we were talking to michael fea um uh kirsteen had put together a memo for the school committee which outlined uh sort of their open capital projects and on there was a million three for something done at the high school and um when michael fea met with us he said well that that project should be off the list it's it's been completed to which i said well how did you complete it because the million three to do that project was just borrowed so how do you complete it and it sounded like it got completed probably over the summer um and so that i think brian i've asked you this question before i understand of late you identified this ability for the general fund to advance money as long as the select board agrees and signed a particular dor form and it's sent to the dor but that that was a relatively recent discussion and so i i you know and i noted i think i asked you this question when i got the open capital listing from like august which is the one that the staff got with the request for submission there were a number of accounts that had negative balances in them and the only way i could see them getting negative balances if the money was getting spent before the funding had been borrowed because they all seem to be related to items that we hadn't borrowed the money yet so i just didn't know how that was happening and i just want to make it's not my job to make sure we're not spending money before we you know are supposed to but uh so i i'll leave that question with you you don't need to address it tonight no what we did was we issued bands and what brian has sent me a request for open capital and i believe it was uh you know maybe october or november they'd asked me i forget exactly when so when whenever we issue bands the money comes in and the ban money goes into the accounts on june 30th dor requires us to remove the ban money from those accounts and put them on the balance sheet as a liability which is bands payable so on june's on june 30th all the accounts show a deficit even though they don't have a deficit because their money is on the balance sheet so what happens is once we close the fiscal year and we open up the next fiscal year we move the money back off the balance sheet from bands payable into the various lines so that's why numerous accounts that brian had sent me had negative balances the only one that runs in a negative is chapter 90 because it's spent and then reimbursed but the money was on the balance sheet right and that goes to my prior question how can we spend money which results in a this negative on the balance sheet which means the town has spent money before we've gotten the money back without without an appropriation for it well you you never spend money without the appropriation so in winchester i can tell you that we never spent a nickel on anything until we had the bond proceeds when it came to wayland all of the debt was issued in february so you would have you would go to a springtown meeting in april project will be authorized and these these uh project managers in the town were so accustomed to start spending the money in in july and august and september even though we wouldn't even finishing on the debt until february so i've at least moved up the borrowing of the debt to octoberish most projects that are issued by debt don't start for at least six months or nine months after the fiscal year so in in probably all cases or most cases we get the bond proceeds prior to anything really being spent so that's what i'm saying the one that you might look at and again this is not my issue um uh the school michael fayette basically said the million three for the school
hvac yeah he said that project was completed you know was well completed and that happened before you borrowed the money that you didn't have a ban for it he's wrong because we we borrowed the ban money oh you didn't have a ban for that item i looked at your debt summary that we did on the working group we had we had 1.3 at the end of the year on that one well then your debt summary schedule that you did for the working group on the psych ward you might want to go back and look at that because that line item didn't have any band funds associated with it as best i recall anyway and i don't want to tie this group up on that item um yeah this is a sidebar yeah we need to do this as a sidebar okay all right yeah i just it the only reason it came up is because we were trying to make sense of some of these open capital items and and reconcile what we're being told but anyway much for to talk about moving minutes yeah let's let's do that um okay if you're into minutes yes you can absolutely go brian brian you can absolutely go kevin not overly um thank you thank you for the members watching from home all right all right thank you all right thank you good night carol mr town manager thank you thank you carol yeah madam chair all right can we vote to any discussion on the minutes of december 9th edits discussion right seeing no edits or discussion can i get a motion to approve who had been sharing that up on the screen was it robbie was oh i am where oh yeah i took it down i'm sorry so that's what people were seeing that at home yes yes sorry all right i just said sharing it never mind never mind screen share on the long day all right thank you so we had so moved in a second thank you uh all in favor all right i okay uh any topics not reasonably anticipated by the chair not to my knowledge um we do have a meeting scheduled for zoom um on the 22nd i know liz you didn't think you'd be able to support that is that still the case um i i don't have a firm answer yet okay no i have to i may have i may be traveling on no friday okay so i'm going to leave that on the calendar uh if for some reason three of us i need three what what would we be talking about at that meeting this kind of draft report yes question is practically so i can get done i can get done what i said i would get done if you're not going to really have the time to get it done i would be inclined to not yeah the meeting then and just as much as we've got to get this stuff done um give yourself yeah i agree holiday season unfortunately to get through it and meet this best we can the first week of january to try to finish okay because i think you can because because you will be drafting that yourself and based on you know input you've received through the open meeting again i think you'd be able to distribute a draft before the meeting so that people could at least be prepared at the meeting you just can't then collect yeah any input from people okay until the meeting and likewise i'll i'll the next day or so get back out to people the um yeah the purported tables and updated excel spreadsheet so again people have time to look at it all right we what's the first day of that first week of january is the fifth that's monday yeah deep breath again you you should check with the availability of rooms just because i'm sure people a lot of committees will be getting geared back up for town meeting um what days the week of the fifth can can you guys do midweek i think is much better for me but tuesday wednesday yeah i want to travel on tuesday but wednesday works monday works as well and thursday i'm going to try to get wednesday hybrid that's a hybrid hopefully i can get
that whole week is the first half of january is garbage for me but that's um i'm going to try and get wednesday and i'll let you i'll send you guys a note if i can send that out again if you and if you get jammed up at work but you have a draft that you've been able to get out to people in advance you know hopefully the four of us could move the ball forward it might be the case so brad you might have to chair the meeting um just because that there is a possibility that i can't leave work you could at least advance the ball with maybe one more meeting needed it would be a final meeting can we speaking of that can we go ahead and look at the following week too just so that
we try to your holiday in there somewhere in that week no that's the week after that is the holiday
so i'm looking at the week of the 12th i've read that entire week read that entire week all right i think i might be traveling like monday through thursday yeah i'm gonna i guess check with john brad you were good the whole week yeah so timeout did you pick a day no um i again they're all crappy for me so um brian are you okay that week yeah liz you think your saturday's work better for anybody yeah we can meet yeah it's in a public setting yeah um liz you said yeah it's navy that we can dc and the expectation is i'll be there for that okay all right so i'll check with john and see just because i'd like to get we get the seventh the seventh i'm going to see if we can get start time if you can do a zoom now i can probably i will sneak okay after spending a day there that's back to the hotel room so i can definitely support hybrid okay 6 p.m 6 p.m on the 7th yeah on the 7th i can't do earlier than that okay january all right 6 p.m and then i'm going to try for the same thing wednesday of the following week 14th hybrid hybrid for both 6 p.m for both 7th and 14th i may regret that but and again you just if you can get them to hold a room hybrid room for you and hopefully it's all right well a topic i'm not reasonably anticipated that i can think of now is happy holidays thank you everybody for your time and consideration i know it's not an easy time of year to do this you do robbie yeah yeah thank you now we get adjourned uh all right can i get a motion to adjourn so all in favor all in favor aye meeting adjourned at nine
Pursuant to Chapter 2 of the Acts of 2025, this meeting will be conducted in person and via remote means in accordance with applicable law. This meeting may be recorded and will be made available to the public on WACAM as soon as after the meeting as is practical. When required by law or allowed by the chair, persons wishing to provide public comment or otherwise participate in the meeting may do so by in-person attendance or by accessing the meeting remotely, as noted above. We request public comment be limited to two minutes per person. And I'm going to go through the agenda. 6 p.m., call to order, review the agenda for public and any announcements. 6 p.m., public comment and members' response. 6 p.m., continued review of Excel's spreadsheet reflecting consolidated department capital requests for FY27 through FY2031. Potential vote of the committee's position on ranking such requests. 7 p.m., discuss and potential vote on the content of this committee's report to the town manager. 9 p.m. 10, review and vote to approve minutes of December 9th, 2025. 9 p.m., topics not reasonably anticipated by the chair 48 hours prior to posting. If any, and setting times of next meetings. 9 p.m., approximate time of adjourning. And I'll go back. Are there any announcements?
And I said all members who are going to be attending are here in person. No one will be participating in Zoom, double-checking. No one, no members, voting members will be participating via Zoom.
And since we are all here in person, we will not need to do roll call votes. Okay, so public comment. Robbie, is there anybody in the person bundle? We're getting raised. Okay, and that's Carol, who's our liaison. Can we move her over? Yes, sir. Please.
Carol Martin, who's our select board liaison.
Okay, so seeing no public comment, I'm going to move on to the spreadsheet. And I am going to attempt to share that. If you give me a moment. However, I will note for you that I've gotten a couple already of internet unstable messages. So, I'm not going to share it. But to the extent my internet connection is not working, that could be an issue.
What was that? Email a copy to Carol or Brian, just in case they could share a screen from their end. One second.
Good luck with that.
I believe it.
I just tried to open mine up. I can't open it either. Okay.
And I am sending that spreadsheet. Brian, I sent it to you, to Carol, and to Michael McCall. I've also sent it to each of you on the committee. And then I'm going to put that up. We'll go ahead and share screens. I'll attempt to, anyway.
Success. But for the fact that I can't see it too fast. Now, I'm good. Okay. So, I'm going to increase the size to the extent I can. But better.
A bit more toggling, but we can have one. So, I want to thank Brian for incorporating a preliminary rank from each of us on these. And we'll save that and just sharing it with everybody now. But I still, we're going to need to walk through each of them. And I think, given that this is our first year, I think we've said this many times. Since we're doing what we can do, given the short time, we've got a late start, and the short time that we've had information. Well, I think it's fair, given that we're going to discuss each of the projects. To the extent we think there's things that are still missing information, that's what we ultimately are going to have to caveat in our report. So, we're going to make the best assessment we can, based on the information we have, and caveat wherever there's information outstanding that would be helpful when we turn that over to the town manager. Okay. So, why don't we start? And I'm open to suggestions on form of going through this in a different way, seeing as how we haven't done this before. Happy to hear different ways of going through it. But I think, for me, the most orderly way is to go through it in order. Talk about each project briefly, and whether or not anybody has opinions that deviate significantly from the combined rank. And so, I think that's possible, right? If there was a bunch of people who, a couple people who were low, and a couple people who were high, and that ended up at medium. If your view is drastically different, and you want to express that, please do. If not, I think we're going to move on from that particular project. The other thing is, as we go through each project, if you think there is outstanding information that's necessary for a full assessment, right? We make note of that now, so that we can include it in the report. Okay? Does everybody think that approach sounds okay? I'm through the rule. Okay.
All right. Road improvements. We have this medium, and this is, we're looking at 2027 specifically. We can talk about FY28 and out if we get past 27. Anybody disagree, have thoughts on that?
My only comment on that was, well, two comments on road improvements. One was the escalation factor in the out years, which we can talk about later, is 10%, and whether or not that is the appropriate, right, amount of future trend, right? If we want to be conservative in the plan, fine, or do we think it's not conservative? But we can table that until we're talking about the out years. And then my other one was just ranking of road improvements as medium I'm comfortable with. I don't know if that, if any discussion is warranted around the amount of road improvements included for the year, and with the thinking that other monies that were available from Chapter 90, where we're currently at from a SEND perspective, is there any perspectives on amount of funding? Yes, my question for you, Kelly, in terms of tonight's process, at the moment, it appears your primary focus is on the consolidated ranking.
The document you're looking at for the benefit of the others is a template that I pulled from Brian Keveney's Capital Excel spreadsheet, just for FY27. And at the moment, it includes a couple of minor exceptions, it includes all the requested dollars. And so my question, Kelly, is do you want to take this opportunity to both on each line item address the ranking, consolidated ranking, and then talk about how much, if any, if any, dollars end up in our recommended fiscal 27 budget, or do you want to go through all the priorities and then move back to more of the budget side of it? Because it goes to your question you just posed. I, for example, just pick on this item. I think you all were mediums, all four of you were mediums. I was low, and that goes to your point, where I think they have some built-up funds. I have a view generally of what I think should be in the fiscal 27 budget, which could lead to a lesser amount than what's been requested. And it's just a question of process. I think it's more efficient, in my opinion, to talk about both when we're talking about the project, rather than go down the whole list and then come back around for money. And I also don't think that, I think there's a lot of projects where the amount may not be as debatable. So, I would rather do both at the same time, as long as no one has objections to that. I think that makes sense. Because I agree. I mean, I'm looking at some things like loaders or equipment. I don't think there's much you can do on the price. You can't say, well, I'll give you half the price of the loader.
Kelly, do you want to, because I think you understand, based on prior meetings, conversations, I think what you're getting at is, in the past, typically, town manager's budget, the FinCom's budget, have generally included for road improvements what was requested by the DPW. That amount, which I believe we've confirmed, does not include road improvements that are funded by any state Chapter 90 funds that we might receive. And the state Chapter 90 funds have been averaging $400,000 or $500,000 a year. And as an aside, for the benefit of Brian Kepney and the town manager, I have an open question as to whether the town should have in the past been doing something at town meeting to appropriate funding costs that were ultimately reimbursed through Chapter 90, similar to what's done in the school budget, where we get reimbursed through Chapter 70, but we appropriate the entire amount of the operating costs. And I found, I didn't do an extensive search, but Weston and Westboro both have annual articles that ask for, in effect, appropriation authority related to Chapter 90 costs. So I'm just questioning whether we've been doing it right or wrong. And that's not relevant. No, I think that's a side. I think that's... Anyway, so on this item, historically, that first line would have been tracked, sent it through. If you're looking for our individual views, I put it as low, because not that I think keeping the roads up is a low priority. I only had it low in this year, and that's because my instinct is to, because of all the open capital projects and roads are included, just because they have a year's worth of funding already approved, and they have an additional bunch of Chapter 90 money likely coming to fiscal 27. I'd personally be inclined to zero it out, but I also appreciate that that might be viewed as extreme. And so, you know, put half of it in as approved to give them sort of a bridge to then get back on a more typical funding schedule, which I think you may have mentioned at the last meeting as a... I don't think I mentioned it, but it is what was in my head. So anyway, that's why I ranked this low.
