November 3, 2025 – Select Board – Video & Transcript
November 3, 2025 - Select Board
good evening carol martin as chair of the select board i'm calling select board meeting of monday
november 3rd 2025 to order it's a hybrid meeting we are in the whalen town building in the select
board meeting room at 41 kachita road in whalen one may watch with the meeting link that can be
found on our agenda and also on the town's calendar page pursuant to chapter two of the
acts of 2025 this meeting will be conducted in person and by a remote means in accordance with
applicable law this meeting may be recorded which will be made available to the public on wacom
as soon after the meeting as is practicable when required by law or allowed by the chair
persons wishing to provide public comment or otherwise participate in the meeting
may do so in person attendance or by accessing the meeting remotely as noted above through the
link it's on the calendar we request public comment be limited to two minutes per person
okay so with me in the room with me in the room is tom fay bill whitney to get some stuff in the seat
doug levine uh myself obviously and online we have ann bransley because miss bransley is participating
remotely our votes tonight will be uh by roll call so our agenda for tonight is the call to
order review the agenda for the public followed by announcements on the comment we'll have a
discussion review and to vote on the electric vehicle first light duty vehicle policy we will have um
two candidates to interview for appointments one to the ecc and one on the conservation commission
uh approximately 7 pm we will enter into executive session
pursuant to massachusetts general laws chapter 38 section 21 a3 to discuss strategy with respect
the collective bargaining with the international association of firefighters afl cio local 1978
return to open session of section 7 10 although the agenda states otherwise at 7 15 tonight we will have uh fiscal 27 financial forecast including but not limited summary of the fiscal year 25 operating results fiscal 26 tax fee cap estimates fiscal 27 revenue expense forecast and et cetera we'll be joined it's a joint meeting with the finance committee and the school committee we will also have a conversation with the finance uh director about review potential vote design documents and award the top 8 million 215 000 bonds to raymond james and associates uh following all that we will have a discussion the massachusetts water resource authority including but not limited to financing the next steps followed by a discussion review and potential vote to authorize the town manager to sign the acknowledgement certificate relative to the sale of the town center and we'll have a town manager's report the consent calendar minutes of october 20th and october 24th we will review correspondence select boards for sports concerns there are no topics not reasonably anticipated 48 hours in advance and hopefully around 9 30 we will adjourn so i do also want to know although on this left we are joined this evening by town manager michael mccall and assistant town manager of power spurlet okay so before we begin tonight's meeting i want to thank the board and the town manager for joining members of the community outside the high school today to show our support for our neighbors of color in light of this last week's incidents at the high school while the incident is still under active investigation any action that makes any member of our community feel that they do not belong has no place in wayland the strong showing of support this the community is a testament to the fact that we value and respect one another here in town
i am also going to just go a little out of character with the board's indulgence and move to reports uh concerns select boards concerns for this one topic to see if um individual members have something they would like to say on this as well and um i'm going to start with you doug if you don't mind sure um i think it's been a particularly fraught situation in town over the last several days since we learned about this incident that occurred on the 30th we learned that the next day on halloween and i think something important to bear in mind is what the chair mentioned is that there is an ongoing investigation currently and i think it's difficult for us to not take a beat and wait for that to play out so we have all of the information before we make any type of formal statement because i don't think any of us have have all of the facts right now and so i think it's important to pause wait until we have the information and then i think there's an appropriate time for us to be able to weigh in at that stage but i'm very glad that folks came together to stand in support of residents and friends of color of whalen and we had a very robust turnout today and uh i'm glad all the members of our board were there as well thank you uh tom rebel well i don't have much to add you know a school is a place to foster respect and um looking forward to the investigation being complete so we can get all of that i would excuse me don't have anything to add thank you thank you um you know obviously this was a very upsetting um situation and of course whalen came together and showed support but i think there's probably some overall protocols and general policies that we need to put in place and uh we'll see how things unfold but it there's further discussion that's needed on this on race and whalen and its relationship thank you right now this is um a practice when we have discussions again with the board's indulgence i'm going to see if mr mccall would like to uh also have something to say add uh thank you madam chair no i would echo select board member levine's comments as well as yours um i i thought it was a great turnout and i know we all work to ensure that our citizenry and any of our visitors feel valued here um but i would say that there's an ongoing investigation i'm committed as i said uh some of the board members working with dr fleischman going forward on communication but until such time as an investigation is complete i don't think there's much that we can can add to it from our from this this board thank you of course i'm not done one more before we go off this topic there was um doug's gonna help me with the details here there was already scheduled a program uh next monday that this will be part of our announcements i'm kind of i'm kind of moving along but uh and november 10th at 6 30 to 8 at the uh community center so and it's marion ryan the district attorney for middlesex county um it's going to be holding event workshop on hate crimes i think it was originally billed as an event for both the wayland and sudbury communities and i imagine in light of recent incidents that there will probably be a robust turnout and folks should feel free to attend in person or online great thank you so having said that now um let's move on to um regular announcements and i think we're going to start with one from mr mccall oh thank you madam sheriff i tonight you're going to hear from some of our newest employees um when we get to uh agenda item number three uh julie gaggin who is our new manager of sustainability she'll be here talking with you folks but uh i also want to introduce to you our new executive assistant in the select board town manager's office that is abigail warren who's right here um she comes from a background of working um with non-profits uh managing office settings coordinating a lot of things she has been a great addition to our office it fits right in and we're happy to have her and unless you feel like saying anything i just wanted you folks to have a name and a face because it's the person you interact with quite frequently when you call our office but uh abby's been great and it's week two and we're looking forward to a long tenure with her thank you welcome
yeah yes yes yes that's what i said yesterday okay catching on very quickly she's already sending a list of things to do so i think we're in good steve thank you very much and welcome to the town um i also want to announce that we're having a veterans day um ceremony is next tuesday and thank you again and for um representing us and giving the welcoming remarks so does anyone else have any announcements we're good to go thank you so now i think i'll move to public comment is there anyone has public comment i recognize miss podel do you want to come up here please hi my name is hope podel seven jennison road i just from a kind of a different perspective but looking at it as a citizen resident of wayland and a human being um after this horrible event the other day i did what i always do is uh started to read about uh more intensely than what i had done before hate crimes and uh hate incidences um because it's different than hate crimes it's not um it's a hate incident if you want to look it up it's easier than we explaining it i have to talk a little bit just about my reaction was uh i was dumbstruck it was dumbstruck it was beyond for all the years i worked in uh different social service non-profits and universities and colleges um with some different events long before these kinds of events had labels or names um i feel this beats them all and uh i feel horrible the family or families um that uh are the parents and are guardians of the children that were harmed and uh i i have been active in reading on the wayland community forum on facebook some are better off not bothering and others get very involved in it and it does have had it has had different opinions and different attitudes and one thing i did see was um a little bit more activity and different opinions um different feelings i don't know that it was opinions i think it was feelings and the town of which i just heard the participation on wayland community forum and spoke to some others was kind of sadness hurt and how could this happen in wayland well unfortunately um it has and it is happening in other communities similar maybe larger than wayland but it's here it's now i sent out a list of uh websites for people to take a look at was more for i called it learning and teaching um the learning that while i did a lot um have done more and i think we could all learn more about the history of hate and racism that goes way back and uh lynching um for what i know now i don't know the other um it may be different events that actually happened but nonetheless we're a community that has to come forward whether in small groups and then larger to make sure we really service our children and the staff and the whole community otherwise sometimes it for people who just don't know it becomes a lot of white privilege talk and that's more distressing but that's because people generally don't know what that is and just need you to bring it to a close miss modella okay um so that i can feel and with my friends and community that we are really making an effort to enlighten ourselves and people around us for the safety of the community thanks thank you thank you appreciate it anyone else would like to make documents for you
identify yourself sir when you want this to give us your name and your address sure my my name is uh stephen cass i'm a former wayland resident an employee um did you have a number so i live in orleans massachusetts orleans yes um i also want to speak about the the uh recent racist incident and give the public outcry about you know this is a town that doesn't discriminate and we're not racist and we don't approve of bullying and from my experience here i can say that that's that's just a bunch of nonsense um i was the wayland athletic director from 2013 to 15. i bought a home here thought it would be a nice place to live and work i uncovered massive financial fraud in the athletic program pretty quickly mostly i uncovered discrimination against girls um in the last 35 years the boys have won 28 state championships the girls have won one if you take out swimming there's a lot of discrimination behind that coaching money but mostly there are powerful white coaches they make sure that they get all the privilege um ultimately i was fired because i wanted the girls i wanted all the kids to be treated equitably um and i didn't walk away because i knew my firing was illegal um so i was arrested by some wayland police officers in my home who went to high school with a with a high school football coach had a gun jammed in my back in my living room at 10 in the morning um i actually won a whistleblower suit but i lost my home i lost my career i lost my retirement i lost everything um so for wayland to say you know the people of wayland to say we're good people and we're not about discrimination and we're not about retaliation and we're not about bullying or racism you fired three black school employees the athletic director justice smith maybe go read wallace the met co-director and omar reese the superintendent two who filed lawsuits um there are white people in this town people in power police officers school administrators who have done far far far far worse things so to say you're not racist the evidence is points the other way if you want to prove you're not racist hire a law firm put the corrupt cops either in jail or fire them or take away their pension fire the white school administrators who've done far worse things how can you punish students for discrimination or civil rights violations when the leaders of your schools town and police do far worse things if virgil tibbs train had stopped new wayland i can assure you he would have been treated far worse than he was in sparta mississippi it's easy to breathe too close all done thanks sir thank you sir is um anybody else miss miss miss kelsey is there anybody online who wants to do public comment sorry no there's nobody waiting on mine to make public comment thank you anybody else in the room want to do public comment all right i think we're listening on um the next item on our list is going to be going to have a discussion this is a continuing discussion or at least i thought it was going to be um the electric vehicle first like duty vehicle policy and we are inviting by for attendance olivia blaney was our sustainability coordinator and julie gang i said it correctly manager the sustainability and a project manager so if you want to take your seats up here are you ready to start so yeah we have a powerpoint which i think will help get us through the bullet points so i just want to say one thing i i know we have this conversation offline through uh abby it's we only have 10 minutes for signing because we didn't know that we would we should we have a whole change of action will that be it will you be able to do that within the 10 minutes and allow us um yeah okay so there is i think um people difficulties i have to come over here so we can hear you thank you sorry it's okay we can do it without all of you
hi everyone i'm julie welcome to new i think i'm the newest employee here um i am the projects and sustainability manager for the facilities department um i have a background in civil environmental engineering i spent a number of years in consulting i wrote um municipal master planning master plans um did some wastewater work remediation um environmental remediation and like sewer projects so i have a good municipal background um for the last three years i've been in the town of weston as a sustainability coordinator there um so i'm so sorry for all the changes to the ev policy we went through it over the spring in weston and um when i took a look at the policy that was drafted here um you know when i developed the policy for the town of weston when i do things i spend a lot of time doing research and making sure that like whatever we put together fits within the criteria um that we need to meet and also that is comparative to neighboring communities um and so the policy that you have now um reflects what the town of conquer the town of lexington the city of cambridge um and the department of energy and resources have all put together as kind of like the standard for um your zero emissions vehicle first policy which is different than saying light duty vehicle electrification policy um the policy that you have presented was already reviewed and approved by
doer
it's not fun to me right here
yep
does that work did okay um so that's the policy that you have put forth if you feel that you need more time i'm happy to pass that through because um we have another more pressing thing that needs to get done today um the green communities program do we have our robin can you give me this for a second is this your annual report the annual report is the thing that needs to get on our calendar don't you don't have to concern this okay so you have 10 minutes for this because it's on our consent calendar so that'll be all set all right when we get that far we'll it's due november 7th so no pressure but thank you right okay so you had slides you wanted to show us somewhere okay um so you do know the history of this is that we did see and all a vehicle and then when it came back unfortunately so many people have touched this yeah the ecc came in and then abby took it over and came in and then she left when the person really inherited i spent some time with herself and with michael and then she came in and we said gee it's only going to be the light duty and show us the cost because we're very concerned about cost right and then we made some revisions and so we were expecting just 10 minutes look at it and we've done now we have gone back to a whole different thing just so you know the history of where we did and i watched the previous select board meetings um and i did hear the comments um and there were a couple thing concerns that were raised i think i mentioned this in the email today but one of the concerns was about the green communities program um and its eligibility for continuing funding um based on what's happening at the federal level and i just want to assure you that the massachusetts green communities program is not affected by anything that occurs at the federal level um green communities if i can move slides am i able to um so our most pressing thing is the annual report um the second one is to approve the zep policy but i also want to put a couple other things on your radar um we have a decarbonization roadmap that was drafted um mike and i have not yet looked at it so it's not ready to be reviewed by select board but before we can apply for the climate leaders program that will have to go through you um and be approved by select board and by the school committee um we can do this on any time scale you want so if it's easier to go slower that's fine with me i usually do a lot more working with individual departments before i'm coming here this is my sixth day until the town of wayland so i've not had quite yet that time um but i'm happy to take the time if that's what you prefer um just so you know the next round of climate leaders closes december 31st i think it is possible for us to do this all within that time frame but again if you'd rather spend more time and and process then that's okay too um i'm just giving you some context on doer and green communities because this is a really critical program for facilities um improvements within communities that fit the profile like wayland and we're not eligible for a lot of federal grants anyway so um you know while there's less federal money um that's not really the biggest concern for us green communities is a program that wayland opted into in 2010 and since then every year we do an annual report which looks at our energy usage across our entire building portfolio um we had to pass some local bylaws in order to make that possible um and as a result every uh grant round we're eligible for up to 250 000 from the green communities program for municipal decarbonization work so that's like lighting improvements to reduce our energy usage boiler replacements town-wide street light replacement um we have received 818 000 from the green communities program and what i want to stress most about why that money is so important is that um you know looking at abby's files over the last three years she's um received about 700 000 worth of consent incentives half of that has been incentives that are matched with programs like green communities so while you're getting 800 000 of dollars from then you're probably also getting two three maybe 500 000 in additional incentives on top of that money so these are dollars that really have a lot of roadway um out of all the municipalities within the state of massachusetts over 300 of them are green communities um which is why doer is now opening up the climate leaders program um climate leaders as you can see are these yellow communities and i'm happy to talk with you more about all this i just wanted to give you a little primer on everything um climate leaders is a fantastic program in that it not only gives us 150 000 for technical assistance for a project so that's like hiring your engineering firm that's doing your feasibility study that's looking at your current hvac systems and developing engineering designs it's also up to a million dollars in dollars for your decarbonization projects um which is a lot of money because that's not including all the incentives that you're eligible for so again these are dollars that can stretch really far um and that is a that's a lot of money for a community with the profile that wayland has you know smaller community um doesn't have the ej qualifier you know we don't have a lot of grant programs that we can pull dollars like that from um which is why that's so important in order to be eligible for a climate leader um to apply for climate leaders we have four out of six of the criteria i know previously you were told there was five criteria and i'm sorry for that i did the same thing in weston so that is no one's fault here the language in the program is unclear and doer knows this because i um gave them a lot of feedback back in the spring and we were surprised to find out that we needed to give the decarbonization roadmap um get the approved by the select board today and we have the zero emissions first vehicle policy again that's a draft that's approved by doer already if you're okay with this policy it can go forward if you want more time with it that is okay as well um the next step is going to be the decarbonization roadmap so in theory we could wait and vote on both of those next time um there are 19 inaugural climate leader communities within the state your comparable communities act in arlington ashfield cambridge carlisle lexington um these are all neighboring communities i can tell you weston had their application in in end of june and i put it in um so i'm familiar with the level of work it takes it's um we're expecting to hear this month within the next couple weeks whether or not weston received it and there'll be more communities added to the list climate leaders has 60 million dollars of funding settled aside for their first round of communities there are only 19 inaugural communities um so while it is technically a competitive grant there isn't any competition because even if all 19 communities went for that million dollars there would still be money left over um again this is why this is such a critical moment for us and getting in early gets us a foot in the door towards um being able to do funds a lot many of the projects that our facilities director has on the docket so um the zero emissions first vehicle policy again i know that that's a slight change in the language i want to assure you that it still is only focused on light duty vehicles that's anything less than 8 500 pounds um nothing that has emergency response capability is covered within this policy um nothing that has um no off-road vehicles no fire trucks no snow plows nothing that is critical um is is part of this policy it really is just our vehicles that we use for moving equipment from one place to the other um vehicles that we use for getting from um you know getting to meetings and things like that and getting across town here's our light duty vehicle fleet you've seen this in the last meeting um we have 110 vehicles in our fleet and um what is this about 19 20 vehicles that are light duty so it's a very small percentage of our fleet um that is would be covered under this policy um and i can get you more specific numbers i only have the 2024 fleet list so um that's the policy i'm happy to answer any questions that you have on it um and again if you want to pump this to the next meeting that is completely okay as well next meeting is beyond full i'm sorry to tell you so that's what we have and i'm old so anyway i'm going to open this up to the board the agenda item actually just talks about um the policy so i will say this this is the most comprehensive information and clarity we've gotten on these programs so i wish we had told me this earlier would have put more time or figured out how to have like more time to explain this because now we understand some of these things a little better but i think the agenda i'm going to give me the the agenda just talks about the policy so i think we ought to have some i'm happy to ask a question if we have a method of policy what would be the financial impact of the town sure periods in five years um so the policy the way that it's written and the amendments i made to it make it really clear that when we're looking at purchasing a vehicle we're looking at the whole vehicle cost so the first cost right your initial purchase cost the maintenance cost right um oil changes repairs things that you would need to do to an engine that you don't need to do to an electric vehicle um and the cost of fuel and so when we look at that cost comparative um you know we're looking at vehicles that are within our current vehicle budget we're not looking to exceed that existing budget um and we're only looking to replace vehicles with electric alternatives and or hybrid alternatives and or um fuel efficient internal combustion engines that meet that income that that financial criteria um if a vehicle is 30 percent more than its internal combustion engine alternative what's not that doesn't fit within the scope of this policy um so we're not looking to increase costs you're basically saying that it's like that that county voted in the spring could handle portion yeah if i were the jobs policy correct and in addition we're like oh sorry if you're planning to