Although when, again, we get into fiscal 28 to 31, I bumped it back up the median in all those years. And no years did I put it as high, because I don't rank most of these items similar to life safety, which generally got a high, I think for most of us, high ratings. So anyway, I'd be curious as to how the rest of you, and maybe if I could just at the outset, and I'll stop talking, keep notes. Given where the town is, vis-a-vis its operating budgets, maybe unknowns, given the, obviously, very large project with the MWRA at the Hallowell,
left up to me, I would only put in this year's capital budget high priority items and basically push everything into fiscal 20, everything else into fiscal 28. I'm just from a high level. So you're going to hear from me as we go down these items. If it's not marked high, my instinct is in this one year, given everything that's going on, to push it. And that's in part because of the open capital projects. It gives town staff a chance to catch up on those projects. The DPW is going to be up to their eyeballs with the MWRA project and several other big capital projects that are continuing. And it's not like they can't walk and chew gum at the same time, but they have funding sitting there that they won't get to until the spring. They'll have Chapter 90 money that they could at least advance some of the places they think are in worse condition. But otherwise, fiscal 27 due patching is just how I was thinking about it. But I'm going to stop, keep notes. This is your time to kind of weigh in.
Well, I guess a question I have in terms of processes, we all went high, medium, low. And to your point, Brian, I mean, does high mean that we think that it should stay as is in the fiscal 27, in the amount medium means push out a year and low means push out two years? I mean, I don't think we initially discussed what we mean by. Yeah. My thought was that we were going to, I think, based on our conversation at the last meeting, given where we are in the lateness, was we very well may not have the time to go through all five years. But with actual dollars in every category, we talked last week about maybe trying to do that with fiscal 27. But for me, the ranking was more instructional for the town manager, who then, with the benefit of the finance director and exactly what they want to do and present to the finance committee, would look at our rankings. And that might help inform them as to what gets included or excluded, rather than us necessarily doing all that work for them up front. So that's how I do the ranking this year anyway. I don't know if you felt differently about it, Kelly, or? I think we have to do the ranking at a minimum. But I don't, to the extent we can, I think there's two things I want to do. I want to go through the list, and then I want to look at the totals relative to what was approved in the plan last year for 2027 and see where we can close the gaps. There's two ways to do that, right? There's difference analysis. How much are we different by, let's take out what we need to to get back down, which is impossible in some cases where you have MWRA. There's also a proposal like you just made, Brian, which is don't do anything that isn't high, right? I think there's probably an in-between option, which is do the highs. And to the extent you have things that can be funded with surplus capital or free cash, right, that you have anything left over, you do those. Because we've done the desert approach a couple times, I think, or at least once while I was on FinCom. And that's not necessarily a solution either, right, because not all projects use the same resources. And so I think we can debate that, but I'd like to at least get through them. And if you want, we don't have to go through these in order. We can start with high, right, make sure we agree on the highs, and then go back down through, you know, medium and low and make sure we agree that they're placed in the right place. Or another approach is let's start with the biggest dollars first. Because some of the small ones aren't going to move the needle, but a $38 million water project is going to move the needle. The high school wastewater facility is going to move the needle. So to me, I'd rather expend our energy while we're still relatively awake and focused on the biggest dollar items first. Okay. Yeah, I'd say go with the high. Probably the biggest dollars are all going to be highs anyway, I would imagine. I wouldn't expect the high life safety to, based on how people rank them, I wouldn't anticipate there's going to be a whole lot of conversation other than if there's, you know, any open questions as to the dollars.
Anyway. I don't have a problem with that. When you talk about high dollar, what's our dollar cut? What do we do? We can start with the biggest and work our way down. Yeah. Okay. So that means we're doing MWRI first.
So it's $38.6 million. It blows a hole, right? And everything else on the page. So it's going to be its own article. It has to get done. It's been exercised and reviewed a whole bunch of different ways. I don't see a whole lot of decision-making from this committee in terms of, like, this has to go forward as an article vote for the town.
This committee doesn't decide how that's going to get funded, if it's going to be from debt through the water fund, or if it's going to be taxpayer dollars. But either way, it's a burden on the residents of town. So go ahead, Michael. Select Board voted the other night to respond to the Board of Public Works that it'd be funded through the waterways. So it wouldn't be a vote for excluded debt. It wouldn't be through the taxes. So the next vote would then be a town meeting to appropriate for the borrowing. So Select Board made that, made, voted, and that's the decision? That's Monday night. It'd be funded through the waterways. Right. So let me just ask a question. There was some discussion that the finance director, I guess, had led another option, proposed another option, because the town would, no matter where it appears, the town's borrowing money, right? But that the town would put a ballot question on to exclude the debt. The town would appropriate debt service, but would collect as revenue similar to indirect collection of revenue from the water fund for insurance, for example, that it would collect water revenue sufficient to pay the debt service. So the excluded debt would be fully covered, assuming they had raised enough water revenue to cover it. And my understanding was that the benefit of doing it that way, as opposed to just treating it as traditional water debt, which is outside the levy, right, was that if something goes wrong and there's not sufficient water revenue along the way for 20 years, and the town had to fund it through the general fund that that funding would fall within the levy and could therefore negatively impact the operating budgets in those years that that happened. Whereas if you had the debt excluded from the outset, and you were faced with the same dilemma, the town would still fund it, but it would be funding it as excluded debt, which would therefore have no impact. Now, there's no decision made about that. The short answer is they didn't take a position on that, and they still want to hear more information. So I'm just pointing out that it's possible that the financing for this project could be on the ballot as a request for excluded debt, but that was not, it was discussed, but not determined. So for right now, it's the water weights and less this other mechanism, but I think they need a better understanding of what I'm not. I'm just reporting what I heard in the meeting. I'm not saying that's a good idea, a bad idea. One of the concerns, since we're talking about it, which I did provide some background information to the finance director, one of his concerns was that if you treat it as excluded debt, the town approves it at the ballot, and it's fully funded with water revenue, and this is going to be a little bit beyond you too, but you'll get it. And when you do your levy limit calculation, your excluded debt line item, which is outside the levy, will go up by the debt service on the debt, even though it's being paid for with non-taxation revenue. And the finance director expressed concern that over the next 20 years of borrowing, you'd have to be sure that folks didn't use that to fund other things. So I found a DOR document that suggests that you can, when you ask for the ballot question to exclude the debt, you can have that question be net of any revenue that otherwise is, other than taxation, that would be funding that debt. So it's a net request. And so he took that under advisement. So we just need to stay tuned on that, but it could, whether that goes on as excluded debt or not, could impact a couple of the other items in what we're looking at that likely will, or may require, or we may suggest to the town manager, you might consider using excluded debt. And having a big $38 million excluded debt question, you know, could impact how the voters view that. So more than you might have cared to know, but we don't have a lot of time to, you know, try to get our arms around this. But so basically, Kelly, your conclusion with your first four points is, it's going to go forward. There's nothing that this committee needs to do other than be aware of it. And again, it's going to be done as an article. In what we present, historically, a project that size would not have been included in the traditional capital budget that's approved under the Omnibus article. I included it in what we're looking at tonight. Going forward in our report, would you envision pulling that item out or just leaving it in? I would envision anything that's article related being its own section of the report, but not pulling it out entirely because it's going to have to get paid for, whether it's a part of traditional capital or not. I think it's a really important consideration, right? The debt financing on that is debt service of what? 1.2, 1.3 million? 1.9. 1.9. What's the term? 20 years. So 20 years. At the moment, there also is a possibility it could get extended to 30 years, but that wouldn't be at 0%, which a 20-year loan would be 75 basis points or something. Okay. So I think it has to be factored in because even though it's water fund, right? Tell me who in town doesn't have water, right? That they're going to have to pay for. So, okay. Any other comments on MWRA? No. We all have that. I think we all have that as a... Okay. Next biggest is, as a combination, is town's building, I believe. Brian, do you agree? Yes. Subject to what we heard last week, Director of Facilities, about his intention to get back to us and push out to fiscal. Well, he didn't, he wasn't specific as to which years he would push it to. Yeah. But it sounded like all he thought he was going to end up asking for was money to do part of this building's roofs. So that took away. I've not seen any revision to what he has submitted. So, yes, if you look at what's been submitted thus far, it's over $5 million, $5 and a half, if you look at a little piece in fiscal 28. But for the purpose of our discussion tonight, should we assume either he's going to get back to us or we just decide that everything but the roof? So I'm going to, similar to what I mentioned at the beginning of our discussion, my recommendation is that the committee defer all town building projects with the exception of roof amount, which we do not think is final, right? We don't think, we think that requires some revision. My recommendation, my opinion of our recommendation to town manager would be defer everything that isn't absolutely necessary. And we think that's potentially a smaller amount than the roof project that's on here, right? The roof project that is on here was the whole roof, right? 2.8.
And that was the only one that was ranked, consolidated, ranked high. And the only thing you can't discern from that ranking is whether members felt they were comfortable moving forward with doing the entire roof for 2.8 million or were anticipating that we were going to be seeing some smaller number because it was going to be phased. Yeah, I thought whether it's, whether it's the entire roof or phased, I still think it had to be done. So I guess I was, my, my thought was that the full 2.8 is a high priority, but to the extent it can be phased, then all the better. But my thought was the full 2.8 was high. It should be a high priority. Yeah, my ask was slightly different would be that Michael, they identify what has to be done, right? And if there's, you know, 80% of it needs to be done and it doesn't make sense to break it up, right? You go forward with the whole project. But if it's, no, 50% of it really needs to be done and the rest can wait, then we do that. And the condition on deferral is, I think what we discussed when we talked to Michael, which is what is the full cost and full schedule of activities that need to happen at this building to bring it up to a basic standard, right? And we can't, I can't see putting forth a vote on any of the other projects unless they are, we have a view of what it's going to take to bring the whole building up that we can tell taxpayers, you know, you're voting on 3 million. And we expect the total cost, you know, to bring this, to do all of these things, to bring this building up to code to where we want it to be, to be 10 million, and I'm making up numbers, right? I think that that information is required to do anything beyond the must do, right? You would envision our report as to this item, then would highlight for the town manager's benefit, our thinking, which is, we think it makes sense for there to be more discussion amongst those that control the ultimate decision about the future of this building. And if the future of this building is, as this town offices, we want a longer lookout over 10 or 15 years and accumulate anticipated costs over that entire period so that people could put this in context, which, so I think it'd be helpful to have that in the report, such that we're not simply pushing us off. It wasn't a huge part of the 2.8, but I believe in the first meeting with us, he said he included an option for metal roof, which I think he said was $300,000 to $400,000 of that amount. I'd be interested in, you know, calling that out and looking for further rationalization, as opposed to if you're going to be here for the next 30 years, that probably makes sense, but may make no sense if you're not going to be here. Whereas you have to, you have to do the porch on the roof where there's structural issues leave over your office, Mr. Town Manager. So we want to protect your interests. Hope you don't wear a hard hat while you're at work, but, and we obviously don't want, you know, ongoing leaking that creates even bigger issues elsewhere, but sounded like the extent of the phasing was going to be to deal with the side of the building that is over the structural issues so they could address that. But again, since we haven't heard back, you know, I think we're left assuming he's going to do that and we'll find that those, if that information finds its way. The other, the other issue I have here, and I have the same issue on some of the other big numbers, you know, I have great confidence and faith in town employees that they are good and experienced at what they do, that they've thought out and planned these activities and that they have some basis for the amount of money they're asking for. But I also assume that there's only so much time in a day and without actually going through procurement, a lot of these bigger projects could be based on, you know, per square foot estimates based on other experience, plus a significant enough contingency to cover for any other things. But we've not, I don't know what we asked for, but I'm, and this maybe goes to the future as well. In looking at other communities, their submissions to committees like this are much more expensive and actually include much more detail of how they arrive at the ask. And so to a lesser degree, if you take the fire chief's submission on the ambulance, at least he had a one page piece of paper that said, here's what I know the current cost of ambulance is to be, but we know it takes, once you put it in order, it takes a couple of years to get it. We factored in, you know, two years worth of inflation. At least I could look at something and say, okay, I have to assume that there's a state contract or something that you can get an ambulance. He has a pretty good feel for what the figure is. I don't know whether 2.8 million is enough for the roof, whether it's too much, too little. And, and I'll have the same comment on the high school wastewater and the. Yeah. So this is back to, and I don't want to belabor this too long, because we have a lot to get through, but we've talked before about. I may have to step up. We've talked many times before in financing meeting in the time that I was on there and there's a standard, right. For, for doing capital projects of design, build, operate, maintain. My opinion that the way that this is presented is missing the design phase and the design phase should be separate. And the funding for the design phase should be separate. If we're going to spend what is to sums up to over $5 million, I would expect that there's a pretty sizable design project, right. That comes before that. And so I will say if the roof is leaking, the roof has to get fixed and I can, I can see shortcutting that because the roof is leaking, but for the rest of the projects and the same goes for any other large capital project, there needs to be a design phase that's separate and before so that when we ask for the construction phase, we have an informed amount, an informed design. And we've been burned as a town right before when that hasn't adequately happened. So I agree with you, Brian. I don't know if the roof is leaking, I'm not going to say, well, we'll fund the design and you can replace the roof later. Right. Because I don't want to throw good money after bad and have other things be leaking in the meantime. But I agree with that concept generally. And that's the way I would recommend looking at other large projects. And from a diligent standpoint, and I agree with all you just said, from a diligent standpoint, though, particularly on very large dollar numbers, do you think as a committee, if we're going to put forth anything that has numbers in it, do you think we should have at least a better understanding of where the number came from? Yes. And what I suspect we have right at the moment, which actually, what Kelly's point is, you need to have that design first, because that will provide you with a baseline for what the cost is going to be. Yeah. But for purposes of this number, we don't have it. And I think we'd have to, you know, I can ask, we can send a note to Michael to say, you know, what's the basis for whatever his, and I have a note to send him a note on, do you have a revised estimate? And I can ask at the same time, what's the basis for the revising? And I heard him several times mention that he's been talking to a vendor now. I assume it's not gone through any sort of procurement process. So he may simply have a knowledgeable contractor that is helping him out by giving him, you know, per square foot estimates, if looked at the building. I think it would just be helpful if he has something in writing that's from a contractor that says, here's what I would use for an estimate. I personally would just like to get my eyeballs on it and say, well, I know where that number came from. Other than it came from, not that I don't have confidence in facilities directors. To me, it, you know, we're the first trance of this process. And it just seems to me, at least for me to be able to vote on a number. I have to do something more than simply say, well, that's what was requested. Nor do I want to say, well, that's too high to cut it because I have no basis, you know, other than to say, you know, because we have more information, you could phase it. So what, what do you need, as Kelly said, to deal with it? So anyway, I have, I'll ditto that comment on a couple of the other big items. So would you, and I'm happy to do it, would you envision, so again, the report process, would you envision with the memo report attaching fiscal 27 effectively budget when we're done here? And if so, I'd be happy to obviously go back in and prior to the next meeting, move numbers around. Yeah. So I'm trying to make, I would envision it because I think we can do, I think we're capable of doing that based on our discussion. I'm just making notes on the side of sort of, yes, no, maybe so that I, and I'm writing it down too, but just so that we have, I don't want to change the numbers as we're going because I don't want to screw them up. But so I haven't, I'm changing this as I go, but yes, no, maybe. And the maybe here is I think, yes, we support it, but we would like some support for the, for the amount. Right. And my other question was, I couldn't remember if the, the force main tie-in was related to the roof. It was part of the, no, I mean, the, the town, when they put the, the sewer main in, the town has an existing septic field and system. And the town has the right to hook up to the system. So it's been dedicated a certain amount of flow and the town, I don't know if the town is exempt from paying for it, but there's a certain fee that has to be paid by those people that don't hook up. And so up to this point, the town hasn't actually gone through the process of designing what the hookup would be. And then ultimately constructing the hookup. The library just again, I think the design part of it is short money. So I would probably say that's okay, but you know, the construct part of it to me is, well, tell me what you're doing with this building long-term. Yeah. I would argue the same for the design component of it. I don't, I mean, it's just, I think that all the other, I think that all the other things need to need a design component. So I don't, I would delay. Either way, I mean, it's not going to move the needle, but at least from a philosophical standpoint, it would be consistent to lock it out. All right. So I've, I've put no, and you guys can tell me if you disagree, right? On everything other than the roof related to the town building with one other exception I wanted to talk about, which is the town building wall pads, which I think is just a matter of safety and relatively low cost. And that's one I don't want to wait on if possible, because that's being used. And that's, I agree. Any other discussion on town building before we move on?