you have to schedule replacing vehicles yes so in addition one thing i failed to mention verbally but that is in the policy is that to also look at grants and incentives in that whole financial picture um and part of the implementation on this last page of the policy is to look at our electric vehicle transition plan um and to have that we can get those done for free um and so that would be like a next step and that would give us cost comparative alternatives and a timeline um and that would also give us an ev transition plan um that includes charging stations what we need for charging infrastructure and that'll have more cost compared cost numbers within it and that would be critical yeah to both appreciate vehicle placement costs and also infrastructure which could be nice right thank you so bill is the uh liaison whitney sorry it's bill and i'm sorry and he's the liaison to the ecc so great it's yours as you can i guess michael's like this you're up sir i noticed that uh zero mission vehicle is is not a defined term um this reference several places and policy sure i see you know the acronyms as the word type um just trying to understand whether this applies uh specifically like you white duty vehicles um so as defined by the policy um what we're looking at is purchasing zero emission vehicles first that doesn't mean considering zero emission vehicles first um if you look within the applicability of the policy in that first section it talks about how it applies to all municipal departments um specifically the purchase of road worthy passenger vehicles pickup or utility trucks or suvs um it does not apply to specialized equipment or off-road vehicles there's also a list of exemptions and within the list of exemptions you have a whole suite of um it does not apply to emergency response capability vehicles does not apply to snow plows um it does not apply to police crew cruisers or heavy duty vehicles so yes it does apply to light duty vehicles but the way that we put that forth is by saying we look at our entire fleet and we exempt out all the things that do not fit the criteria that we're looking at rather than it being light duty only which wouldn't meet the criteria the toer is looking for within the policy you know i guess that was the point of confusion for me when going through the draft and that uh i didn't attend the earlier meeting but watch the tape and there was a lot of stressing that this policy was applicable only to light duty vehicles but when you go through uh the uh vehicle the kernel priorities i infer that that uh includes uh pertains not exclusively to light but to heavy duty as well um so if you look at the exclusions though the exclusions um i have yeah yeah so heavy duty vehicles are exempt at most i would say that this policy suggests that you consider fuel efficiency standards for your heavy duty vehicles but to be honest that's not a priority within doer it's not the purpose or intention of the policy and um i mean it very clearly i think the exempt is defined three different times in the within the text the exemption actually uh in the definition and the enumeration and the bullets uh don't exactly align particularly as it pertains to police vehicles which could be under any 500 pounds so i think there's a little uh contradiction that you might want to look at but also i just reiterate the question the vehicle uh procurement priorities is that applicable only to light duty or is the intention to say that to the extent that heavy duty vehicle alternatives come along this would be the priority i mean i think any policy is up to be interpreted by the person that's implementing it as far as i know this is being implemented through facilities is that fair michael um and the only way that we would consider a heavy duty vehicle is if we have the infrastructure in place to be able to charge it and we would need a level three charger before that would be on the table and those are expensive and that takes a significant amount of energy time and planning to be able to be explicit like my duty versus applicability to the uh possible application right yeah i mean if you want to redline this and and point out where that needs to be further defined that's excuse me i i have to tell you we have a national crisis
we have people we're supposed to have interviewed about 20 minutes ago we have a financial summit in 7 15 and we're keeping jalen out to seven to do our executive session minutes which was supposed to be at seven so i want to just raise this rather than make this decision unilaterally or what we should do but i feel that um like i said if i had known this would be a totally presentation which is information we certainly put out should have and would like to have i really don't know what to do because i know what's what you think i'll look at you i think i might have to another meeting yeah i'm really sorry and i know you're going to say we're fine but um we have two other committees coming at 7 15. i'm not be rude this is not my point yeah i think that's and also mr lewis is here so i i don't know what else to do so i'm i'm sorry do you want to we can just have a conversation about the next time we come because we also have the decarbonization roadmap to present and i think that's right definitely have to have conversation offline yeah okay welcome to him yeah thank you thank you thank you thank you yeah have a good minute throw you out it's totally fine okay um
let's um should we do the interviews real quick let's do mr lewis um who's applying for conservation for mr lewis will you want to be one minute you're not even going to be one minute i feel terrible but we're just really behind and i'll mr lewis very very briefly tell us why you are applying for a position we are all pretty much where you are so um just as i mentioned in my application i think the concom's activities can be better streamlined and better integrated into the other things that the sound does um and i've got some you know a lot of background and capabilities in doing that so one sentence that's it i've been moved with this board approved with next member of the constitution to a term expiring through 30 of 2020 second thank you is there any discussion otherwise i'll go right to the roll call vote and yes um tom yes yes yes and carol yes thank you i think you probably know the procedure but mr you know i didn't have time we've got to make up time
okay thank you you'll get a letter from the town clerk okay thank you um have you can you take yourself off how are you hello i'm good we're sorry we're late and we're going to be really fast so can you give us a one minute or 90 second uh explanation as to why you would like to be a member of the energy and climate committee and the student uh representative um i care a lot about the environment and like i'm also secretary of my school's green team so i just think there's a lot that we could do for the town i mean right now we're not even composting in the school because we don't have enough money for it so i think that there's a lot that we could do as a town to do better and to be and be more sustainable and i would really like to be a part of that change or like i i really want to help make well and more sustainable i guess that's why good thank you we all have your information in our packet and i'm going to speak from the board here it's very impressive uh what you've done and and your and your thoughts and what you would like to do so we appreciate you applying does anybody on the board have a question for it i'm just going to make a motion go ahead you can i move that the select board appoint kavia sarukar to a term as the student uh position on the energy and climate committee for your mending june 30th 2027. sir thank you there's no further discussion all those in favor doug yes bill yes yes yes and carol yes there you are you're appointed thank you kavia you'll um receive a letter in the coming days from our town manager's office and once you receive that you can take that letter into the town clerk's office and you'll um get sworn in to becoming the official student member of the energy and climate committee and they'll also give you some materials in the clerk's office as well regarding conflict of interest training etc so wait to receive that letter and then come into town building okay thank you so much thank you for your service thank you very much enjoy um i move the select board enter into executive session so it's massachusetts general laws chapter 38 section 2183 to discuss strategy with respect to the collective bargaining the international association of firefighters afl cio local 1978 is there a second to the motion to enter into executive session second the chair declares that a public discussion of these matters may have a detrimental effect on the mitigating negotiating or bargaining position of the town we're going to have a roll call vote bill yes doug yes and yes yes and carol yes the chair invites attendance by michael mccall town manager council powers for that assistant town manager and jaylen bradica management analyst communications coordinator the committee will rejoin the public from executive session in approximately 10 minutes wait the select orders returning this open session and we're at 7 34 a.m right next agenda item is to um brian we are going to start with a presentation of the bond the bands afterwards all right uh presentation of fiscal 27 financial forecast this is going to be a joint meeting with the finance committee and the school committee discuss and review the fiscal 27 financial forecast we invite attendance by brian keveney our finance director christine patterson the director of finance david fleischman the superintendent betsy galvan the assistant superintendent um so the first thing i want to ask is there's a plenty of seats and if the seats aren't there you want to pull them up so you can see or be part of the program but whatever you want there's a finance committee need to call to order we're already okay it's the school committee need to call to order we don't have a quorum we were told there's a 20 minute delay or something so i think we're waiting so could you text them that we are and we do i apologize profusely we had a number of items that got added to our agenda and had to be including executive session which we had to do um so i apologize profusely for the delay and brian they're getting set up so we're about two minutes we were supposed to do 7 15 and it's seven thirty five seven thirty five yeah it's a really nice adjustment to revise but we advised them all 7 15. we had to add the items in that got moved which is why i announced it earlier so hi david i think we want to select to brian it's it's it's it's it's it's it's working okay do you want to proceed this maybe give me one more minute give me one more minute okay great good job yeah i'm gonna move back because i don't know there's all the edges it's it's it's it's it's it's all the time i always
a moment it's thanks to all my stuff i think that's the call
i think everything else
apologize again for the for the delay um do you want to bring a chair plenty of room up here for everybody um bill you want to come up no april i know you don't let's go around brian when you're ready the floor is yours so this is an annual event that we have um that is obviously done by the finance team brian and michael and i think christine christine has us um on this as well to kind of set the budget discussions and the direction for for the next year which obviously is fyi 27. brian has done a number of slides um do you have a sense brian how long the slide presentation will be 15 minutes i should be able to get through it okay do we want to um to do them all that want so do we want to ask questions as we go through as as we go through we can do it okay so if anyone has a question in the slides and they go through just speak up how do we get these something to come hey yeah there's your screen yeah how is this doing
it is in my inbox i'm bringing it up on my desktop yeah and the slides start on what page in the packet here uh is it 17. yes i'll just minimize minimize i mean you want to pull your chairs up here because we can put some more chairs over here and pull them all in squish in
do you have to call to order oh yes okay why don't you do that while we're waiting for fines and some difficulty pulling the slides up and again you know i'm going to say it to you i'm sorry for the delay we had some additions to our agenda today several i'm sure that has never happened to you never no no i know so i'm explaining close so 740 you can want to select board and finance committee order we have all of the members right then
dr fleschman and we're being recorded by wake him yeah yeah you're not being recorded or dr wake him now or yes okay so we're good to go so thank you everybody for coming tonight michael mccall and myself want to present the fiscal 25 summit and i'm going to go through each slide and talk about what's in each one of them anybody has questions please ask so it's about 50 pages i should get through it relatively quickly but if you do have a question please let us know so i want to first thank you michael mccall carol martin um emma mula erin gibbons dr fleshman christine patterson kathy steinberg kelly powers perlet brian or herlihy paul judice and um other various town and school department we met pretty much straight through the summer and compiled this forecast and without the help of everybody on the screen it would have been pretty much impossible to put together so i do want to thank all those folks well the next slide is going to be the fiscal 25 results i think i missed point so here's what we're going to talk about we're going to go through the fiscal 25 operating results we're going to talk about the fiscal 26 tax recap the fiscal 27 revenue and expense forecast uh new whalen developments and long-term liabilities in financial reserves so to start with we're going to talk about the fiscal 25 results so the town was um appropriated with 107.9 million dollars of expenses and that included transfers related to the uh free cash so we had a town budget and free cash appropriations that totaled 107.9 million and as you can see on the left hand side the total expenses matched the total revenue budgetarily on the revenue side we came in at 107 million revenue actual there was a difference there of 895 000 on the taxation side we came in less 866 000 that's typical we collect about 99 of the tax levy every year so that number of 86 866 000 although it's a large number it's pretty consistent with what whalen experiences next state aid we got about five thousand dollars more than expected local receipts was a great story and we're going to get that a little bit as we go through the presentation it came in 1.3 million over budget and that was related to for the most part investment income returns building permits and motor vehicle um the negative there 2.6 that is expected we expected to use free cash which was uh money that was achieved in prior years we don't actually receive a receipt of free cash it's basically money coming out of our fund balance so that negative 2.6 million is expected we did also collect on budgeted revenue totaling 1.2 so the performance of the year came in as a negative 895 000 at the same time when you were going to use 2.6 million of free cash so that was a relatively good performance in fiscal 25 for revenue on the bottom side you see the actual expenses town budget uh their budget was expend expended except for a 1.1 million dollar turn back the school department had a five thousand dollar turn back unclassified was 969 000 other budgets which includes overlay was 200 000 for a total unspent appropriation of 2.3 so when you combine the negative 895 000 with a positive 2.3 you have a fund balance growth of 1.4 million dollars in the balance sheet so relatively speaking this was a very good year for the town it had a very good collection year particularly with local receipts we did return 2.3 million dollars of unspent budgets and at the end of the day we increased the town's fund balance of 1.4 million dollars this screen the screen on the left hand side just summarizes the turnbacks in the general government uh we returned uh 390 000 dollars public safety was 506 public works was 186 000 health and uh recreation were lower on the unclassified side you had health insurance returning 300 000 reserve salary adjustment we did not use in fiscal 25. we appropriated that for the fire department but the fire department um contract is not settled so it got returned to free cash so the finance committee reserve fund we did not use in fiscal 25 so you're returning there 250 000 so that's generally the largest returns that we saw on the um turnbacks on the right hand side is just the graphics showing that that the public safety was the most and really that was driven by both fire and police not expending their full salary line they had vacancies during the year and if you add all those up there was a turn back we also had some turnbacks in overtime second was general government facilities was the number one give back that had some unfilled position um abby accepted a position from her uh climate control position last year and we also were did not hire yet the custodians for the coa so that was the light largest one on the town side was then the facilities department i won't go into the other ones but i would say that this is a typical turnover for the town and i'm glad to see that at least 2.3 million got returned to free cash so let's talk about free cash the very top number is the 10 million dollars that we received last year the next series of numbers what's a negative is what we recently voted at the april town meeting so we voted about 2.4 million dollars of free cash and what you see the bottom of the sources of free cash that's the performance of fiscal 25 where we're increasing revenue over budget and we're returning full spent appropriations so if you add all these up it comes to 4.7 million the free cash uh which is what the state right now uh most likely would be certified by the end of the week is going to come in around 12 million dollars so those are the the numbers that go into uh reconciling or proofing out free cash dor uses a different methodology they use the balance sheet we're coming up i come up with the same number either way we do it so the certification is going to be around 12 million um and again we'll probably see that at the end of the week question on that yeah the prior year turnbacks is 2.19 yeah because i'm adding in the fiscal 24 um yeah because that's we're not in account including um this is net of overlay so the two point number 2.1 million dollars is net of overlay so it's a different number the other one was 2.3 the other name was it was 1.5 so the the turn back on the town side was 2.3 if you see right down near the bottom then you go to the free cash the 2.1 is net overlay so i don't include include overlay as a turn back and i and i don't um and on the real estate side i reduce the real estate by the overlay amount so it nets out that's the difference between the 2.1 and the 2.3 that you're showing on the screen so free cash i wanted to show this graph if you take a look at a file after the inside 2012 we were around 10 million dollars and really between 2013 through 2017 we had a high use of free cash to balance the budget starting in fiscal 18 or 19 we started to move away from that so we don't use free cash to balance the town budget we use it for other reasons and as you can see there's been a a consistent increase in free cash since then fiscal 24 was the first time we got free cash back to the level it was in 2012 and in 2025 you do see that 12 million dollar number this is what we should be seeing as you see fund balance increase you should be seeing free cash increase free cash is a component of fund balance not the other way around fund balance will always be greater than free cash so this is a good benchmark to be then 12 million dollars in free cash it's the 12 million dollars is a percentage of your fund balance so as your budget goes up we're going to get that in a little bit as your budget goes up your fund balance mathematically should increase which is what exactly what moody's expects and we're going to get to that in a couple of slides the free cash is a little less than fund balance but you do see the output slope a fund balance and free cash is the same graphic going up from from left to right but i wanted to put this in there so you can see the weaning away from free cash from what you did before to where it is today so essentially free cash is part of our fund balance it's a significant part of us it's about 90 percent of your fund balance total that's the remaining 10 percent encumbrances things like that reserve for expenses so arpa um we do need to spend all of our money by the december 2026 as of right now the time we see 4.1 million dollars we've expended 87 percent of it the only project out there and i know linda's working on it now is snakebork dam that is expended around 20 percent of their appropriation we just need to go in and clean up some of these remaining balances of these unspent budgets i know tom holder is working on the mwra i expect that to uh finish uh michael fay is going to be spending the you know the thousand dollars remaining in the fire station in the coa as well as the coa um i'm going to spend the rest of that 321 in the audit and we do have the property removal i believe it was uh north whalen that we got to finish up on and then obviously the 459 000 that why and how much do you anticipate us returning we don't return any of it we got to spend it oh we don't want to return but i'm turning me and sending it back now we're time on this we don't want to see these numbers down here so we recently had a moody's rating michael and myself did the rating call along with hilltop securities and the comments that in kelsey i forgot to mention kelsey um so we had a rating review we reaffirmed the town's triple a rating um what they did talk about as positive was that uh there's going to be no outlook provided to the town that basically means in the past moody's would say triple a moody's whalen is a triple a town stable or it's a triple a town negative it's simply not giving that last word at the end of it because of the size of our outstanding debt they're simply just saying whalen is a triple a rated town there's no negative or positive related to us not having uh any kind of an outlook beyond that whalen continues to be a stable tax-based community it has a high residence income and wealth so those are the positives that moody's cited during the review uh the what can downgrade us so we need to pay attention to this number one in the extended period of available fund balance ratio below 25 percent of revenues the next one is sizable and issuance activity that is not excluded from living limits of prop two and a half we really only have the dpw project that we did not do within outside of prop two and a half other than that town's done a good job of putting most of these projects outside of prop two and a half and we have um significant growth in the leverage ratio above 350 percent of revenue that means that they don't want a community to have um the following would what they do is they take out outstanding debt they take our um unfunded pension liability and our unfunded opep as a percentage of revenue right now whalen is 182 so we're well below the 350 i don't see that as an issue with the town it's just a metric they use in rating town so we're at we're at the 182 as a percentage right and for context if we were b rated or double a rated instead what would our interest rate cost difference be uh well we just borrowed money at um the two inch cost of 3.04 so i'm not i can't give exact amount it would be higher yeah so there is a value and monetary value to being a triple a uh next so let's talk about this because this is important so moody's changed the way that they rate a town in particular the highly rate fund balance on the left hand side is the old way they would take our general fund balance in the uh the fund balance accounts would be committed assigned and unassigned and that would be a percentage of our annual revenues when it was trending around twenty percent this is off the fiscal 24 audited financial statements that is on the low end that really is a triple b rating when you're at that 20 percent rating so they've always advised us and warned us to maintain that at a higher level than 20. what they've done now is they've changed the methodology they've gone from what's on the left hand side to the right hand side which now they're bringing in more funds and we've referred to those as governmental funds it's the general fund it's some revolving funds stabilization funds and they're bringing in enterprise funds current assets if you notice it's current assets with the governmental funds it's fund balance so current assets basically is your cash account and your accounts receivable for the most part your fund balance really does equal not dollar for dollar but it is very close to your current asset on a balance sheet exclusive of um accounts receivable and then they do the new metric based on that so our metric based on um 24's balance sheet i'm sorry part of the financial statements was 24. that is at the low end so if you take a look at fund balance um on the left hand side is the general fund goes back to 2013 and as we talked about before the trend of free cash free cash is trending almost the identical way as this so the general fund has been increasing fund balance over the long term fiscal 13 through fiscal 25 that's what we should be doing we need to increase that fund balance to maintain that ratio on the left hand side as i just said we have to now bring in the enterprise funds the water funds fund balance has dropped from four million dollars in 2013 to today being at 1.4 that is going to be a drain on our calculation because the water fund budget is going to go up their fund balance will become a percentage of their new budget number their budget number is going to escalate because they have more debt service just in this recent borrowing not including if we whatever becomes of the mwra if they take 100 of it or some kind of a mix the fact of the matter is their budget is going to escalate their fund balance is not escalating it's most recently flat mostly because um about two three years ago we told the port of public groups that they could not use retained earnings for any reason until they stabilized their fund balance this was even before moody's come out with this recommend new methodology so that's the water fund what accounts for that trend revenues not meaning expense revenues actual revenues not meaning revenue budgets it has to do with the rate how they do the rates and it has to do with retained earnings the use of retained earnings um even outside of their operating budget they haven't had rate increases year over year current yeah so in fiscal so 25 may have been we were going through this with the order the the 25 rate increase may have underfunded the the revenue budget by almost 200 000 the fiscal 26 rate increase was zero so there was no rate increase at the same time their expenses went up so my fear is that the fiscal 25 6 performance is going to drive this number even down even more so it's really important that the board of public works sets their rates to achieve their voted revenue number now the pending revenue increase in 27 is about 30 percent so they're really going to go from zero to 30 in one year which is a lot so that's why a lot of focus needs to be put on they mean making sure that the rate increases reflect the actual revenue and that fund needs to bring in in that fiscal year and that's really over the long term brian i think i may hop in here um this new relationship the fund balance that includes the retained earnings i guess i want to use right for the enterprise funds really i think needs to be communicated to them and perhaps we should put together a memo i do know that on the new debt policy the debt management policy we do have a sentence in that says enterprise funds will remain retained earnings um balance of 25 percent of revenue revenue that was questioned to me to me by someone and i was wondering why it was 25 now i see why i think we should be really clear that if they don't maintain the 25 the general fund has to make up the delta in order to maintain our rating so do we have a plan to put something out to the enterprise funds in writing well i think we we do need to do that okay so back in 2012 at the indotel meeting the water fund became an enterprise fund and there's language in the warrant that the fund and it came from dep in the abrams school but would have been mark abrams at the time his son mark is now engagement but language in the warrant said that the fund should always maintain 3.5 to 4 million for three reasons number one they mean to maintain 20 percent revenues it mean they may need to maintain a balance to support the capital and another large amount to me so that if there was a catastrophic event or something happening significant to the fund they would have access to cash so that fund started with that in 2013 with 4 million today we're at 1.4 but it is it is really important to get our heads around where this fund is going with their retained earnings and fund balance because it is going to affect the rating down the road and just for context i think they have an extra challenge over the last several years of conservation uh for water bands i think it brought down the water consumption substantially because they as i recall when they were describing it's only their upper tiers that they're particularly lucrative for them and that probably isn't happening at all in that way and i just think we need to be clear with everybody the interrelationships here in terms of maintaining our stellar rating sorry thank you you mentioned so the new hurdle is 25 percent of the new methodology you said fiscal year 24 we were