Did you say you were changing them to low? I put, I put no. So basically I'm, I'm, when, when we go to revise, we go to create, okay. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just putting an N wire. And so that when Brian and I go back, I know what to take out, what to keep in. But I want to make sure everybody's in agreement that that's, that's the things we want to keep in from an FYT. 27 standpoint recommendation. Yeah. Wastewater, high school wastewater is the next biggest item. Yeah. Madam Chair, can I ask? Absolutely. The wording in the bylaw has under section 20.3, there's this nice little sentence in the end as determined by the town manager, no capital improvement appropriation shall be voted by town meeting unless, unless the proposed capital improvement is considered in the committee's capital plan, including any and all addenda additions, supplemental plan. So, and I know you will make some recommendations on this. So if you say, you know, you rank something lower or say no to it, it has been considered in the plan. That's all I want to say. So I could say, all right, I appreciate, you know, I agree with you all this, but I think we need to do X. Yes, you absolutely could. Yeah. The, the, my understanding of that intent when, when we were doing it was that there's no late ads to the process. There's no Hail Marys after the report goes of, I'd like this project. That's correct. We talked about that. It all had to be submitted as a proposal upfront so that you looked at it. So it couldn't be like the last minute from the floor or something else. And our, you know, this committee's report to you, which is required by the bylaw will be a public document. And then it'll be up to, I guess, the finance committee as to whether or not they want to share anything from that report in their report. So that follow through with your example, follow through your example, Michael, if we take a position that for whatever reasons, we don't think something should be addressed in fiscal 27 and you have a different view, you're going to put a fort to the finance committee. Um, what we thought about it may or may not impact what the finance committee and ultimately what town meeting thinks about. And I think that would be a fair process, but we're, our report is not required to appear in the town ward. It's simply a public document. I assume we can post it on our webpage. Um, yeah, we'll post it on, I would just say, right. It doesn't start required to be included in anything. I would expect there's going to be residents who, to the extent there are differences might ask that question. So it's in FinCom's yours and FinCom's best interest to explain differences. But I don't think, I don't think when we discussed drafting the bylaw, we anticipated that they would match exactly because we all know there might be differences of opinion. There might be things that change, right. There, there certainly could be circumstances even that, right, develop between the date of the report and the date of town meeting that necessitate differences. It was just trying to prevent the late, um, the late ads of projects that hadn't flushed through the whole process. And there may be, you know, for example, to that last point, there's things there in the JCC. And as you know, the town, um, is joined the Middlesex region, um, emergency communication center. Um, um, and there may come a point as we progress with that timeline that some of the requested capital for furniture and other things may not be warranted. So things could change. And as you know, from our discussions, what, uh, what is I've seen happening, what happened in one town, the reason why we developed a committee like this is because it always came down to the town manager with the assistance of finance director, making all these unilateral decisions on the capital. And my hometown has a capital plan and I think it's valuable to have people that live here and have expertise to give a second set of eyes to some of these things and take a citizen's perspective. So, you know, and it's additional betting, you know, on these requests. I think, again, the reverse, um, in a perfect world, all this process from this point, all the way forward to town meeting should be collaborative. Doesn't mean all the way along that everybody will be aligned in their opinion, either individual members or the whole committee. Um, so, you know, as, as you're sitting here tonight, listening to some of this for the first time, um, if there's something you hear tonight that you feel you need to talk to the chair about that, if we had more information might enlighten us to the point where we might put something different in our report, it'd be better to know that. Exactly. Before we put something in, in writing and out in the public. So. I mean, the town hall is, is a tough one because there's a lot of factors that aren't necessarily on, on there, you know, land, other consideration, where we go, wastewater and, and land that's accessible on a major artery here in town on 20. So a lot of considerations that, that factor into that. Yeah, there's, there are a lot of considerations and we recognize that. I think the, the place I get stuck is when we are going to put forth big dollars that are not all the dollars, right. That we expect to spend, right. And not communicating to the residents, what, what the overall ask might be. Um, and then also not having it phase design and construction. Um, I think it is not a good move when you're spending millions of dollars. So I, I think we told Michael, right. We all know that this building needs work. And really, you know, we commissioned it last year, people to take a look at the building, the envelope, do an assessment of what needs to be done. So we didn't have some of the information to give you the long range, um, forecast and, and, you know, it might be a phased approach if we're going to stay here. So I understand. Okay. All right. You know, before just, just to throw it in, but you know, before the new high school was built, there was a committee and actually I was on it to analyze whether it was better to redo the existing high school and just tear it down and build a new one. I mean, it's a whole committee just for that exact thing. I can see something similar for this building because it's a, it's a big, it's a big issue. And I don't know to the extent that the permanent building committee that we have could do any of that. Uh, I don't know. We, I just know we have a committee and I know our conclusion was to build a new high school, but yeah, I think let's, let's say we got a lot to get through. So let's table it for tonight, but it's, it's definitely a future discussion for us. Um, all right. So wastewater, um, and the fields, I believe are the next two biggest, um, and I'm going to be quiet and let you guys give your opinions and then I'll chime in to the extent I have a different opinion. I mean, I'm still, I think this, the septic system needs to be fixed. I mean, it, it, it's obviously an important issue. I'm still scratching my head about the, the, the fields, um, and whether those need to be done at the same time. It seems logically like they should be, um, is that what we're talking about? Yeah. Did we ever get information about how much we're paying other towns to use their fields? I thought that was an action. No. Um, so why don't we, why don't we separate first? Okay. Let's talk about wastewater first and then make a conclusion on wastewater and then talk about fields. Well, my view is the wastewater I think is important and should be high. Um, again, to me, it's just a matter of economies. I mean, if you're going to be doing that, it doesn't make sense to do the fields at the same time. And that's what I don't understand. Yeah. Liz, yeah, no, I agree. Wastewater needs to be high. We've identified it's, it's been a problem for some time. I think we might pull and take care of it. And I mean, it's wastewater. It's not like it's, you know, a lawn sprinkler system or something, but I agree if the fields feel should be part of that, you know, solution. But at the same time, what I wasn't clear on is how much are we paying out? So are there operating costs that are going out the door and to the extent of how much, because I think that's further motivation to make, I think there's, I think there's a few open questions on the fields piece and that's why I wanted to separate them. And, um, I just, I want to, I want to close out on the wastewater, right? So wastewater has to get done one way or another, whether it's a septic system or a wastewater facility redo, right? DEP, mass DEP has said, you're done, right? You need to stop trucking. You need to get this fixed. So we don't, I don't think there's really much of any choice in that. Arguably there might've been a choice between septic and wastewater, but I believe we asked a question of Tom Holder about that. And my, my read of that was that rehabbing the wastewater plant was both more expensive and not necessarily going to get us, um, anything additional. At some point there had been a discussion about whether or not you could hook up, um, the homes in the Dudley Pond area. Yeah, but they would need additional flow than what it has today. So that's not necessarily a solution to that problem. Um, I think we're at a point where we have, we have to do the septic, um, and comply with mass DEP. And there also is a cost we've been paying for trucking waste off of the site. The reason I'm doing that is because it was less expensive than fixing this problem, but we don't have a choice, right? We've been, we've been told by the state we need to fix it. So Brian, I have really just two questions. One is, uh, mass DP has been requiring the town to do this for at least several years. And so one question would be if we didn't fund this in fiscal 27, because it's just not far enough along, or it may not be far enough along by the time it gets to town meeting, uh, for the voters to be comfortable that they know what the project is and the amount is accurate. Uh, would mass DP allow this, allow the town to continue for one more year with some statement by the town manager that, that there appears to be total understanding and subject to town meeting vote that it'll get done, but we just need more time. Um, so I just want to understand, are we literally at the end of the rope where there's some punitive something or other is going to happen to the town if it doesn't get this project funded and completed in fiscal 27? And then secondly, I had asked a couple of times now, and so far I haven't gotten a response, whether, uh, the town engineer, I've asked it through Tom Holder, whether the town engineer has a, um, a scope of work again, so that we could understand, uh, what, what that $2 million pays for how much contingency that just began at a granular enough level that we can be comfortable. Um, I'm, I'm, I have a total favorable view of the town engineer who I don't know that, uh, she's pursued this option versus what would have been, at least as noted in the last couple of warrants, a $5 and a half million upgrade of the existing facility. So absolutely I'm supportive and absolutely agree with all of you that it's got to get done. Um, I just want to know that, that, that, that we at least have asked that that's, you know, what is the scope? And, uh, thus far I haven't gotten anything back to that question. Um, and, um, I won't get into the fields other than to say in that same question I asked, uh, do you have a site plan that would, um, I went on the web myself and looked at an aerial to see where the existing septic facility is or a septic facility and where it was in proximity to the fields. And so I simply said, well, can you just delineate what is going to be disrupted on the fields that would, would require what land disturbance is going to be required to build out this traditional septic system. So we could be in a position then to evaluate, do the fields really have to get done now? If it, if it's a, if it's a five foot trench, you know, that goes through part of the grass versus, is it going to involve ripping up, you know, the, the ball fields themselves, the dirt fields? I have no idea. Um, and, uh, I got, I got a little bit of an answer back from Tom Holder that, that led me to believe that it wasn't necessarily going to be a major land disturbance, but again, I have no idea. So I simply said, can the town engineer just do a site plan and just demark the area? Um, the second thing I found, which I'm prone to do research when I have nothing else to do, uh, and, and I don't, I don't spend a lot of time with AI. It just happened to pop up on my Google and I'm doing a traditional Google searching was AI came up and said, uh, not good idea to build septic facilities underneath, uh, baseball fields because of the compaction of the soil, et cetera, et cetera. It doesn't allow water to, you know, kind of prickly through. So I, I simply copied that and sent it along to Tom and said, could you ask the town engineer, are, are we even going to get the people to do this? And then, and when he responded, that's when he said, well, I don't think this project is going to disturb the plane, the baseball fields. There's two of them. Uh, in fact, one, they're proposing to relocate to a different corner, which led me to believe that whatever disturbance is going to occur in what is now a grassy area in the outfield, which doubles as a potential doubles as a soccer field. Um, but even that, um, I I'm curious what happens if there's a problem with the leaching fields, if that's where they go and you got to dig up, you've got to dig up the outfield. Are we talking about another whole field project? So I, I just want a better understanding of how much thought has gone into the future of something that fails on the septic system, if you put it underneath the field. Um, and so, cause I don't have any of that. I'm, I, I wouldn't be prepared to, even though I'm, I'm, I'm all for saying we got to do something. Um, I'm just not prepared to say, let's move this forward now until we get some of those questions answered, which means we may simply have to say in our report, we all think this has to get done. We just don't have enough information to tell you that it's got to be done at that price in fiscal 27. Um, is just kind of how I'm seeing it. Now, if we get more information in the next, our next meeting that answers some of those questions, I would get more comfortable. Um, as I have no reason to believe that's not a good number, but, um, I just don't know. So just a quick timeline. When do we submit this Michael? No, just don't. There's a lot of caveats. October 15th is what the bylaw says, but yeah, I mean, we're saying as soon as possible. Yeah. As soon as possible, which. So I feel like, but I mean, I think we're going to have to, and that's why I said at the beginning of the meeting i think we are going to have to say in words something along the lines of we understand this project you know may be necessary and and may be um most efficient to do while doing or right after doing the septic but we feel right we're currently missing which may be resolved by town manager before getting to town meeting i i don't that's i think it's the timeline but when i'm doing like we need more information i'm like well that would be lovely right nobody's saying it wouldn't be but again just trying to couch that up against okay when we actually have to deliver something and recognizing that was a couple months ago so so it's just going to be i think we have to deliver with some caveats and then michael and brian right keveny will decide we've gotten enough information that we feel like we can go forward and put it in and and recommend it or we haven't gotten enough information right or right you know something along those lines but i we have to cut off and say this is where we're at right um so it's like yes to the wastewater in some fashion yeah i'm yes on the wastewater the fields i'm gonna put at maybe yeah right um need more support for necessity yeah efficiency of you know doing at the same time yeah and i'm getting too far off track i'll say instead of out of uh field um you know there we have a moratorium on the turf fields and at some point we're going to have to end up life probably the main field over there and you know people want us to improve the other fields so we one of the fields that we've been told needs work is the uh the baseball fields over there and we're going to look at turning them around so that we can put in the septic and the leach fields and mr holder as he explained to me part of this was you know the economy is a scale that mr carver mentioned it's you know ripping that all up why i sought it and do it and then rip it up again and so i'll work on getting some more yeah he did say in his response to me which i'm happy to share his response i just forwarded it to everybody that on his docket is a hundred thousand dollars to be spent repairing the baseball fields next spring i have no idea what the scope of that is i have no idea if that will put the baseball fields in a condition where uh schools no longer have to rent fields that they're now safe enough to play whether it's the infields until you tear them up and put a septic system under it you you had thousands of not enough yeah i understand and um yeah i have no my own sense was um the schools with presumably input from the facilities department and um recreation had this project out in fiscal 29 or 30 um and that was probably done in a vacuum as to the fact that this other projects were on which again we don't know how much disturbance it's really going to cause um which to me then looks like a convenient way to kind of nudge that project up but uh i posed the question at the last meeting to first being uh uh school business manager you know if this became a priority are you prepared to have some of the other school capital requests that are in this fiscal 27 moved out because there's just not enough room in the budget and there wasn't you know i don't think she had really spent uh time specifically on this field so um i'm not sold on needing i'm sold on needing to do the field at some point uh i'm just not sold on it um for fiscal 27 and um uh so
i'm not sure we're going to end up voting an actual budget for fiscal 27 at some point if we do um as a placeholder i may ask that um members be given the opportunity to pull out an item or two for a separate vote because i'd hate to vote against i hate to vote against a complete capital proposal just because of one item and this happens to be that item for me well that's consistent though with that i think you know i mentioned to you brian separately which is given how many big given given the size of and large projects that we have that are on top of right what was the capital plan um i could see a world in which the septic the things that have to get done are a part of a combined capital vote which is what we typically do right list of we've seen 25 30 projects and the fields are an article right which is separate um and i would say our vote i could see our vote being if we're going to vote a budget in a consistent fashion right so these are the things that go in the capital budget for fy 27 here are these couple of larger projects we're going to vote on separately address it right and i do and i have a note here to make sure we find out if or see if we can find out
the cost of field rental that's happening right now i think another component of of it is michael you just mentioned it if in the cost of doing the septic system i'm going to make up a number there's two hundred thousand dollars to resod reseed after you've torn it up and that could instead be right you could spend 200 and not have fields or you could um offset right that's a cost that you you wouldn't spend because you're going to redo the fields right that's an important piece of information for people too like are we just going to throw 200 000 to put you know throw some grass seed down and then still not have a field we'd rather do something else maybe yeah i would obviously that example i know where i would come out on it but um it's not going to be that easy uh but i'm also focused on how much debt particularly if it's not excluded debt does the town take on having just gone to the town through the special election to get five and a half million dollars removed from levy debt um and so again that may be one of those things that all we can do is explain it in words as to what some of the things that you need to consider are okay um now that we've done those what's our next next i guess hard to read it from we might need to go back to just going down through this and a little bit i think um um yeah i probably just i just probably just let me just go through it then line by line from this point from this point okay some of them will be able to just skip apart going hit going down which ones are i do that eyes first yeah through the highs first all right so let's go down to make sure there's no issues or questions particularly as a voice for the dollars yeah so we're going to start it's it's really an it um and i'm going to look at it in total um for a minute here because i think we have most of the it projects labeled as high three of them labeled as high so cyber security firewall replacement and public safety regional emergency system the amounts on those are 250 100 and 150 respectively um i my personal opinion is those all right need to be done it director told us they need to be done but i also understand why those are critical right to town operations that we have modern cyber security firewall and why the public safety regional emergency system as we heard from the it director and fire and police right is a component of being able to to move forward with our um joint jcc so any any go ahead just give you an excellent hb you could scroll over on the firewall replacement supplement fiscal 24 yeah i put these numbers in columns that either they were included in the five-year plan in those columns or i just put them in a place that i think might make sense but again we'll have to talk about that in this case i put a hundred thousand dollars in the capital stabilization fund as the funding source and the only reason is because my recollection is that one of the uh priorities of using that fund was for supplementing prior appropriations that that was kind of one of its purposes uh but as i said uh ultimately we may not have any real input as to where things actually get funded yeah i'd like to focus right now on yes or no okay and then when we've got our yes and no narrowed down right we can look back at at funding sources i don't know that we necessarily get to make that decision but we'd like to try to fit it in um any any the only lingering question on the public safety regional emergency system was just to triple check that that is not duplicative of anything that's in the police um requests as relates to or the gcc requests yeah i thought when we talked to it we asked that specific question and it was different like it was the it was the technology infrastructure that needed to be built out versus pieces of equipment yeah i believe so but yeah yeah i mean that's really where everybody seemed to come out on that and then while we're there because there's only two more in in it um website redesign and video monitoring we had as medium you know everybody well again the consolidation medium uh myself included um having said that uh having just before i got here watched some news about brown brown university not having video cameras in some of their older spaces um um all it takes is one incident that you wish you had video equipment yeah i i kind of if i get a mulligan i might myself bump that up to high so i have the same that was why i wanted to go over these while we're at it i have the same thought and not just because of brown but also because of things that have happened in our own town where video equipment would have at least um maybe maybe prevented it from happening because people would have known it was being watched but also being able to actually um catch people who are were vandalizing our buildings um so i i would change this to high we have implemented just recently when i first came here we didn't have video surveillance and from all the reasons that you've stated here um to protect the public check staff um variety of reasons um yeah my feeling is i i think i probably put medium on that in the thought that thinking that it could be pushed out a year or so but um kelly i i i don't disagree with with what you just said and and i'm perfectly comfortable having that as a high priority as well i put it in the same category when we were talking about radios right i i don't want to be here and find out that the reason we couldn't know something or stop something is for surveillance any thoughts i mean i nothing less than medium um i do think sometimes if we're using it as a deterrence you know sometimes you know often or you know it's the best defense if you're being a bit proactive there um i guess i'm not clear where we have cameras currently and where we would be in the hallways we'd be back putting new cameras all those bubbles this would be just for this building though um then we're going to be looking at right things there's also a fiber ring project and the idea is at some point all these cameras will be visible through dispatch so if there is an incident somewhere we can call those up so it's we put some thought into this not necessarily the conversation for today but i think it gets back to is it a phased approach this is a phase this is so this is phase two i don't think you can see it um no i have to go into the other tab yeah you can it's up in the top if you look on it right now so if you look in the excel
not that long ago we didn't have cameras even on the exterior of some of the buildings and there's been a phase to add some not all right um so this is this is another phase of that project okay so i i could be swayed to make it high uh again wouldn't want to bless the medium but if we have to pick and choose and i'm not quite sure where it still might you know i think there's some other things that are more immediate need i'm gonna put it on a yes and leave it at at medium it's not huge no it's not huge dollars but i'm gonna i'm gonna here's what i'm well you have it pulled in from another so i'm gonna just say medium high to make me come back to it but um there have been instances in town where had cameras been in place that yes we would yeah it might have been a good deterrence for if something's happening let me ask a administrative question of our zoom participants how is the audio quality carol and brian it's good well good great thank you it was better last night for the flight board audio is perfect sorry okay thank you so we spent a lot of time we did a couple of dry runs in here with the audio um with it and i met today with wake cam and it and facilities about how we're going to improve in the former coa for future meetings there um and what i've been informing the madam chair about is apparently they are over at this new coa and they can't get the microphone working so i have my it director coming in to go over there i was going to leave go over try and assist there's a panel on the wall it's it's a nice system but i don't think they maybe receive an instruction on how to use it so we have some people did they have to shut down their meeting no no apparently everybody can hear them um online it's just they have a big enough crowd and they can't hear all the way in the back of the room so they need to get somebody to activate the speakers in the back oh i see okay all right thank you okay um website redesign and migration we have as medium and i don't have any reason to change that um michael's gonna be like no i'm just wondering how much i know it's it's been a in there for that right now yeah um that may be something that does change because um without getting into too much detail we currently use civic plus and they are ender-lifing the version so they're they're doing some level of upgrades that we're working on currently so there may be that number may be revised but yeah well we're gonna do what we're gonna do if that's something that you revise that's something you revise i would just i would i would urge and i know we just got an it director there's a lot of projects outstanding and so if it's end of life there's not a lot you can do about it but i would encourage making the way through the it projects right before we we give too many more um and the vendor is going to do the upgrading migration and um a management analyst communication coordinator is working with the conversion of the content over so um as you said some of these numbers may change between now and town meeting solid that's another question of the town manager uh casey has to run out can you go to the um field maintenance line item which is right after dpw since we didn't get a um yeah cip from your department we just want to see if you're expecting you're gonna ask for the 100 grand that was in the plan so you know it's funny i had my time here and my time my other communities did not submit a town manager's cip request however i if you recall two town meetings ago uh mr bernstein got up and asked about you know could we commit monies he wanted to create a separate committee and we as we went into last year's budget i worked with mr keveney and we we believed we had enough money to start putting money towards fields maintenance because mr doucet um working with ms bernard felt if we had a certain amount we could start upgrading some of the uh you know sometimes especially in road maintenance you do best first you take the fields that are close to being good and you fix those they're kind of a low hanging fruit before you do a complete makeover so to go out and fix some of the um uh the sprinkler systems and make some of my repairs so we committed to doing that and i committed to trying to put a hundred thousand in year over year over year uh i left the finding the funding source to mr keveney but i can giving us a verbal cip that yes you want a hundred thousand dollars and you want to request a hundred thousand for each of the five years yes not increase but just a hundred thousand yes i i agree we have to bring up these fields if we're going to shut down some turf fields we're going to have to have these other fields we're just flying in the dark so no and so yeah well i normally would say that that's i can get you and then you know i can put something in if that helps no i we can add it in um i think my feeling on that is well there are other field right things that we have questions on and i would put it a low priority i think a hundred thousand dollars is short money to try and approve improve the condition of fields that we do have and arguably is what we should have been you know should have been doing all along i do have a little bit of a question on how much of it is capital versus should be part of an operating maintenance budget and whether or not it belongs here or it belongs as um additional money in i think dpw cares for the fields they do maintenance i to answer your question i think this is more sticking money in to make those upgrades of the irrigation systems and things where we can the ones that they just do set help target some so gave him this money to go out and make those improvements and then i agree the operating year-over-year maintenance and things that should be in their operating budget so i don't know for example a hundred thousand that tom holder referred to is going to be used to repair the baseball fields of high school i don't know if that's the source of that money or not but no but i saw i mean whether or not i saw somewhere a list of what was done with a hundred thousand given last year and i actually thought it was a pretty extensive list compared to what we pay for on a lot of other things i thought they they managed to improve quite a few um situations so i we had we had two people uh even though we didn't we didn't have uh we weren't sure it was going to be requested we had two members put this as a low priority one member put it as a high priority and uh myself and you kelly didn't rank it because we weren't sure it was going to be in the plan um i hear you saying that at the moment relative to other things you would rank it uh low no i rank it high oh you would rank it high yeah because i think it's what my opinion is it's what we've been asking or what i've been asking the town to do all along which is to look for the small dollar ways you can improve things before we get to uh two million dollar replacements right of fields okay so you're high i'm gonna i'm gonna say um medium uh i i'm on board with needing to spend money on the fields for the reason you just stated which on a consolidated basis i would make this a medium item just to be able to keep it in the context of all the other projects okay so we got the answer that it should be in there as requested and i actually put the number in and uh now we have a ranking for it and uh i'll go back and update the master file okay thank you for taking that out of order yeah we're taking that out of order but i'm i'm not going to rank it i'm not going to give it a yes or no because we still have a lot of highs to do um back to the highs okay so we're in police we're gonna do police fire and jcc um the in-car replacement and computer replacement was because uh but you're the police chief had it in the wrong year you actually have my 28th that's what's happening yep so i think see we have traffic signals dash cams let's do those two first um so that was 50 and 100. anybody have any disagreement with high on both of those no yeah okay good all right then furniture and radio system upgrades let's do furniture first we have low as anybody yeah i can't of all the things we have on the list it's like as long as we don't create uh i mean i ranked it low but as long as we don't create uh medical issues that cost the town a lot of money because people are sitting in chairs that uh like these missing leg no i i again for now relative to everything else it's okay i go with no and the radio system and equipment upgrades we have as high yeah and i think the only issue there was the uh i mean on the plus side the chief said the police chief said that um he either had already for fiscal 27 applied for a grant state or federal i don't remember um and uh i'm assuming that he would intend to do the same in the out years we're just looking at 27 but uh it wasn't as clear to me as you move out in the five-year plan which we're not doing right at the moment so i'll mention that when we get to but for fiscal 27 sounds like they need this to make sure everything's up to snuff when they make this transition over to the yeah one thing i have a note on though is i would like it if and i can send an email to police fire schools and i.t i would like to see the comprehensive plan of what we're spending on all components of the radio system including radios how many radios is that gonna i i'm feeling a little discombobulated about how many different places there's money related to i think all related to similar things maybe not the same things and just understanding right it's 200 000 a year because we're buying we're phasing in enough you know a certain number of people per year and eventually we're you know at the end of five years everybody's going to have new equipment or is you know is there different components happening in each year so well i think to your point if you tack on dpw police and then the school radio system you're looking at you know it's over just shy of 700 million so but then there's additional and there's additional monies and those were phases right like i remember schools saying schools was phasing but i'm not sure if police they were getting recommendations from yeah police so and then we all talked about it should own this or someone consolidated yeah i just would like to see the i would hate to see this in the plan as four different requests when they're all related to this and say it's this request and here's the bend of the departments who are going to have pieces of it i think that's i for one again it's just again doing diligence um i looked at another community that just announced a federal grant for 43 handheld radios and i think i worked it out it was like eight thousand something dollars a radio i have no idea what one of these handheld radios costs walkie-talkies whatever i would just like to know i assume there's a state contract of some sort that they use to purchase them but um just from a diligent standpoint you know those are big numbers i'd like to be able to say well that's 60 radios or 40 radios yeah i agree that's the same the same feeling one last point in that but also if schools not complain was that they have radios that don't talk