at 25 um that's on the slide yeah so i went back i guess my question is where yeah facility or 25 kind of year-end and i know some of that's probably still so yeah what is that percentage yeah so we don't have our auditors we don't have the drought financials for 25 but for 24 it was 25 so i went back and did the financials for 24 23 and 22. so in 22 we're at 24 percent in 23 we climbed up to 25 and 24 we're at 25. i don't have the financials yet for 25. what we've been trending again according to moody's many triple a towns are between 25 and 40 or 50 percent of fund balance so we're at the very very low end of the scale right now yeah my question is it's kind of feels like to be projected to 25 this is the year 25 is likely less than 25 percent it could it could be yeah but i i don't have those numbers yet yeah i mean maybe to that point if we're talking about that targets for people setting the target you know the bare minimum it's a lot what doesn't know a little more jeopardy right if we're issuing a target of 25 25 is the bare minimum which probably at least considered putting some cushion here thank you so here are the other two enterprise funds wastewater back in 2013 they were a little over 200 000 it was a surge in prepayments of the um the um the benefits so that you can see that they spiked up in fund balance in 2015. for the most part they've maintained their fund balance their fund balance um is about a million dollars right now um actually like 1.3 but the annual revenues are much less than that so their ratio is completely positive the other way the transfer station just started in 21 um today they have a fund balance of around 300 000 so they're on the upper trend which is nice so the other funds are doing relatively well in comparison to their annual revenues so those i wanted to bring that point up so you know in the in the next three years it's critical that our fund balance on all these funds is at least maintained or gradually increases so let's talk about the tax recap so the fiscal tax recap we're also in the midst of doing that we're going to be meeting with the selectman in a couple weeks to go over the draft on 26 recap um here's a comparison between 26 and 27. this is draft we are seeing a you know four percent increase in state aid 13 percent increase in local receipts um transfers from other funds it's 199 that also includes capital funds paying into the into the budget so that's why it's at almost 200 increase but the good point here is that the tax increase of fiscal 26 is going to be 2.66 and i'll show you in the next slide how that became to be so when we went to town meeting on the left hand side that was the expectation of tax at the town meeting in april that we're going to raise 92.5 million dollars in tax to fund the budget on the right the next end column which is the tax which is uh headed december 25 you see in yellow the tax came down 848 000 that's because state aid is expected to increase so our state aid assumption that we went at the town meeting is almost two hundred thousand dollars more than it was in april the other good news event is that uh local receipts is going to go up six hundred and thirty one thousand dollars on the recap than it was when we went to town meeting we went to town meeting we didn't have a full year filled but the fact that we had such a good year in local receipts we can ask for more money on the local receipt side to do it does need to be defended even though you may have it had a good year in a certain category you still need to demonstrate the dor that you're still going to have that in in the future years so um if you account for the fact that state the state assessment on the top came down and the fact that we injected more revenue the use of taxation came down by 848 000 so we went into town meeting i forget the it may have been 3.61 was our assumption on a tax increase but ultimately the tax increase in 26 26 is going to be 2.6 percent so let's talk about the 27 revenues and expense forecast so here's how the revenue categories we've been through these before real estate and personal property state aid local receipts enterprise and revolving fund transfers and sometimes we do get grants and we do use some reserves to some extent and free cash so on the left hand side you see the the box that is the full amount we can raise in fiscal 27 and the very bottom there the total months the town can raise is about 11 16.3 million that includes the use of free cash to 2.5 but starting from the top we start with the expected fiscal 26 tax recap amount again these are estimates so a lot of this is being driven off the current tax recap so we're expecting um the 26 prop two and a half percent number to be 89.3 million we're going to add the standard two and a half percent increase uh we have four hundred thousand dollars for new growth for a total annual max levy of 91.4 the debt exclusion number is 4.3 the 4.3 does not consider the pending ballot question that's coming up but let's go back to new growth when we started the budget group back in july i started with the number five hundred thousand dollars the assessor came back and said he was getting vibes from dor that the number was going to come down to four hundred thousand dollars most recently it's gone the complete other way that we're expected to get more than four hundred thousand dollars for new growth we don't have the number yet it could be five six seven hundred thousand dollars it's still pending with dr right now the assessor is asking for a lot of these properties to be valued at this point and they take the valuation as of july 1st so the reason why we're having an escalation hopefully of new growth is that his staff has been out religiously visiting these locations getting these assessments done and getting them into dor if we do get more money than four hundred thousand dollars that goes into the prop two and a half percent calculation which will help us for a few years to come so let's hope we end up with a positive number beyond the four hundred thousand dollars in new growth so that on the left hand side is the total amount that down can spend in 27 based on the current recap and the right inside is just a pie depicting that again the tax levy for people who are not familiar the tax levy is what we actually put on the recap and we levy to the residents off the recap the levy ceiling is the most the town could ever raise which is two and a half percent of total valuation we would never do that the town's valuation is five six billion dollars the levy limit is the prop two and a half percent calculation that we just talked about on the screen before so here is the town's levy limit on the left hand side you see where things are trending and i did do some conservative outlooks into the next years this will change based upon the 26 final recap but i do have it highlighted down here you do see in the bottom that we do not see even a three percent increase in the whole levy increase and prop two and a half plus excluded it's still below three percent even though our use of tax could be north of three percent the levy calculation is lower than three percent now again that could change when we get some new growth but we did talk about in other meetings where whalen stands with new growth in comparison to other aaa towns and where they stand to other communities but the the takeaway in this screen is that the the levy limit percentage increase is running around three percent for now based on the information we have uh here's just the state aid i just wanted to put this in there you can see on the 26 where i have in the middle or highlighted in red you do see that the um 26 is gonna um the increase in is 744 000 which translates to 27. if we get the 6.3 million number in local receipts and we do well in fiscal 26 meaning that um all the rate increases that we did on all the different departments we didn't increase the fees if we have a good year in 26 we'll be able to put on the 27 recap something like 6.5 or 6.6 million that will help the town and bringing down the use of tax in um dealing with our revenue issue so it is really important that we do have a good year in 26 with the local receipts and this is just a summary of um the tax recap on the right you do see that state aid obviously is the biggest driver we're expecting to see based on historical spending up another 250 000 in 27 even though we got more than that in 26. but we don't know what the state's going to do at this point 250 000 is a conservative number when do we learn that brian is that at the end he says we won't get that until um end of january after the mma meeting usually the governor announces the uh local receipts and give preliminary cherry sheets that third uh fourth week of january so here's the forecast for 27. so again we started in july with the group that i mentioned earlier uh during july and september we developed the forecast really between october and december the guidelines go out the capital guideline recently did go out the departments will be receiving the operational guideline they'll be entering their budgets michael and i and kelsey will be meeting with them as long as well with the superintendent and and his um staff and we'll be developing a draft budget in january we'll be getting the state uh a number that michael just referred to we'll have a better understanding where the budget stands really in january as we did last year and finally in february is when the health insurance number comes in right now we're carrying health insurance in our model at 12 percent and we'll get to that in a bit but that's really the cycle the town goes through in preparing the budget that goes to the annual town meeting so on the town side we have for the fiscal 25 forecast we would include any cba which right now is going to be expiring at the end of uh this fiscal year michael is con is right now discussing some of the labor contracts with a few of the unions so the budget for 25 27 may have their collective value in the amount in there but right now they're not i will also include any steps and lanes that are required by uh their current contract as i said just uh the contracts expire at the end of uh june which really hurt us in developing this fiscal 27 budget the fire contract is still not settled we do have an appropriation in 26 i believe 500 000 for that pending contract but that one is also not settled in 27 we're going to have an escalation in elections we're not going to have any new ftes on the town side um and there's going to be a mix of level funding and level service budgets in order to balance this budget on the town side and here's where the town side forecast stands overall it's a total budget of 24.9 million a 700 000 increase for an overall 3.19 increase on the department of payroll it's a little under three percent on the expense side it's 4.3 we're not expecting any new ftes at this point so we're going into this budget development expecting to come up with the budget around 24.9 again a forecast is not a budget it's just a tool to use to develop your future budget on the school side um they have all the labor contracts expiring at the end of june i know the school committee will be working with the teachers union uh trying to get something done probably hopefully prior to this upcoming town meeting um right now the superintendent is not seeing any new ftes fees they will have to honor any steps and wage contractual agreements on the expense side especially it continues to be an unclear expense and it's difficult to determine and we're still experiencing that um the current at least the current uh trying to transition contract is settled so we're not looking for an escalation in 27 on that contract so the school department is still a work in progress on their numbers simply because so many things are unknown so for forecasting conservatively conservatively we have the school budget a little over 50 million and that really has the payroll at 5.5 percent and the expenses at 5.5 percent first in the expenses that really is driven by the uncertainty of sped they do a good job controlling their other expense sides it's the special ed that we're still um trying to get our head around and we won't know that till probably later in february i would say the payroll we have in there uh 5.5 because even if the school department settled at say three arbitrarily but their steps in lane increases alone bring that up another percentage point and a half so a three percent increase in in cola could mean a five percent increase in wages so conservatively we're going in this with about a 58 million dollar budget increase i'm not going to go through every one of these numbers except for the fact that the uh retirement assessment is up six percent that is coming down because we don't we did this um new financing with the uh select where we will be issued bands and not bonds so we actually have a savings in the idea on debt and interest budget the general insurance number we have in there at 12 percent we're getting mixed information right now but we have 12 hopefully when we get to february that comes down which it did last year we were carrying i believe 10 percent in our forecast last year and we came in around three ultimately so that clearly broke our way let's hope we get lucky twice on that one and the other ones i do have in this overall we're looking at a a um a total budget unclassified a little one to six percent so town wide you put it all together we're looking at 113.4 million dollar budget about a five percent increase now we've had budgets around that in the past but we've also budgets much less than that in the past so we're working on getting that number down and we won't know that until we actually dig into the budgets and see where these numbers stand okay these are the other budgets we do state assessments cherry sheet overlay we fund opaid by tax so you factor in these other ones these are also funded by tax so the amount of budgets that will be funded by tax is 114.3 million dollars or a year to year increase of five percent only because these ones are flat we're keeping the same