to each other the frequencies are not correct so we definitely want to make sure that doesn't we don't go buy this whole slew of new radios and run into the same problems yeah hopefully they're buying all through the same procurement process see this is where you would follow oh yeah yeah although cursing was talking to a vendor so yeah i i will send i keep making more notes of like they may not have this information but i'm going to continue to let me write the report but i'm going to ask it okay fire uh and apart fire department yeah fight uh yeah fire department um so the ambulance at 6 15 i think we already talked a little bit about what the basis for that was we have dive equipment uh it's that at 25 we have the shift officer command vehicle at 80 000. so why don't we do those three so i don't any disagreements on the two highs the ambulance and the dive equipment no no and brian keveney can i ask a question on the on the ambulance if go ahead is that something we we typically we have it in debt we would typically do that in debt and then the ambulance fund would pay theoretically pay the debt service or is that a the ambulance fund makes a contribution to the general fund which kind of covers the debt service so their current contribution every year annually to the general fund is for an indirect charge to really just help support the general fund budget in addition to that they're paying the debt service on the 950 000 truck we bought back in like 2016 or 17. so this particular one here i believe last year was less than the 6 15 and it's we had it in the plan as you see by levy debt because the ambulance fund we rated it down to the point where it was too low we already have a five-year plan to allocate a lot of his capital into it so okay to answer your question we have done that in the past and we are doing that but this one isn't mapped in to take debt service out at this point so i said another way we we don't think the ambulance fund can support the additional that can can support the additional debt on top of what it's already giving to the general fund and on top of uh the debt service on the fire truck yeah for just give me one second so be about so it'll be 6 15 so i mean if this is a five year if we do five years in this one i don't think bond council will let us do seven but if we did five it'd be about 123 000 a year just in principle alone and so with principle you're probably talking maybe 150 160 000 that might be just a bit too much yeah maybe down the road we can do that and we can do that down the road that the ambulance fund can pay more but adding another 150 they're already paying around i believe about 450 000 to the general fund annually to throw on another 150 maybe not for 27 but maybe we can map it in for 28 in 29 particularly as you heard from brian we're heading into the override years and we need to look at every penny that affects levy debt so it is possible in a couple years we could switch that to being funded by the ambulance fund if their revenues go up and they are going up we could possibly do that yeah we we heard from the fire chief too though there is some downward pressure on their on their fees again right from uh medicare so i don't i don't want to count on that um right i don't think anybody can count on it it'd be nice if it happens but i don't think you can count on it the problem with this is that we appropriated in 27 it's a matter of time even get the truck we're looking at like two years now i believe we just got the ambulance truck and we waited over two years so we actually you don't want to get in the case where you're issuing debt you're paying debt for something you haven't even got so we may be issuing this debt i don't know when it depends upon when neil thinks we're going to get it from the manufacturer so at this point it's still going to be levy debt yeah so we'd approve it but not necessarily issue it until we get closer to when it's going to be delivered yeah because there's like a two there's over a two year wait yeah okay all right thank you
all right dive equipment no one had any any concerns on that it was a small office i can't it's 25 000
okay shift officer command um command vehicle again i think it ended up medium in my mind probably others just because it i suppose there's a life safety element to it that if that trips officers gotta have a dependable vehicle to arrive on scene of some incident but i guess my view is relative to the other things that that just seem one notch down is kind of how i looked at it i agree i thought it was something you could probably defer to you but if they came back and told the town manager it's got 135 000 miles it's on its last legs yeah we're never sure when we turn the key it's going to start and then i think we'll leave that becomes probably to the town manager yeah um if that needs to be modified okay um okay i want to do since we did police and fire i want to do jcc which is down why i put it at the others am i missing when we did jcc think did we already oh because it was separated okay never mind no no it was it was i got it sorry because i just screamed nope you're right okay so we're going down the list um we're at facilities so the first one is cpw facilities rehab and upgrades i don't have an issue with medium here yeah medium he's right uh transfer station low five hours no issue with that either i think we've heard general agreement from tom holder who's trying to shift ownership over to facilities um and from michael feya that while it needs to be done they agree that probably makes more sense to wait for the town-wide trash pickup study to be completed before worrying about spending more money that the transfer fund doesn't have yeah yeah um all right i've already moved on sorry um public safety building hvac upgrade when much was this this was 250. i don't remember um michael having sort of strong like this one's bro i heard more about the school's broken hvacs than i did about or call more of school's recovery yeah my sense is he's still i mean he's made great progress getting a lot of problems completed but i think he still has yet to go and i have no doubt that if something really really needed the attention he would he would highlight it um and um i think this one was just in the plan and i'm sure over time money has to be spent as we see later in his five-year plan request just kind of town-wide roofs or whatever yeah so i kind of put it in that category until someone tells us you know it's broken yeah can't be fixed yeah agreed all right all right high school so now we're down to facilities that are school projects um why don't we try to do let's do highs first so we had the middle school rooftop air handling units and exhaust fans as high and that was 500 000 any degree it should be high any brian anything from you no um and then let's do let's do the safety and security um communications first because we already talked about it on police and fire um any i know we we still i have to make a note yeah we just need more money i think but we that request should come from kirsteen directly to uh cover whatever they thought they needed to do and i think it was second and last phase um and again if we don't have that we would simply in the text of the report say yeah we think this is an area that should be done all at one time yeah just given the risk inherent risk not doing it okay so i'm going to put it as yes but i have a note to she was going to get us a better number for the total right um and then the pre-k elementary literacy curriculum we have is high um i mean my feeling on that was that i want to make sure we're encouraging the submission of grant funding and i don't want to lose grant funding because we don't appropriate the amount of money right needed to do the other side and i think that was why i asked the question specifically of were you going to do this right do we need to do this regardless of whether we got the grant and the answer was yes um any and just as a reminder uh the schools did get the grant of 300 some thousand but they can't access the grant unless the town matches right so i think from my perspective that put in a high category um albeit as you heard me ask about as i did a couple years ago in the math curriculum still not quite comfortable that it's a capital item per se but um i think at least precedent was established a little bit by the fincom by approving the math curriculum and it's again it's needed and their operating budget is not likely in a place for fiscal 27 to be able to absorb this cost so i uh i've ranked it high which i think everybody did maybe for other reasons but um yeah i would feel differently um if we go to do this next year and there's another request for curriculum surprise right that wasn't in the five year i think i made pretty clear my opinion that if these are things that we need we got to at least try to plan for them right um not the year that they're happening but and they'll have as you heard brian kevin say for a bunch of years starting fiscal 20 there's likely overrides needed so there'll be um opportunities for the school to make the case for their operating budgets and again my instinct is this more belongs in an operating budget but for now it i i think there's components of it that are operating when you have to replace you know the consumables i'm not my and i wasn't necessarily right um supportive of it as capital when it was the math curriculum but i was later convinced i wasn't there for that actual vote um i think the the foundation of setting it up and the material everything that comes with getting it implemented right does have a long user life has a longer user life so i can see the argument that it's capital um i just it's more intangible capital and tangible capital but nonetheless i agree that it i mean to the extent has that a useful life if you will i mean it does seem capital i guess i'd be concerned to what you were saying kelly if they came back with the same number next year for the same thing well wait a minute we already or another it's it's other curriculum and the part that i and i mentioned it to the schools when they were here that was a specific and it wasn't christine wasn't here so you can't write but it was a specific request and question of the schools of how many other curriculums need to be replaced and when should they be in the plan should they be in the plan and they're not in the plan right and we went and applied for a grant so clearly we knew we needed it right it's just that's the part that bothers me like i want to see these planned out if they are if they're needed not coming in at the last and she may come back to us and say um oh i was just focused on fiscal 27 we've talked about and we need yeah this one on fiscal 29 i mean i think we've set the tone for that is changing next year yeah for more information you need to have more comprehensive plans so all right let's um let's do the mediums for schools um and just i'm gonna go through these quickly run through them and i'm gonna sort of collectively if anybody has different opinions with them being mediums so high school building improvements was 87 000 um the district-wide repair replacement of dryways and sidewalks was 444 000 elementary installation of hvac air conditioning was 540 000 yeah i think that one as an example there was an overarching acknowledgement that the schools are in the process for long-term planning study that encompasses what they want to do with elementary schools generally which i'm assuming will come to a head sometime in the next 12 months and um again you'd hate to prove and spend money on something that unless it's actually needed today you might make kind of like transfer station thing you'd rather have that benefit the knowledge of that so some of these are things that um and just for the record i am the school representative on this committee but as i heard kelly say to the finance committee when i asked the question uh to represent fincom's point of view on this committee the answer was um i'm your eyes and ears and i'll report back but i'm a member of this committee and i kind of feel the same way as to school items so i'm not necessarily necessarily here to advocate uh for the school items and so there are a number of things here that you know repairing roadways and things or whatever the reason i say at the very outset of this conversation i think i would limit my focus generally to high impacts to high priority stuff and if the roadways need a couple of blacktop patches to get through another year until we have a better sense of what the town's overall financial picture is looking like and what this elementary school study comes out and says so a number of these i ranked medium with the thought that i'd be prepared to nudge some of them out and also to make room for these two high priority requests that weren't in the plan uh sometimes you have to right yeah pick and choose i don't disagree brian but i would say um i was the elementary installation and i have to be careful if it's installation of new hvac or if it's replacement of of broken hvac i could and the town manager can make this change if it's replacing hvac so that whatever i'll use claypit as an example can be used as the summer right for the summer programs right then i have a different opinion than if it's adding hvac where there wasn't hvac before um so that's one i could i could probably be convinced if it was there was an imminent need um in a particular building but otherwise i agree with with what you're saying like i don't think we can completely stop if something's broken and michael said right i think he said claypit right there was you know four years on the roof but one right one working or something like that where i wouldn't want to be in a situation where there's no working um and then waylon although this will date me but we didn't have air conditioning in our schools or our high schools so yeah or my house yeah i and that was the other i agree with you and i thought the same thing because we're not texas yeah it doesn't it doesn't date you brian because the same was true in my school in fact i think it still is true today in the school i went to so um but i sometimes when it says hvac air conditioning i have to ask the question is it strictly air conditioning or is it the the air handlers right that are necessary for heat to move right so it's quality that differentiation i'm sure everything these days is tied to enhanced learning all i thought about was getting out of that hot building we used to have classes outside when it's hot yeah and this but that's my other reason like if a if a building's being you know you didn't go to school in the summertime typically if the building's being used in the summertime yeah i don't know for another purpose that's that's that's can be a priority okay whalen high school and middle school ceiling and wall repairs any concerns with that as medium yep okay um middle school roadways and sidewalks we also have as medium 431 and district-wide flooring um 215 um so i'm i'm okay with all of those being medium i would just ask to the extent we slot these right if there's room in and i don't know that there will be in free cash or surplus capital that we consider we go back and consider you know tackling you know a couple other projects just to to not you know take so many away we do have five school buildings right and they're worth quite a bit right in total and to only be spending right we should we should have some consideration to how much it costs to maintain all those buildings right no and again the schools have over the years have made the point that that unfortunately they've had to remove from their operating budget a lot of repair dollars that um that need to be redirected to the educational aspects um and so they're they're through that deferred maintenance it's led to probably more of a need for some of these things and so uh i suspect uh if they had their druthers they would be looking for even more money but um again i'm just i think at the end of the day we just need to every year has its own context yeah what we're looking out at is now finally to become i think clearer to those that serve in town and town management that uh we really need to be carefully thinking through all of these things and deal with those things that really have high impact need to get done uh maybe flexible but just be careful which is what i think we're trying to do you actually raised a good point um brian that i add to my note um i do would like to have an opinion from michael on faya on maintenance budget right both town and schools and whether or not um there's a an issue there from a deferred maintenance not not capital but just maintaining things and is there something that needs to be addressed and i know it's not you know given being up against the the levy not a good time but i i do struggle with funding capital while underfunding maintenance and so i would like an opinion from him on are we are we shorting maintenance and then that's ending up costing us right multiple multiples of that from a capital standpoint because if it is i think we have to it's my same comment as i had on the fields like if there's short money that can avoid large-scale problems we should be addressing that first yeah i mean i think i agree the having been on the budget working group the schools in their at least very preliminary iteration of the fiscal 27 budget did include a a good substantive number for building repairs they've included that in their budget maybe not at the same level that have been currently in their preliminary budget fiscal 27 but as the school year goes on and they they you know like last year uh special education very quickly was a million four over what was there to fund it in the budget so they had to put on a spending freeze and my understanding is one of the first places i've heard the superintendent say that's one of the first places they go to grab appropriation out of their total budget is building repairs and and he acknowledges that and it's always a pillar of their this presentation is maintaining facilities so i think they all agree with what you just said i think they're gonna they're trying again in the fiscal 27 budget to ensure that there's enough money in there to start to address it the other thing i'll say is during one of our working group meetings and if carol martin's still on she certainly can speak to it because i thought it was she that brought it up was um if there was um sufficient deferred maintenance that is more repair type maintenance that typically wouldn't appear in a capital budget um given where the operating budget is looking like is there some rationale for bundling um repair dollars and turning them into a capital budget request um and i think that's what i heard her asking and and i have my accountant's view of that which is operating expenses shouldn't be funded through the capital budget um but for now i think the schools totally agree with you it's just i think they've had trouble not using those monies yeah i and this has come up before and it's not within my purview but this is you know the discussion before has been structurally changing right where the maintenance dollars right live right do they live in unclassified and we've done this with utilities right we've done it with other things so that that's not a decision that gets to be made anymore right maintenance comes maintenance comes out of a maintenance budget and it doesn't get commingled with other things because it's just it's hard it has historically been hard and i don't think it gets any easier going forward okay um so we're down to
water fund other than mwra right yeah i think i i had that i had a little lower than most everybody else had high and my recollection is that tom holder said that particular water line has been failing they've had a number of failures on it and it really needs to get done and i think they already spent their design money from fiscal 26 so uh i had no problem with it others giving it a high ranking
pretty sure everybody else yeah when i hear that there's failures in water means
actually it was you and we have that reversed i had it as low you had a medium i guess i rate it high we had three highs and two mediums which turned into a high but it is i guess my rationale then for taking it high was it was i'm mentioning that it's been failing and i i agree it's a water main you know you get water means breaking wreak havoc and so
many people spending 38 million on yeah to get quality water having it go through a pipe with holes in it no thanks um i wish they didn't cost as much as they do but all right and then there's vehicle at medium
um now that's coming those are all brian kevenny you taught you said this before but i think in an email right water water retained earnings isn't sufficient right anymore we have to go to borrowing that is correct there is no use of retained earnings for the operating budget or capital budget
except okay so but if it's borrowing we expect that then the rates have to support it yes right right yeah yeah this borrowing for the benefit of brad and liz and the public is uh is outside the levy to the discussion uh so it's town debt but it's water funded brian do you brian o'herley do you know have you watched dpw have they voted on or on yes is it dpw or the water like have they voted on their projects for the water fund and yes uh tom holder met with us before board of public works had reviewed the capital requests with him he went through the these requests they approved them just for fiscal 27 he didn't ask them for a vote um subsequent four years yeah i this is i only i just struggle with water only because ultimately they will vote it at town meeting but they the they have to decide whether or not that can go right if they can manage it within the rate with and what they're gonna have to do to rates so uh ultimately yes and and if it can't get covered with rates which is an issue the finance director has um is that that could lead to a town general fund subsidy because the debt has to be paid um they've historically brian correct me if i'm wrong they've historically been able to pay all their debt service you've never since you've been here you've never had to provide the water fund with a subsidy correct uh no but dor is threatened in the past that the uh the water fund would need a subsidy from the general fund it almost happened with the fiscal 26 recap we had to have a summer meeting with the dor in the board of public works um that was based more on the level of retained earnings it was based on the fact that they needed a nine or ten percent increase in revenue and they did not have a rate increase and when they voted that in june i immediately called dor because i knew dor would have a real problem with that so dor agreed that they will go along with the rate increase as long as zero the dbw or board of public works claimed that there was going to be an escalation in billings well we haven't seen that through five months so dor sort of gave them a pass um and did not require a subsidy but dor can step in in december when we're doing the tax recap and mandate a subsidy in the form of free cash or tax from the general fund and that's exactly what we're trying to avoid but that's an issue you've been uh focused on now for a couple years anyway and and we'll continue to focus on but um yeah but ultimately um they've always managed to cover that through setting proper rate levels i would i would disagree with that they've been able to cover make their payments obviously they've made their payments they've had enough revenue or cash or fund balanced in my view they have not set rates properly um enterprise fund they were four million dollars today they're 1.4 yeah i stand corrected they they've covered it but not necessarily out of uh current watery water revenues yeah that's a better way of saying it yes madam chair yes carol thank you carol martin and like remember the select board i am also the liaison to the board of public works and the water commissioners and their philosophy you asked a question about whether this truck could this vehicle could be funded through um retained earnings or through um debt and they have uh have historically followed a process and i believe just voted that they will fund via debt all capital projects that are greater than um five five thousand dollars and i forget how many years five years so this truck i believe that they would be anticipating this vehicle would be in um debt yeah i understand that carol i think i would just comment and it's similar to a discussion we had about the roads a few years ago if you start doing everything with that that works at the beginning right as as a you have an amortized value that you've got to get into rates but if you you know if you're all your trucks are over five years and you've been putting them in as debt for five years after five years you're going to have the same amount of money that you need to get out of rates right as if you had never um if you had never funded as debt so it becomes becomes a problem pretty quickly if if you can't cover it in rates and just sharing their philosophy yeah i got it but i think at the moment anyway brian you're maybe for different reasons you're you're on the same page with the board of public works as to these couple items for fiscal 27 funding them through debt yeah i mean i i did this plan last year i mean i've done the last seven years of them and i told um dpw probably i don't know three years ago when cliff lewis was the chair that everything going forward on capital needed to be from um debt in no more use of retained earnings there was there was one year we did use retained earnings a couple years back only because um they were getting reimbursed 139 000 for lead pipe so since they were getting that reimbursement from the state we did use retained earnings so tom holder and i made it clear to cliff lewis a few years back that it would be absolutely no more use of retained earnings in the capital budget uh so everything everything probably three four years ago was always by debt but to kelly's point uh uh if you think about how the town treats police cars which i don't know what a police car costs 50 grand it used to be 50 it's probably those those those are run through the operating budget because they get replaced pretty frequently and so while i i think you're talking about using retained earnings they could pay it out of water revenue just by you know they'd have to increase the rates a sufficient amount to cover the cost of the truck at sixty thousand dollars in a single year right so those are your three choices you borrow it yeah yeah we've done that in the past actually we've used water revenue in the past to do that in in you know probably prior to 2020 we did that but to carol's point the board of public works did recently vote as a policy matter from their board they didn't they didn't want they wanted everything capital related to be borrowed yeah they also they also voted as a policy to use retained earnings to fund their operating budget which we're absolutely opposed to okay all right well that's that's outside our yeah we're gonna purview but sorry we spend time on our monday so all right uh we have two projects left uh wastewater low pressure low pressure sewer was it replacement yeah this is this is the design of the the line that runs up and down route 20 and uh yeah different places that's been there for 15 years maybe plus or minus yeah and uh i think what tom holder suggested was that at some point in the next x number of years route 20 is going to get ripped up and put back together again uh hopefully at the state state's expense and he wanted to be in a position to have both designed the replacement and uh actually be prepared to have the money to construct the replacement uh and and so i think that's intelligent way to approach it and i also generally don't say no when somebody says they need to do something related to the sewer because i don't want the implications of that not happening okay and then the transfer station was duplicate this was duplicated we've already the garage replacement we've already talked about it um yeah and they uh here um the only other discussion point is that um in the request that came in through the dpw and through facilities so it was duplicated and so obviously we knocked out one of those anyway we're going to defer it secondly but thirdly it really is a transfer station enterprise fund expense and so as a budgetary matter it really needs to be reflected which is why i put it down in the enterprise fund line item so when we put our report together depending on what tables we have that's what the finance committee did with it yep so i was wrong because we we started below dpw um maintenance yeah so field maintenance we agreed um i believe you're going backwards well i we because we started so i just want to go back up to the top and do the rest of good roads yeah so roads sidewalks are not high on anybody's list yeah so roads we said i'm gonna i'm gonna put that at a maybe because it was a question of is there enough philosophically how do you versus something yeah how do the other two of you feel about the concept of each and every year they make an ask for money for the roads and they ultimately use it and i suppose you live on a road that gets redone you you like it but uh how do you feel about picking up i think budgetary constraints i think you must have to take a pause i feel like every the 38 million really i know we talked about this is going to be its own kind of standalone item it's just makes a lot of these seem like nice to have but i agree you know i'd rather maintain something you can't buy a partial vehicle but maybe again there's a partial budget so maybe don't do all the maintenance yeah let's i'd like to take another look at what tom sent dollars wise where and just kind of map out where that runs out like based on his historical spend brian right and include chapter 90 and include chapter 90 and like this does what he have get him through and it's tough because it's not half years because they don't they don't do roads all year long but does it get him through half of fy27 and then there's another budget gets him to the right end of the fiscal year because i don't see any benefit in having x ahead of yeah just kind of what's been like yeah and i i don't see a benefit of that because we're paying that gets paid for right in advance of being used so i don't i don't see a benefit to that um and then sidewalk would love sidewalks to be designed and constructed but it's again i think on a relative basis i might suspect people just said relative to all this others yeah stuff it's a nice down in whalen there are three sidewalks i mean no yeah again the only i'm being considered yeah the only exception i guess to that would be if there were something that um you know was uh safety related um
handicap accessibility related that uh you know was important again to protect human travel uh and and uh but so maybe through more detail there there could be a rationale but i think as a just generally improving sidewalks that are passable but maybe not in the best of shape um didn't seem as high a priority as most of the other requests yeah the only exception i would say is i think you think i remember this except i dropped my kids off at school but i know if you're within a certain mileage of the school you can't get the bus and you either have to be dropped off or walk and that might be the only exception where i'm like okay those in decent shape people actually have to use them you know a good chunk of the year yeah i but that's i live within that mileage of a school and there is no world in which they're giving me a third they're i'm getting a sidewalk okay yeah that's that's i will leave i i would say given the priorities we leave it at no and this is if it's a healthy issue right that michael and and brian um can reinsert it i think we have to have some lows because i think you said at the i put every vehicle as a lot is there a lot yeah and so i struggle a little bit with that because i i agree with you general but i also don't want i'm not going to say that just having a low but no no rationalize your way on that on that on the dpw vehicles i do the the heavy equipment right where tom is saying right this is breaking down really i can't use it right they have to deliver their service right they've been what we're paying dpw to be there and not carry out services that they need to carry out so i would i would say on the equipment right i might go back to tom and say right you've got let's look at what he has for dollars right yeah my logic was there's a lot of them some of the lows will make it some of them won't so yeah none of the none of the lows will make it we will run out of money before so i would say the highs make it in media some of the mediums will make it in i don't know that the lows will make it before i forget can i just make an administrative note here to the rest of you um i inadvertently put uh the comment there moved to fiscal year 30 on the wrong item it belongs on the street sweeper okay i've changed that in my file but just if anybody get got confused by that okay i agree with what you just said as to the particular equipment requests that he's got here based on his discussion with us most of these things sounded like there was a pretty darn good reason why they he needed to move them up i realized he wouldn't have it was to move them up yeah so that's where and i don't know that we're going to be able to completely get through this um tonight without brian you or i going back and sort of reworking the numbers and see where we land but i think there's there's probably room for some of the mediums right to come in i'd start with the highs again depending what your target is the answer is yes i mean we're not eventually we can scroll down to the very bottom where i did a variance comparison to what's in the five-year plan for funding but before you do that um can you just go down a couple the sherman's bridge um the discussion there is um there had been a request for uh in the five-year plan for 630 thousand dollars we understand that if all goes well the state's going to cover that cost and if there's any other additional costs that can't be covered by the state uh tom holder felt that he had uh sufficient excess chapter 90 money that could be used uh the only reason i would need need to discuss was it wasn't he wasn't sure whether uh you needed a appropriation vote at town meeting uh to be able to this goes back to my initial account by accessing both chapter 90 funding generally and whatever program under which the state's going to cover the cost as to whether the town needed to appropriate the money even though the state was ultimately going to pay the cost either through chapter 90 or otherwise the chapter nine i i okay so that that's a question that is we have zero it's likely going to be a zero in what we present well it's my understanding that they they're going to you know in-kind donations of materials and uh their contractors so i i don't know that but i think if we're going to use chapter 90 money or whatever other place the state's providing this money if it's outside chapter 90. so it's just you just want to make sure for town meeting purposes and getting the right action in front of town meeting that it simply not just be zeroed out because the state's going to pay if um you know like like a matchable like a grant situation we had last year with the stormwater asset management fund you know the town had to appropriate the full amount even though we were we had been approved for a grant for 60 percent of the cost and and uh so that's the reason i put it needs discussion here um um stormwater system yeah that one the reason i think it could be pushed out i think it's absolute priority yeah it has to do this stuff but uh and brian kevin you can correct me if i'm wrong they have at least a couple fiscal years worth of unspent appropriation on the open capital list as well as this grant i just mentioned its purpose was to do an asset management study and report on culverts and yeah pipes and things so it kind of made sense to me to maybe just nudge that because he had funding in his request every other year yeah so i was thinking you might nudge that into fiscal 28 so you might have 28 29 each having a request but it wasn't necessarily needed for fiscal 27 because they'd never get around to spending it and probably shouldn't spend a lot of until they get the study done that that was at least my thinking for um but but i think again if we don't comply with the stormwater regs there's bad financial things that can happen to the town yeah so i don't think we have much question we have to do this work question why you said we were going to get out of here at 9 30 tonight but here we are 9 30 yet but it's 8 it's 8 17.