numbers as we did in fiscal 26. now the revenue forecast now this budget will be funded by state aid at 9.5 local receipts at 6.5 again we're hoping to have a good year in fiscal 26 for us to get that number transfers at 1.4 taxation at 96.7 for total revenue budget of 114.3 and again that's based on our historical receipts on state aid of increasing well above 250 000 we only have 250 000 in there and local receipts i only have going up an additional 127 000 again there's a big jump between 25 and 26 i'm not going to have that big jump between 26 and 27 because these increases that we put in are already taking effect in 26. where this stands on the tax levy calculation so this would be the tail of the tape based on the very first number which is the estimate for 26 you see that 89.3 million dollar number your prop two and a half at 2.2 new growth at 400 000 for the total levy would be 91.4 you add in excluded that at 4.3 so your max levy which is the combination of that is 96.2 your estimated levy which we just talked about is 96.7 so we have a structural deficit here uh 470 000 the budget group what we do is add we added 200 000 to that deficit just to be sure we were not going to bring a budget to town meeting that would not be in jeopardy of not um being in compliance with prop two and a half because our budget is not done with the state until seven months after we vote the budget in the spring so we want to have at least some question in there that's why you see the number of almost seven hundred thousand dollars as a deficit free cash calculations here's the um assumptions at this point the very first number really came out the five-year capital plan of 2.4 million i have tentatively in there the capital stabilization of 250 000 special ed 150 i believe we were 500 000 last year in 26 uh service water quality will continue to fund out of uh free cash i don't expect to give the transfer station a subsidy this year which um by free cash which we have in the past so i'm expecting them with 300 000 to produce a budget in 27 they will not need a general fund subsidy so the forecast said 2.9 is on the high side we haven't appropriated free cash to three million dollars in quite a while so that's really on the high side and keep in mind the more free cash you appropriate you're vulnerable to bringing down your fund balance so we need to pay close attention to that brian i have to add to your problems because the surface water quality has i know they've reached out i don't know who if anyone has heard them but they have it's cyclical and they're having a different program they have to do next year and they're going to need 60 000 so i don't know if anyone has heard that they were supposed to reach out to coast i don't know if they've done that i'm going to tell you they need 60 000 i believe um and i do think that the transfer station subsidy really needs to be looked at we can talk about this later but um there's about sixty thousand dollars worth of trash pickup that gets done at the transfer station that's for the town picking at the fields and what have you um in the current when you put zero subs subsidy in there that means that the rate payers are subsidizing the town expense also their funding model is kind of like the recreation that they're taking in the next year revenue in may and june because you know you they start selling tickets in june tickets uh stickers not tickets so i do think we need to take a look at both of those but well we can make this 2.9 a little better as is the first number right now it's in there at 2.4 last year we end up having a lot of closeouts so when we get to the capital budget at 27 if we can inject a lot of closeout that will reduce the use of free cash i believe the use of free cash in 26 and capital is 1.6 million so we started around two-ish and we brought it down to 1.6 because of the closeouts um some of the things that could go wrong the new growth i have in there 400 000 i'm expecting uh better than 400 000 but it's to be determined state a we have in there an increase of 250 000 transfers is minimal growth there's not much more i can get out of the transfers from these other funds um between our two percent um that's about all they can do and local receipts i'm open for the increase of 6.5 in health insurance we get in there 11.6 million i'm open for something less than 12 once we get to february and get our actual number from west suburban so new developments um this is important because this adds to new growth these are the pending projects that would contribute to prop two and a half which is the st anne's project um the projects that would not contribute to prop two and a half growth would be the terrain development that would be a building permit dunk and donuts will be a building permit um the uh the church is the 169 rice road again a building permit there's not a lot of new growth that could be certified by um doi for that the carol school that's its expansion that's a big big building permit in some level of new growth um the vertis christian academy again is is not growth that would be part of prop two and a half these would be generating welcome building permits that are part of local receipts and here's just a summary of where those projects stand this came from the planner as you can see a lot of it is to be determined under review permits still in process um estimated revenue is still yet to be determined because the building permits have not been taken out of many of these projects i believe the um sanians did take one out they did yep so that's that's not correct but other ones are still in play and work in progress these projects here are the pending ones or potential ones that may be coming as one 212 constituent we have the town center multi-year multi-family development which is 50 andrews f route 20 west multi-development family development we have the route 20 redevelopment district uh the cascade which is the former mahoney's property and 12 school street these are projects that are hopefully on the way that are not pending with building permits right now again is a summary from the treasurer i'm sorry the terms of the planner a lot of it is still in play to be determined and it's difficult to quantify revenue at this point so we've been putting in uh no determination yet so we don't have numbers on these potential new growth items i wanted to put this in there just to show where town stairs what stands with the land if you take a look at the open space but plus the wetlands really 40 percent of the whalen's land is unbuildable the rest is a significant amount of the land and whalen is in wetlands or if it's in or it's an open space so there's not a lot you can do uh with new development and new growth in the town because of these land masses uh long-term liabilities which does affect the town's finances in our moody's ratings so right now in the middlesex pension fund we're expected to be fully funded in 2036 our unfunded liability right now is 58 million on the opeb side we're expected to be fully funded in 2047 the unfunded liability is 42.1 these numbers here moody's does look at and they view these as being managed these are the financial reserves right now the opeb account on the left hand side is 33.5 million general stabilization is 5.1 recreation is 50 000 capital is 2.2 and the estimate for free cash is 12 million at this point and that's it 48 pages so thank you jordan it was really comprehensive and i liked that the share you included um some slides on the the new growth possibilities in town and projects that are somewhat uh being discussed and some that are being permitted um i'd like to open it up obviously to anybody who wants to have some questions normally i start um with the select board but anybody wants to speak first raise your hand otherwise i'll start up here all right let's spend it because i know you're ready so while we're all here there's 10 acres of land i believe you know holiday room i think it's on the jurisdiction of school
because we have such a small commercial place so that may be a topic that might be worth discussion thank you um ryan um the f-127 tax let me forecast a projected deficit of 670 931 that assumes uh that does not assume the re-classification of the debt that's right right that's right it does include the bands it does so and if the uh principal is about seven hundred thousand coming here on the the payment for that project for 27 700 000 it's the three hundred thousand dollars i'm just gonna hop in on your question if you don't mind was a three hundred thousand dollar um reduction in debt service approved in the original 1.8 deficit say that again carol yeah on the slide it showed there was a three hundred thousand dollar reduction in of the debt service due to the issue in bands versus funds was that included in the original forecast so technically it would be a one-father grant so our assumptions on the budget came down eight hundred thousand dollars i was here like about about a month ago when i did a presentation that number was about eight hundred thousand dollars higher i did put in the adjustments of the bands and bonds um but i was using four percent so the the actual band that we just got was 2.6 so it's going to come down we're going to capture even more savings once i get the debt schedules from the bank does that mean we potentially don't need to go the exclude the reclassifying of the debt or we still need both no you still need to do it because it not only helps you in 27 it helps you in the out years and if you don't do it then that debt service will be part of the override conversation number so as moody's did say in their rating to always do large projects by excluded debt and that's just in falling in line with that so bill i hopped in on your questions you'll finish yes okay thank you and then i guess when i have turn next yeah just a quick question brian um at one of our meetings a few weeks ago you gave us a budget summary that looked out 10 years specifically around what we'd be looking at for shortfalls and potential overrides and it started in fy 27 and then went up until fy 37 and it seemed to be compounding by about two plus million dollars or so a year is that still where we would be yes the only difference would be if we got a significant amount of new growth in 26 27 if that number increased then the overall override number would come down because that doesn't get calculated in the prop two and a half percent calculation but overall yes those big numbers don't go away they do go away if we did the levy to exclude it on the dpw and they would also diminish like i said if we got a more new growth than we've been experiencing and i'm no expert on municipal finance so this question may just be me not understanding but can free cash not be used to plug any of this this deficit that we're looking at each year like if we have 12 million dollars in free cash and we're looking at a two million dollar deficit one year we can't tap free cash well we didn't talk about that at the budget meeting basically the conversation was whalen has been disciplined not to use free cash to balance the budget and they they moved away from that what if we just do it for one year and explain to the auditors moody's it was a one year fix just to get over a non-override how would that affect the rating and i don't think believe it would affect our rating what we would probably need to do is limit the use of free cash in total in other words you saw the 2.9 million dollar number we couldn't do 2.9 and then another five six hundred thousand dollars something would have to be taken out on somewhere else we still need to be conservative without use but to answer your question you can do that that is possible we did talk about that at the budget if everything went the wrong way in february would we entertain using free cash as a one-year plug and how would that be viewed by rating and we all felt at the budget meeting that that would probably be okay as long as we explained it was a one-year uh action only so one of the other problems that we've experienced will have used uh free cash in the operating budget brain will confirm is it creates a a lovely bonus prize for the next year because you've got exactly that lost the new part so it it's kind of a kicking of the can situation i think brian probably could use a better phrase but it's really not a good practice to do but it is if you really need it it's there we did it once i think during covet on me to fund opep and then of course the next year we had to come back those like pam will remember and it was just a huge thing we had to not put you know five i know we had to put seven whatever the number was and it's it hurts so one of the other ways we could use free cash is that the budget that we've produced for 27 probably not have a salary reserve salary settlements as we've always done um back in louise's here we brought up the fact that we would appropriate that amount as a separate article and put it into a stabilization fund most towns do that yes they appropriate that amount of money for unsettled contracts not in their general fund budget but outside the general fund budget if you put it in your budget and you don't use it just like we saw in 25 you appropriated 286 000 you didn't use it it went to free cash we have 500 000 in the 26 budget the five contract is not settled that's going to go to free cash that's not what we intended to do by putting it as an outside article put it into a stabilization fund so even when you get to the second year you're not appropriating two years in the general fund budget you're only appropriating one and then you're pulling the money out of the stabilization funding it lowers the use of tax so you will probably see a budget that does that and to your point doug we we may entertain funding that with free cash which would be outside the general fund but we don't know that yet that's one area where you might be able to use free cash to fund a it really is a general fund budget expense but it's not in the budget because it's it's not settled because many times always how it impacts your rating no it