you think my 9 30 was optimistic or i didn't know if that was a typo the other way i thought anyway let's keep going because there's a lot of stuff here i thought i was being optimistic um okay so the rest of them there's radio system upgrades and several vehicles um like i said before i i struggle a little bit because i think when tom asks for vehicles he's been very judicious about moving them around until right he absolutely needs them because they're either in a state of disrepair not being able to be used or you know significant amount of time offline having said that however yeah go back to the street sweeper which once you move the comment to the right place that was something he thought he needed in fiscal 27 and now he's moved that out to fiscal 30 but he's he's he's done free he's done triage and said we'll figure out a way to make that thing so i'm just saying not not everything he asked for absolutely has to be done i i i agree that's an example i just i want to give credit and i you know because he does do that swap versus just asking for it as well i mean maybe i have to go back to him to say you do the fire asking for you get to what do you think is the priority yeah right so he's got the swap loader is 370 and then he's got the john deere loader is 325 and the dump trucks 150 those are the three he's actually asking for right yeah and dollar wise plus or minus it it balanced out with what was in the five-year plan between what he moved out and pulled forward so i think that's what you're pointing out that's part of his thinking but again just because something was in the five-year plan for fiscal 27 doesn't necessarily mean this no i agree it's gonna yeah i think i went medium on it for i guess just the general concept that again if you're if we're tight on budget dollars you push a vehicle out for a year but but to your point if you think he's really been judicious over the years and he really does get the maximum amount of time out of the vehicles then yeah i'll i'll do this right mass come right what what are the implications if these are not replaced each of them are not replaced this year one of them was going to fall apart yeah and so that would be the
and mr time manager you may find when we're done our work you may have a bunch of department in sitting in front of you going through exactly the same process as you've gone through in prior years making their case for why we don't know what we're talking about so sure you're prepared for that but uh i presume this committee gives you some cover
and i apologize for those who may be watching it uh at home um in addition we've had a an audio problem the microphones were locked up and somebody uh we had to get somebody over at the coa for the planning board meeting and then um we the town worked on a joint community statement today with the school department and went out and then we had some technology problems with the third party server posting those to various social media outlets so the reason i keep going in and out is i'm talking to facilities it and a number of different people to get these all resolved sorry but i've been able to hear enough from the hallway you know get our report no i appreciate your understanding that
what we do here is it's fluid you know we we get when there's always something going on in town well what we i envision doing right michael's we're going to give you our ultimate determination of high things that we think need to be funded yes and then the mediums which we think if there's room they can be funded and lows we we don't think um should be a priority um right now so would it be again i just keep control of the spreadsheet what you could do is send me this back after the meeting yeah your sidebar notes yeah question would it be helpful for me this is brian kevin's standard form template would it be helpful for me on this particular one for fiscal 27 to resort uh the capital requests into sort of the high ones at the top of the table and and then everything following that or just keep it to keep it the way it is keep it i think keep it the way it is for now so i will finish putting these in sort of my next column of my spreadsheet i'll be able to pivot do a pivot table off of okay then the problem with this spreadsheet is that because there's breaks in it you can't easily filter off of it you can't there's you can't do a lot of functionality off of it so i'd like to be able to do it a little bit okay i think we've been through them all brian you mentioned going to the bottom right which was sort of looking at the variance to plans right and
again for those of you here in the room uh maybe you can make it can you make it one size smaller just so you could um no that's fine okay we'll go horizontally first yeah so uh this the blue her five-year capital plan was the numbers that appeared in the five-year plan that appears in the fincoms report and the 2025 atm warrant and so all i'm doing here is to accept we included all the requests with a few exceptions where we knew something shouldn't have been asked for uh we knew it was going to be a zero i took those out just and they're identified below uh and said okay if everything got approved how would that relate to both in total and by funding source what was otherwise shown in the five-year plan for fiscal 27 and so the red numbers are the uh positive or negative variances that if if one approaches is saying we need to recommend something that fits within the blue horizontal line at least in total and ideally in funding source what do we have to take out to get there and we've already talked about a number of things that i'm sure once they come out assuming that's what we ultimately decide but out meaning move them forward um we'll close that gap pretty quickly um um and a couple of big ones like the first excluded column the large chunk of that to kelly's earlier point uh the field portion of two and a half million dollars she's saying we would probably present as not part of the capital budget and it would be its own separate article which we we would render a advisement a recommendation on so that would immediately come out as a reconciling item if you will even though it's really there because it wasn't officially included in the five-year plan that the town saw um did i hear you right when you said earlier that you put them in the columns you know whether it's going to be excluded levy but it might not be the final column it lands in yes okay did i just are we within budget on any of the uh these are on others yeah i think so we can go across so when i looked at the spreadsheet the blue looks like there were manual entries as opposed i couldn't see the formula that generated yeah i pulled those out of the five-year plan table the warrants on the 2025 warrant okay so that's when you look at the 2025 warrant right those were the amounts that were in the the five-year plan for fy 27 um it wouldn't necessarily list be an issue if we had something in excluded debt that wasn't levy debt right but the fact that we're over on you know both right we've got an extra nine and a half million dollars of borrowing there alone yeah um and then we've got you know free cash cap stabilization we're over on um bar we water enterprise because of mwra um right that's going to amount to a pretty significant all the way to the right is the total the variance is you know 48 million but i mean what i what i then did is if you then go straight down from there go go back to the 48 million horizontally go back to the 48 then scroll straight down you'll see i pulled out the larger items that that keep going down i pulled out the larger items that are going to be done through articles um to get to the real variance that i was i would say real variance between what was in the is that really only 800 okay when you take away the town building the fields project the septic project and mwra all of which were in the fincom's report below the line if you will from yeah the five-year plan that was voted on by the fincom town meeting doesn't vote on the five-year plan so fincom took a vote and then it could spread in some lines below that table and then in the text these other larger projects so on a relative basis year over year table to table for typical capital items that the fincom would put in the capital table um at least last year anyway wasn't always that way it's 800 some odd thousand dollars and so if you knock out the transfer station at 450 000 that cuts that in half so we're really not that far off it just means we got to deal with these big items in some fashion well unless we want to go lower than unless we want to go as i was speaking we want to go below recommend something below what was in last year's five-year plan because of the yeah i think the problem is right we could we could go below but we've identified of these big projects right we've identified mwra some part of the town building roof the septic field need to be done and so that it's it's huge dollars right across those projects it's really hard to say we're going to do all of those big projects on top of what we had in the plan which was my issue as brian already knows with the plan being laid out that way because it was fairly maybe it wasn't certain but it was pretty pretty strong likelihood we were going to have to do some of those big projects right in fy 27 so i i think these are the hard choices right and i i would say we lay out a plan that is doing the highs and what that looks like financially and then
we can debate right if we take the mediums and that's a it's a stack on right like here's if you did all the mediums how much you stack on or maybe it's you do half the media right you you take the mediums and break them into two categories but i think you're out of money when you get done with the with the highs because now these are all projects that potentially are excluded right well not all the the two high school projects are but the well actually no the first one now is going to be funded by water rates yes but we still have to do the borrowing so are you concerned about the amount of borrowing we're i am concerned about the taxpayer burden right whether it's through taxes or water rates that we're asking residents to pay significantly more so i don't whether it's personally whether it's excluded or it's water rates or it's regular irrelevant to me it's one pocket or the other yeah no because it's coming out of my same pocket regardless of which of those things we decide to do oh i said whether you call it but yeah yeah you know i get it um yeah your your description is voter fatigue or taxpayer fatigue i understand given given the scope of these projects if they all in fact move forward this upcoming time meeting i think i believe really puts pressure on going through the normal ask of what even though a bunch of things moved around even if the dollars were about what was in the five-year plan for fiscal 27 it just doesn't feel right to me i mean i think the things that have to get the attention these big items have to get the attention and i think it to me it would be fair to the taxpayer to say you know we just need to come forward and ask you for the really important things now and then deal with the rest of it in the next four years because we're going to have operating overrides to deal with in the next four years but the problem is we're not unique in this and i'm not saying that's you know i circulated and i had it shared i think on our town social media the mma came out with a report that they did in conjunction with tufts university called the perfect storm saying how a lot of towns running into issues um budget shortfalls and it's in part due to how um proposition two and a half works but to kelly's point it's okay if the proposition two and a half and allow you to raise taxes you're raising taxes on people and you're you're concerned about the cost of everything a lot of our costs are going up health care everything we don't necessarily have control over that and there is a cost to deferring maintenance these are all things we have to consider you know um i get it it's they're very important considerations we can't dance around the you know the pfas problem can't you know we're going to have some other types of problems over 195 main street because we have we're going to have to do some type of mitigation over there eventually you know we've got another report the other night there's things that just come up that we're going to have to deal with we might be able to imagine are there dollars you're foreseeing needed for fiscal 27. not right now because we still have to finish our phase two report and get into phase three but there may be something needed in 28 or in order to develop that site there's probably going to be some remediation and maybe a subsurface ventilation system if somebody's going to put a slab over there um what else lost my train of thought after the day we've had i know yeah i think you know your point is that no but i mean there might be certain things you know maybe you can get an extra year out of a cruiser or an extra year out of some items some things you won't be able to defer too far even if you know they're high or low you might be able to make some adjustments but i think the other issue we had michael is that um and i understand what the bylaw says my my view was we were going to be spending a lot more of our energy and i'm sure we will uh in the new year on 10 to 15 year long range planning and uh some of these items you know really need to be viewed in the context of a 10 to 15 year plan and so one of the reasons i think stepping back and only dealing with high priority and again you may have different information by the time you need to get done putting together your actual recommended budget but the more you can defer this year the more information will be available both to this committee of putting things in their context um and um and and yeah you don't want to inadvertently cost yourself a bunch of money because you deferred something um but um and i look at the open project list and it'll be a progress that's been made still there's a heavy heavy load of projects for fiscal 25 and 26 appropriations that have to get done and um and then some big potential projects here um i just think staff is still pretty stretched um so anyway i i think i think all we can do is yeah i would i would i mean we're going to make a recommendation michael and obviously you're entitled um right to change that recommendation and we understand why you might i'm with brian i still would like to see the capitalists while we've been making progress shrink down a bit more and if we think right we go through the projects and then maybe that's the way you look at mediums and you say well i'm going to do the mediums that are relatively easy to get done right lingering out there for three years and i'm going to leave the ones that i've got resources tied up finishing existing projects and they're not going to get my my thing is if you're not going to get to moving the project forward in fy 27 then it shouldn't really go in the fy 27 budget right if you're not going to be have resources here to get to do procurement right and get it get it going then why would we tie that up ahead of time so that maybe that's the way you differentiate you know mediums but you're going to have a better sense than we are at this point hopefully it's better in the future of you know i've got certain people who are overextended and there's no way i can put another procurement project right versus keep going back to tom but like it doesn't take that much to buy a truck and i'm sure staff i never had an employee worked with me that would tell me maybe i had a few i can't do that right so i understand that town staff wants to advocate and and tell you yeah they can get it done but all we can do is look backwards in time and say well albeit great progress has been made that there's still a lot of work that has been funded and brian just did as you know brian just did the financing for fiscal 24 some fiscal 24 and 25 projects just got done in november so those projects couldn't happen anyway unless because you have the money so um i i just think this may be a a breather year i don't know i feel this way philosophically about each and every year going forward but there's just so many moving parts um financially for the town that it just seems like the easier pitch to town meeting would be we really have tried to be thoughtful and swim back cut back on some things we were planning to go forward with these are the important things we have to get done uh maybe not the fields but no yeah there are a couple of and and the and the high item high priority items and yeah there are a few other items in there that can get done quickly i mean that's i think that's the rationale it's not i don't sense anybody here thus far as a you know don't spend at any cost type i haven't heard anybody say you know i'm just not a big fan of spending capital money i think everybody has been you know thoughtful on how they kind of approach it and and unfortunately while we had great meetings with town staff they were very short uh there's probably a lot more information that could have been helpful to us that they weren't asked to you know send in um which would have helped us yeah i mean that's on that's on the again late breaking of the committee being created yeah approved and do i want to do we all want to change that going forward and develop a better right request form with a more request form yes communities start earlier you know like late summer when they're on their capital plans we would we would have to start earlier to meet in october 15th to meet the bylaw right late summer probably isn't even early enough traditionally since i've been here or what i saw my predecessors do it was starting in september so in order to do the type of analysis that you've been alluding to would almost have to start july august time frame and you know or alternatively you start right as soon as you finish this report you start with okay let's talk about your what's next well what's what's in your future plan what's in your fy28 plan and and take a little more time right with each department head over a longer period of time right not a rush period and by the time you get to the fall right you got a pretty good understanding of the background of what everybody's looking for and why and it's not such a heavy lift exercise right crammed in at the end well i think it allows more give and take i mean because a lot of these items really don't have a lot of information out if you have an opportunity to go back to a department head and say well you said this and let's let's talk about that one well and most of them don't develop overnight right they weren't they that's the idea that a piece of equipment is going to be at the end of a useful life you know how old it is you know roughly it might move up or down a little bit but you know that's going to happen right that's that's going to happen or software is going to hit the end of useful life stuff like that so all right system sorry um okay and and i know there's a software system that you are using to track open projects um we did get something uh a former staffer started it and we think there may be some limitations we may wind up trying something different going forward but we have something now but we think that we may want something a little more robust there may be that what kelly just thought about that that generally at least i thought it was generally going to be focused on managing projects and making information easily accessible to people whether that same software could house what you're talking about is more forward-looking well easy is supposed to be the forward-looking information is that what you're talking about replacing or are you talking about something else i'm not sure because i i haven't been using it that much i got involved initially when we were helping them uh populate with the data and i don't know if it as it's starting to be used if it will deliver everything that we may have been told that would so i'm just reserving the right to say that it might not do everything we thought you know it was picked a couple years ago and so we started using when i existing projects need to be tracked going forward until they're done which i presumed it would do right um and maybe we're talking about the same thing i'm talking about other future projects that haven't yet been you know formally approved by the town to at least again have a depository real time for department heads to have that information so that maybe you don't need to necessarily call staff in all that freedom if you can just go to a depository of you know they're keeping track of their yeah tom tom typeson you know oh you know just got the word this trucks to himself you know this truck's gonna need to be replaced much sooner than i thought yeah i don't easy cip was supposed to be like these are the projects i've i've put they're in the plan right and you keep adding years and you can also use status on right this status of a approved project where it is but um yeah it may not do everything i mean i had one done all of it so capital planning capital planning tool yeah the idea was that if you had a central tool that the department heads could use it right independently right add their information in and then those who are users of the system can just pop in and say okay this is what you know dbw is looking for right and when and i can i can look at their requests but okay yeah all right we've talked about fy 27 i think the next step there um and i'm not i'm not looking for a vote i don't think tonight because i think we need to put this into it we've talked through everything maybe we have general agreement i think we need to put it in a format that breaks it right the highs as slotted the mediums and the lows um and then uh that would form the basis for the tables in our report but i think we can vote on that when we've got it summarized with dollars okay um for fy 28 through fy 31 we tend not to get as detailed but i do think we need to take a stab at slotting um well maybe we don't because we talked about doing high medium low um there's a couple of ways right we could go about it we could do high media i don't know if that i did i tried to do high medium low on the out years everybody did everybody did and so exactly go to the second tab or yeah so this is the tab that everybody um sent me their individual rankings and then each one of the years has a consolidated ranking and there's only a couple that absent you want to go through each line item right now and just to make sure anybody that might have an issue with what the consolidated result was um needed discussion yeah i think for for purposes of the out years we go with the consolidated ranking as opposed to worrying about starting to put numbers in yes um different places and then to the extent there's any that we need discussion we just talk about those so fiscal 28 we talked about the hundred thousand fields the only one that needed any discussion we talked about that right no especially having nothing in fiscal 29 30 um a small item