would not impact the rating okay i think on a long-term basis moody's previously criticized or or gave guidance against that so you you don't want to get in that habit and we've moved away from that i mean you rely on that for your capital budgets but both brian and i worked in towns previously that used that model that he talked about putting uh your salary reserve building it into your stabilization funds so that's something we're both looking at um and do you have any questions yeah i just had one um when you're doing calculations on the potential growth from um projects that we have in the pipeline economic development projects that we have in the pipeline are we looking out when we maybe there's like set numbers or you know estimates on how much even though we are receiving those you know building permits and fees and so forth are we accounting in any way uh for the added costs on just our overall system for projects like uh um projects where they're a non-profit and we're not going to see specific revenues from it i know we don't have those expenses in the forecast what those could mean like um the um the property up on carroll street if they expand it may mean more fire and police um presence up there in in different services but no we do not have those expenses in the forecast because again those projects are still in play there in work in process but you're right those are good expenses we do have to account for if they become to fruition then we need to extend money to care for them and that's where we come in with the the policy that i started sharing with the board that we're at a point where we need to reach out to some of these non-profits and explain the situation and encourage them to contribute as being uh neighbors and members of the community okay and then the only other second question i have is um when it came to um the the debt ratio that you were talking about really early on i think you said we have about 25 in debt um have we looked at i again i i really really understand that the um need not to use free cash but whether paying down some of that debt would in fact significantly help us on the debt servicing costs associated with that debt well in order to pay it down you'd have to appropriate the the money to do it and but but moody's also took a look at our total debt plus the unfunded in the pension and the um open we're at 182 so i think we have manageable debt right now when i said early in the meeting that moody's just gave us a triple a rating no outlook no language and that's because we don't have a very large amount of debt outstanding we're pretty much paid mom down most of the high school debt it still remains the biggest expense we have but for the most part it's being paid down and we did refinance that about five years ago and saved a lot of money um the other one will be this the coa um i believe we borrowed coa 3.9 percent when we borrowed that it was under four percent it was about 11 million is it about 11 it was 11 million that we borrowed and you don't want to roll off too much debt because you want to keep a certain level amount as things come off you want to put others on in it so that you have that capacity in case you need to borrow something larger in the future okay all right that's it thank you so much thank you all right um erin do you i just can you clarify for me when you come out at negative 700 ish if the vote passes on the ballot does that basically wipe out and we come out even or because isn't it about 700 that yeah so if the dpw was um it's that or to be yes successful that 700 wipe out that deficit would be even they're basically pretty even right okay right and it's 700 because we got a lot more local aid local receipts on our recap so that increasing fees and things like that the motor vehicle um really helps us bring down that deficit we had a very good year investment income because a lot of the money that we had in cds and treasuries was the coa money well that money's been spent and used to build the facilities we know we're not going to get that kind of revenue on our recaps and doi knows that so we have a although we're asking for a lot of the recap it is well within their guidelines that's also assuming that none of the numbers that we have in there change we've estimated certain things for uh local aid and health care and those could you know last year nobody anticipated the increases they saw at the gic and others and we actually benefited from a lower rate with our joint purchasing agreement with suburban so um there's still a note but that goes a long way to helping that that right that ballot question so i think that's part of the story right is that we focus on how important that is to preserving level service level funding we have not adopted we the town have not adopted
to 59 what was it section 18b that allows us to communicate with residents yay or nay or any extra information and all that michael speak to this so who's us though that's the town there are only a handful of towns that can send out say a voter information a red book on a local election but we can have overall right right but people uh independent groups could have have forums there's um i'm happy to share with the other boards here um some of the some of the guidance the town government yeah but i'll share all the guidance that came out from the office of uh campaign and political finance as to what you can and can't do and so we're still working on language we've got a few things going on about we'll put up an faq page frequently asked questions explaining a lot of the terminology that brian had about what's a levy limit uh levy capacity and explaining excluded and levy debt and what the mechanisms of this vote are and we can do some of the technical aspects but we cannot take positions in our day-to-day capacity if we're invited to certain events and asked you could then maybe inject some opinion but other than that we have to we when i say we kelsey and i are working on this in the background we we can only really explain this is what it is this is what's happening and this is why you know and then just as a sidebar we are holding a forum the select was holding a forum on this for residents to ask questions and we'll be rolling out the faq on december 1st but you can give a lot of information we're not sharing an opinion as my point send you the bulletins and advisors this is christian okay just summer first for the select board meeting and december 7th is the vote 11th 11th okay all right just um i'll go down anybody aaron no no christina hey oh i actually do have a question all right do you guys have questions i can't see you okay okay when you say too busy bacon bread back there when you say no ftes or town side um that just means no new ftes over the fiscal year 26 fte count or yes okay we're not adding any new positions if anything we're trying to eliminate some through attrition as we may not refill some so we're not adding any new positions no new positions and we may not refill some of the old ones right um my next committee so um i think that got a reasonable understanding and thank you brian for pomos all together the big question for me is fiscal 28 29 30 and the process of getting us all up to speed as to what we're going to need to get there so it's no question for you today but collectively we need to start thinking about the future of overrides and how to communicate this to the team and for the record i believe we are going to have an article we're going to sponsor an article so that we can distribute the voter book that yeah we are pushing back all right i'd like to think so um um yeah um and asked the question i was looking at asking about expenses from all these um not for property you know extensions and so on um so i won't do that again but hearing the answer i mean i have an idea how this works but i really encourage the town at large to be aggressive and asking for pilot names i think that's just kind of crazy not to so in our last meeting a couple actually two or three meetings ago that select would kind of had a mini brainstorming of potential additional revenue sources it's not was not one and done we started with that and one of the things that we identified and michael identified was let's let's look at a pilot program so he actually presented a draft uh program to us um the last meeting we had right and we're going to see a revise of that um the next meeting and we're putting together a letter and a strategy and we've identified all the folks we would speak to because we do think that um particularly as they expand beyond just the basic house of worship for example that they use once a week that they are in fact utilizing town services and when they don't contribute they're adding that cost to you and i as residents so we are looking into it did that you also go that's it thank you
so i guess that the biggest questions you need on budget items set local schools and still as we have said it's always a big question and often one if you don't get into late in the game and then retirement because is what we have in there a six and a half percent right right that's is that that seems like another is that a firm number is it very conservative no the instance when do we get that it's the middle the middle six is a two-year assessment so we got our 26 in our 27th assessment so that that's a high number yeah and then i guess you've got 12 for insurance that that's still conservative um well it was you know last year we budgeted about 10 we came in yeah it's under four right so it's all called lower and increased last year so it's 12 percent uh hoping the other thing although i've been a lone holdout the last two years the they voted to use some of their fund balance to lower the payment to the towns by about a percentage um so um i'm sure they'll look at something similar if it's higher than 12 percent in an effort to minimize the impact on it because we're not the only cities in town you know that the only city or town that's going through this are some of my neighbors are going through the same thing or had just gone on right and um i also want to take this opportunity to publicly thank pam roman for agreeing to rejoin the finance committee yet again after she's retired to retry it two or three times and um i now sit on the finance committee appointing board and of course i didn't accept that so unfortunately bam thank you pam and phil would you like to introduce your newest member the new finance committee member for its first phase today yes do you have any questions and do you have any questions sir good all right thank you did you have a question i'm sorry i didn't mean to no i'm good thank you yeah i'm just going to copy of the slides we didn't get the deck it seems like i can i can send the individual deck and you can distribute it all right thanks great all right well i thank everybody i think it was a while um hold on one second here um i do want to say one thing that they want to ask something yes i do want to ask something michael when is the guideline coming out and i know you have scheduled to give us some dates because we'll be getting some more budget information here a guideline guideline so it's funny you mentioned that brian and i have been talking about this in an effort to get better numbers he had asked for some budgets from some of the departments and normally we would be sending out a letter right about now we're going to change how we do things brian and i were thinking of doing some additional uh one-on-ones with the departments um before we formalize our guidelines um but we'll probably get something out this week uh to people of how we plan to do that and then of course they will be looking at budgets that are due you'll be some giving us something for the end of the year
we get to work out the dates right um let's skip that in writing though so okay thank you all right everybody yeah so that's fine you need to do
stick your bread I'm going to put it in general for a while. I'm bringing the select board meeting back to order at 8.54. Okay. So I think the next item was a nice discussion. I think we need to go back now to number seven. And Brian, Kevany is still with us. He wants to talk about signing the BN Awards. I can sign it. Or number seven. I think you're right. Yeah, yeah. To Raymond James and Associates. Would you like a motion? Well, we'll let Brian have one sentence. By providing the information, I did a cover memo sort of explaining the interest rates. I know that you folks signed them. So if you do have any questions, be happy to answer it. We need a vote. We need a motion, correct. I move that the select board authorized execution of the paperwork associated with the sale of $8,250,000 to Raymond James and Associates, winner of the bidder, winning bidder for the bonds on October the 21st. And further, it's a which town award. It's another big capital market for the national financial services of LLC. With $1,350,000, $4,570,000. $1,350,000. $1,350,000. $1,350,000. $1,350,000. $1,350,000. $1,350,000. $1,350,000. I have a second. Second. Ready for the discussion? All right. So this, to rephrase what I said earlier, it was the bonds, the $8 million of loans, and then the $8 million of bands that were reported for. It was bands, there's 1.3 bonds, we'll say $8 million. Okay, great. So it's the two things combined. There are about 30 documents that the board has to sign, and those will be available in the town manager's office tomorrow. And there's no further discussion, all those in favor. So it's going to be Tom. Yes. Bill. Yes. Ann. Yes. Yes. And Carol. Yes. Thank you, Brian. The motion passes 5-0. Thank you for your time tonight. Appreciate it. All right. So now we're going to move to a question. Yes, yes. I asked the system manager. Those documents, can they be signed electronically if you don't? I don't. I don't think so. Oh, thank you. Those are wet. Can you have all the way to sign? You need three, three, I'm going away. Three, two, right? I think you need the majority. You need the majority. You need all of them. So thank you. Ann, if you would like to come in, too. Thank you. You have them ready.