there's an item that needs discussion sorry lower level improvements at the library is only sixty thousand dollars um it only needed discussion because one member didn't rank it and there were two mediums and two lows so i just didn't put anything in there fine they just see we didn't rank it it might have been me it might have been me i think my i was either lower i didn't do you want to make a judgment now which one is it the uh lower light level improvements in fiscal 30 60 000 ask and which which line item is it so it's the row is um row 74 column af my reason for putting low is i just didn't know what it was because i thought we were doing the lower level improvement so i wasn't sure what 60 thousand out that far yeah you and i you and i put low and liz and john put medium and and you you had an unclear which i may have forgotten to highlight that one well i think i if it was unclear i think i put because i didn't know what it was is that in this current year no it's fiscal 30 and i didn't all right yeah sorry it's it's you can't see the top yeah um i think i think that that's because i didn't understand what that was i couldn't recall a discussion about it or yeah we didn't we didn't get into a discussion with the department heads necessarily on every item in the four years after fiscal 27 to my recollection right so i i agree with kelly i i also thought they just spent in or in the process of spending a lot of money doing improvements to all levels in the library and it just wasn't clear that they needed to spend more money relative to other items but in any event if you i tried to put low
had another note on fy 31 active shooter equipment two highs two mediums one blank
by 31. yeah that was again you brad it was just unclear and again i may or may not have highlighted that one for you when you went back you took me sorry no there were two highs and two mediums on that one yeah good yeah sorry about that i think i'd put a medium on that one
not marking these prime so i'll let you up
don't see any other ones then but had the uh uh i want to just flag one large one that i um i'm pretty sure i ran say low and again it has to do with the transfer station um million eight and fiscal 31 two of us ranked as low three of us ranked as medium which is how it ended up being ranked medium for fiscal 31. um i just can't ever fathom spending i can't fathom spending four hundred fifty thousand dollars at transfer stations but i just can't fathom spending a million eight you might recall that tom holder this request was a 450 000 to do a sound like a prefab like replacement building uh michael feya's view was you needed 450 000 to repair what's there and design something that could be built in fiscal 31 at a cost of 1.8 million um so it clearly was a disconnect there but um you know i just because the consolidated result came out at medium i thought i'd speak up and just say at a minimum i would if we get around to putting dollars out there i would kick that one out to fiscal 32 just because it's it needs to get resolved but other than that um unless we said unless anybody sees a consolidated ranking that um is particularly objectionable uh if our current plan at the moment is not to submit other than the rankings uh i think they're ready to you know they're ready to be included in the report for those two changes three changes i'll change the fall field for the field maintenance line item i'll change all those i agree any disagreement no no so same same comment though i would like to see it summarized have everybody see it summarized to vote on um so the question in that regard is uh obviously i'll update this just as a source document um so the version whatever um for the report and i'm happy to take a stab at it do you want me to create a eight and a half by eleven table of sorts to uh summarize sort of by fiscal year the rankings it can simply be referred to in the text as a attached table because i don't i mean you can attach this yeah i think we could i think could provide this obviously no you could attach the the project name amount requested amount requested and maybe department and then just these are the highs these are the mediums these are the lows the lows i i would like to so i'm gonna i would like to finish a report with the rankings and our commentary and deliver that to michael i would then still like to continue after we've done that with further like trying to see how this all slots out dollar wise um but i'm just i'm weary leery of time here right um we want to not provide um i think we can i think we can 27 because it's it's already i'll move the numbers around in that based on this discussion um because we discussed at a public meeting i can recirculate that to the members from an administrative over meeting law perspective and the follow-up yeah here's the revised version um any other comments people might have are going to have to wait for the next meeting yeah that sound right i agree with that yeah i think that gives right we've already done the work they may not agree with it but it gives you fy27 which is the most important right for getting a budget put together and tweaking for budget and then we can continue working right give give the out year high medium low but we can continue working on further refining that there's a little bit more time um it's still part of a public meeting we could still share but um i just want to make sure we're getting them enough to work out fy27 and so is our report going to contain the the sort of the budget analysis that we had at the bottom or it's just going to be the the rankings for fy27 what i was saying was i think because brian's already slotted things if we take the way i think i recommend we do it is we take the highs with the columns across of the categories and what they total to we do the same thing for the mediums and low right and so there's an ability to be like all right i'm doing the highs and i'm taking these ones off a medium right um and yeah maybe there's some rejiggering that has to happen but if you start with that you start with high you're going to see you're already right have a lot of dollars tied up so you don't you don't want me to
you don't want me to change any of the specific requests that are in what we looked at in the first tab simply restructure it so that it's high medium and low that's what i think and then at the next meeting i said earlier because i as i thought about it yeah okay no i got it okay i will do that and um but the other the other one we're looking at right there will kind of stay the same uh except that i'm going to create a uh sort of hopefully an eight and a half by eleven summary of the of the rankings for fiscal 28 through 31. yeah and we'll look at it and if people yeah and i would say there's no reason well i i can't remember you you distributed this out tonight to the members right i did uh did that go to all the ex-officio members do uh no i did it to us um brian michael and carol okay people who are here um so i'll again i'll make whatever edits required to that document and leave it to you as to when and how you want to disseminate it share that with the other ex-officio members um
because there's you know hopefully useful information in there that town management the finance director can refer to or use uh but we just need to simply continue to modify it we'll just have to keep distributing out new versions to people yeah so maybe for now we'll keep it until we have our next meeting maybe i would like to keep it till our next meeting because i would like to see it before we go okay sending it off to everybody uh other than me is there any homework for others uh yes i need to put everything into that i haven't done yet into the spreadsheet that i have um just to make sure that flows through all the other i don't know that it's homework for next time but i'd like to be able to eventually give fincom all the charts that they need and that's why i said we can keep working on stuff after but i need to do that um and then brian i will if you put together the charts um i can start drafting the narratives some of the narratives we talked about is there any parts of that that can be a further broken up or do you kind of have in your mind no i think we can break it up i just it might get on unruly yeah i think it's going to become a much shorter report than what perhaps we originally envisioned for this year yeah and um again we have a couple of exhibits that can be referred to in the text and then you're highlighting kind of those areas that we're not quite certain on and then then the question is what what is it we will be voting on whenever we get to the point of voting on something is it voting on basically the report i think we're voting on the report and as long as the report is from my perspective as long as the report is is separating out these large article type projects then um i'll figure out how to work my way around that okay i'm open to suggestions on that but i i think if the narrative of the report is separating and has has appropriate narrative around the concerns with some of those projects i would hope you know we can still but we're not necessarily recommending everything but we are saying what what we think falls into the high medium low and and separating out you know yeah i mean it would be helpful for me and i know you we're working obviously and i i well i have made a one reach out to tom holder i i i don't think we want all members any members other than the chair if we can help it requesting information from town staff but in the interest of time um um question is you know someone needs to reach out to kirsteen to see when and if she's going to have any revision to her so i wrote down everything we talked about meeting are you going to take her outreach i'm going to send one email to all of which are basically the ex-official members here's what we need from every what we would like from everybody with the understanding that whatever we don't get we're not going to be able to pass judgment on we're not yeah we'll leave open in the report right this is you know we feel more information is needed on this area before you know a final decision can be made that's the best we can do at this point and that's just be sure that's going to cover a little better idea of the question i asked tom holder a little better idea of the scope and estimated cost buildup for the high school wastewater facility um a little site plan of some sort showing kind of where what portion of the athletic field is going to be disturbed by that project so we can visually get a sense of you know what real impact is it having um those are really the two big items that i'm you know i'm not prepared to say i'm all in on when i'm all in on the wastewater facility except that getting done i'm just not sure i'm there of recommending a dollar number and the fields i'm just i'm not sure i'm prepared to say it should be advanced are you are you comfortable because i'm you know getting all of this i don't want to necessarily put a burden on on folks to turn something super fast are you comfortable saying sort of a cap putting a caveat on it saying leave this project needs to be done right subject to additional documents receiving additional documentation of the scope like something along those lines i just we got to cut it off no i agree so if the report ends up saying you know we're just unable well we think this needs to be done in the wastewater facility septic um we're just not quite there yet as to recommending it for the specific dollar amount something like that yeah but i'm just one member i mean if everybody else is comfortable then i just need to you know figure out how i approach you know whatever approval you're asking people to give okay um all right but i think the rest of the items we seem to all be in the same way point okay so and unfortunately john wasn't here hopefully he'll be able to watch the tape and uh i forget i disagree with all of it yeah sure that's exactly what he's going to do
okay so brian you're gonna you're gonna re-summarize i'm going to send you the what we my notes from tonight you're going to re-summarize those two tables i'm going to send an email to the various department heads with the open questions and start to draft the narrative around some of the items that we think need a little more narrative discussion um to include in the report and we also are going to include i don't think that we're going to include in the report the work brian did on standing capital our open capital as well and i'll take some in the next draft some from your um intro and put that in as well okay um anything else we need to do tonight i the only other thing that i had on the back of my mind brian a hurley he was you had a question for brian keveny i thought around projects that have been have proceeded before the debt it's it's not necessarily within our purview but um brian when we were talking to michael fea um uh kirsteen had put together a memo for the school committee which outlined uh sort of their open capital projects and on there was a million three for something done at the high school and um when michael fea met with us he said well that that project should be off the list it's it's been completed to which i said well how did you complete it because the million three to do that project was just borrowed so how do you complete it and it sounded like it got completed probably over the summer um and so that i think brian i've asked you this question before i understand of late you identified this ability for the general fund to advance money as long as the select board agrees and signed a particular dor form and it's sent to the dor but that that was a relatively recent discussion and so i i you know and i noted i think i asked you this question when i got the open capital listing from like august which is the one that the staff got with the request for submission there were a number of accounts that had negative balances in them and the only way i could see them getting negative balances if the money was getting spent before the funding had been borrowed because they all seem to be related to items that we hadn't borrowed the money yet so i just didn't know how that was happening and i just want to make it's not my job to make sure we're not spending money before we you know are supposed to but uh so i i'll leave that question with you you don't need to address it tonight no what we did was we issued bands and what brian has sent me a request for open capital and i believe it was uh you know maybe october or november they'd asked me i forget exactly when so when whenever we issue bands the money comes in and the ban money goes into the accounts on june 30th dor requires us to remove the ban money from those accounts and put them on the balance sheet as a liability which is bands payable so on june's on june 30th all the accounts show a deficit even though they don't have a deficit because their money is on the balance sheet so what happens is once we close the fiscal year and we open up the next fiscal year we move the money back off the balance sheet from bands payable into the various lines so that's why numerous accounts that brian had sent me had negative balances the only one that runs in a negative is chapter 90 because it's spent and then reimbursed but the money was on the balance sheet right and that goes to my prior question how can we spend money which results in a this negative on the balance sheet which means the town has spent money before we've gotten the money back without without an appropriation for it well you you never spend money without the appropriation so in winchester i can tell you that we never spent a nickel on anything until we had the bond proceeds when it came to wayland all of the debt was issued in february so you would have you would go to a springtown meeting in april project will be authorized and these these uh project managers in the town were so accustomed to start spending the money in in july and august and september even though we wouldn't even finishing on the debt until february so i've at least moved up the borrowing of the debt to octoberish most projects that are issued by debt don't start for at least six months or nine months after the fiscal year so in in probably all cases or most cases we get the bond proceeds prior to anything really being spent so that's what i'm saying the one that you might look at and again this is not my issue um uh the school michael fayette basically said the million three for the school
hvac yeah he said that project was completed you know was well completed and that happened before you borrowed the money that you didn't have a ban for it he's wrong because we we borrowed the ban money oh you didn't have a ban for that item i looked at your debt summary that we did on the working group we had we had 1.3 at the end of the year on that one well then your debt summary schedule that you did for the working group on the psych ward you might want to go back and look at that because that line item didn't have any band funds associated with it as best i recall anyway and i don't want to tie this group up on that item um yeah this is a sidebar yeah we need to do this as a sidebar okay all right yeah i just it the only reason it came up is because we were trying to make sense of some of these open capital items and and reconcile what we're being told but anyway much for to talk about moving minutes yeah let's let's do that um okay if you're into minutes yes you can absolutely go brian brian you can absolutely go kevin not overly um thank you thank you for the members watching from home all right all right thank you all right thank you good night carol mr town manager thank you thank you carol yeah madam chair all right can we vote to any discussion on the minutes of december 9th edits discussion right seeing no edits or discussion can i get a motion to approve who had been sharing that up on the screen was it robbie was oh i am where oh yeah i took it down i'm sorry so that's what people were seeing that at home yes yes sorry all right i just said sharing it never mind never mind screen share on the long day all right thank you so we had so moved in a second thank you uh all in favor all right i okay uh any topics not reasonably anticipated by the chair not to my knowledge um we do have a meeting scheduled for zoom um on the 22nd i know liz you didn't think you'd be able to support that is that still the case um i i don't have a firm answer yet okay no i have to i may have i may be traveling on no friday okay so i'm going to leave that on the calendar uh if for some reason three of us i need three what what would we be talking about at that meeting this kind of draft report yes question is practically so i can get done i can get done what i said i would get done if you're not going to really have the time to get it done i would be inclined to not yeah the meeting then and just as much as we've got to get this stuff done um give yourself yeah i agree holiday season unfortunately to get through it and meet this best we can the first week of january to try to finish okay because i think you can because because you will be drafting that yourself and based on you know input you've received through the open meeting again i think you'd be able to distribute a draft before the meeting so that people could at least be prepared at the meeting you just can't then collect yeah any input from people okay until the meeting and likewise i'll i'll the next day or so get back out to people the um yeah the purported tables and updated excel spreadsheet so again people have time to look at it all right we what's the first day of that first week of january is the fifth that's monday yeah deep breath again you you should check with the availability of rooms just because i'm sure people a lot of committees will be getting geared back up for town meeting um what days the week of the fifth can can you guys do midweek i think is much better for me but tuesday wednesday yeah i want to travel on tuesday but wednesday works monday works as well and thursday i'm going to try to get wednesday hybrid that's a hybrid hopefully i can get
that whole week is the first half of january is garbage for me but that's um i'm going to try and get wednesday and i'll let you i'll send you guys a note if i can send that out again if you and if you get jammed up at work but you have a draft that you've been able to get out to people in advance you know hopefully the four of us could move the ball forward it might be the case so brad you might have to chair the meeting um just because that there is a possibility that i can't leave work you could at least advance the ball with maybe one more meeting needed it would be a final meeting can we speaking of that can we go ahead and look at the following week too just so that
we try to your holiday in there somewhere in that week no that's the week after that is the holiday
so i'm looking at the week of the 12th i've read that entire week read that entire week all right i think i might be traveling like monday through thursday yeah i'm gonna i guess check with john brad you were good the whole week yeah so timeout did you pick a day no um i again they're all crappy for me so um brian are you okay that week yeah liz you think your saturday's work better for anybody yeah we can meet yeah it's in a public setting yeah um liz you said yeah it's navy that we can dc and the expectation is i'll be there for that okay all right so i'll check with john and see just because i'd like to get we get the seventh the seventh i'm going to see if we can get start time if you can do a zoom now i can probably i will sneak okay after spending a day there that's back to the hotel room so i can definitely support hybrid okay 6 p.m 6 p.m on the 7th yeah on the 7th i can't do earlier than that okay january all right 6 p.m and then i'm going to try for the same thing wednesday of the following week 14th hybrid hybrid for both 6 p.m for both 7th and 14th i may regret that but and again you just if you can get them to hold a room hybrid room for you and hopefully it's all right well a topic i'm not reasonably anticipated that i can think of now is happy holidays thank you everybody for your time and consideration i know it's not an easy time of year to do this you do robbie yeah yeah thank you now we get adjourned uh all right can i get a motion to adjourn so all in favor all in favor aye meeting adjourned at nine