I mean, I can go get them. Yeah, they're in the office. Yeah. But who wants us to sign? I need to sign one. I'm going to sign one after. What do you mean? You do sign them? Yes. Okay. I'll go get them. I'll just go get them. Bye. And then Ann, can you come into the building to sign if she wants? And if you would like to sign, too, you might go into the town manager's office to sign. I think we have a few days to sign them. All right. Thank you. So shall we move on to the next item, which is going to be discussion of the Massachusetts and the MWRA, including but not limited financing in the next steps. There were two items in the packet. We've got one is that we have the official request from the Board of Public Works. I should say the recommendation as to how they feel that the $38 million project should be funded. And then further down, there is, you'll see a spreadsheet that shows, and I've highlighted it on mine, just a potential impact of a water rate increase should everything be funded through the water rates. But when we read this recommendation, they actually feel are looking at maybe a hybrid combination where they fund through water rates, the Happy Hollow Treatment Facility, which is the $14.2 million, and that the town, they're asking us to fund the construction costs, the MWRA connection, which is the $20.5 million. Obviously, we would be applying for and hopefully accepted to the SRF program, which would give us 20-year-long 0%. And also, there was a discussion, and you'll see further down, of the RAS, if we were to receive any PFAS proceeds, the Board of Public Works is asking that those we use to offset costs of the Happy Hollow Treatment Facility. I did indicate that there's still an executive session, we have not released any funds, we've not received that many funds, but that we should probably, and I will put that on the next executive session that we have, that I think we should probably look at making a decision as to strategy for any funds that we receive through the PFAS litigation. So, I'm going to open it up to the Board. Oh, I want to say one of the things. I thought it would be good for us to have a general conversation tonight. The Finance Committee has received this recommendation. I've awarded it to the Chair for them to also apply, and hopefully they'll have a recommendation for us after tonight. And then on the 17th, we can review the Finance Committee recommendation. And I've asked that the Vice Chair and the Chair and the Board of Public Works join us. And probably, I believe, the Director of Public Works may join us as well so that we can have a more robust conversation. So, I just thought we'd get the components here on the table, and then we'll go see what questions we need to gather information for for the 17th. So, how does that sound? That sounds good? I think we've heard from the Board's side of its own discussion, because I think it's it.
Okay.
And any comments on the recommendation?
Either way, taxpayers have to pay this cost. It would be interesting to hear from the Finance Committee, of course. But we discussed this issue before the Board.
I'd like to hear from the Board further on his thinking about making a line item on water and how it was made for this plan. So, both the pipes and the new teams. So, I think that's your turn. Yeah, those are two water questions. But I think I, the Board of the Board, the couple of lines, with my position on the use of the hearing for other members. I think that if you look on the chart, that's why I have the spreadsheet put in. And again, it's not. It just gives us a ballpark idea. But if you look at this, let's say your water bill is $500 to $1,000 now, and your average water bill is $700. Your new bill is going to be $1,200, which is an increase of $500, you know, to support all of these. Obviously, the initial capital flow comes through first, and then eventually the whole, because we're not really going to have the full, the way I understand that Michael probably knows better than I, the full impact of that debt until about FY29. So, year one, we'll pick some of it because it's a capital cost. And you can see that they've put that in these columns here, the Happy Hall of Debt. The other new debt service is column A, and then B. And to complicate matters, some things aren't in this. We have a corresponding projection of what the increase of property tax would be. Nope. We have that since the time says. The other thing I think we need, and maybe, Michael, you can help us with this. This is one of the things, if you don't mind, by hopping in here on this, is I think we need to understand the town's capacity. So, we have a debt matrix that says that we will not have more than 100% of our operating budget with debt. Well, today I heard we have these other obligations to make us at 182. But currently, in the market it showed last year, we had about $53 million of debt. We just deferred this $8 million, but it's already passed. So, if you put that into my mind, it comes out to be about 61. One, if we needed to, so I think we need to understand what is our capacity to still maintain our bond rating, what's our borrowing capacity. But is that affected, Madam Chair, if the cost path to the water rate won't? No, but I'm talking about on the other proposal. In other words, it's part of, like Bill said, what's the impact on the tax increase if we do it, the borrowing, the general fund. I think we also have to understand what's our capacity. You know, essentially, it's like how much is left on our credit card. Because if we only have $40 million, maybe there are some things in the capital plan coming down that we need to allow some funds for. Do you think that's a good question to ask Michael?
I wasn't 100%. I'm trying to make some notes about getting tax projection impact and a few other things from Mr. Whitney's question. So, if you could repeat the question. Yeah, I think we need to understand what is our capacity to borrow within our debt metrics. Maybe it's nothing. Maybe it's not a good, maybe it's an irrelevant question. But I think we should understand if we were to support some of this project, does that, in fact, you know, where does that leave us with debt capacity? All right. What was your other question?
The question is, what are the work? Thank you. What do you think, Anne? I think all the numbers are the same as we've seen them before, except that he's just allocated some of the funds being supported by either the town or his group. So, none of it looks surprising or different to me.
And I mentioned my position before when we last talked about it in this room. I kind of start from the position of where Bill is, but am more in the hybrid camp, just because of the size, the overall size of this project. I feel like I'm now looking at these numbers to offset some of the significant water increase for some $13 project, which I met recently with Cliff Lewis, and it doesn't seem like there's a precedent of a project of this size that he can recall in a number of years. To offset that, I thought we would do some portion on the debt, the excluded debt. So, to me, that just made the most sense, but I understand where Bill is coming from. I don't feel as strongly about it as Bill is, but that's my mindset. So, if we were to do excluded debt, then that has an A and a B as well. Do we do, for the lack of a phrase, normal excluded debt that follows a vote on the ballot and then a vote at telling them you need to support the project, or would we look at the excluded debt that, what is that, 59? No, definitely A. And E, N, K, N, whatever it is that allows the select board. So, there's that. If we go to debt, that's also, that's a decision we can make too. So, I'll make a list of these questions for us for the next time. Sure, I'm trying to follow. So, is the proposal from the Board of Public Works that we go, the normal debt exclusion with respect to the MWRA portion, the happy hollow portion would be water, the sum debt? I think they are planning on applying for this SRF loan. You know, if they get accepted, it's a 0% loan, we could also be part of that. And then we would make, I think, right, Michael, and then we would make a decision how, what type of exclusion that would be. They didn't, the Board of Public Works didn't say. They didn't? Is that what 59, 21 CK is? No, that's the one. Additional debt exclusion. No, no, it is not. I don't think so. N, N is the one, it's the one that the. Yeah, this is, yeah, this is, this is the. This is your A bucket. This is the additional debt. Yeah. I'm sorry, I'm not sure. I hear some of the Ns. Yes. Ms. Britsch. Yeah, this is the ballot, that's all. Yeah. Right. We're not going around, we're not going around the vote, which I think we've all agreed was better than the alternative. Like, we should just bring it to the town. So that's their recommendation. It's, it's, they haven't changed their recommendation. They would say. I did, they were all water rates before. They would still, no. Not, not for the hybrid. Nope. This has been it.
Did you have something else you wanted to add in? No, I'm just saying it, it hasn't changed since they recommended the hybrid. This is the same. And this was backed by town council. When she came in to talk about it.
So we would have to find out too. If we did additional debt exclusion to fund a portion of an SRF loan, is that, is that acceptable? Is that allowed? I get two loans. Perhaps we get one loan and then we, and then Brian does an accounting measure that splits it between, which is what we would vote at the town meeting article. I, I can say, I have to have a conversation with Brian. How's that sound?
What happened here in our next discussion? This is a better idea.
Okay. So what we want to know is what's the property tax increase? What's our debt capacity? If we, we did an SRF loan, who do we then vote that under debt exclusion? Because part of it would be water weights. So do we need two loans or one loan? So, um, and then I think one other thing we also want to talk about is that, uh, two other things we want to make a decision, like I said, on the disposition and, um, the, the PFAS funds as we, we see them, um, will they be used to offset, you know, the water filtration system or will they be used to offset the, the, uh, the, the construction? And then finally, I think we also want to know, um, or recommend, we might want to recommend back that the, uh, these, this spreadsheet does, and I'll note in the notes, it does not indicate, uh, that there is a nonprofit user category. Um, so I think that, um, that was one of the concerns when this was first brought up, um, by Michael and, um, I think Brian originally was that if we don't, if we put this all on the tax rates or anything in the tax rates, whatever portion we put there, um, the nonprofits wouldn't be paying their fair share of the construction, would be putting it all on the, on the, the, the taxpayers. That's it. And then finally, there's another little thing. If you look at the bottom on these notes that I think we have to consider is that the, um, it says down here, municipal water usage is built at tier one, regardless of the amount of water used. And there is a projection showing that if this was all funded by water rates, that our current water bill would probably go up by about a hundred thousand. Does that sound about right? I didn't put the number in my head clearly. And I'm a little bit concerned because we have enough pressure on the operating budget without adding another a hundred thousand water rates. So I don't know, we might, we might want to look at saying, you know, if we fund some of this, then we won't, you won't give us an increase in water. I don't know what that, what our thought might be. Um, so let me put together some of these, let's invite Brian in. I think that sounds good. Kind of make sure one of the questions is confirming the interest rate on, uh, any loans that will be financing this. In other words, if there's a, maybe more than one note here, right? Could be. Mm-hmm. So we want to confirm that, uh, both are zero percent or only one of them. I think there's also, uh, financing with design costs, which is not sort of zero percent. Yeah. So the interesting thing is I think the zero percent loans are only 20 years, which is such to me, a short term for such a long-term asset. Um, you know, if the rates come down, maybe it makes sense to us to think about financing thing over 20 or 30 years or something. It's a math problem. It's a math problem. Exactly. I'm not sure what everyone thinks. Michael, do you have some thoughts on any of this, what we're saying? I want to go back and ask, uh, counsel a couple of questions about the Mass General Law 5921C and Kay, because the, the one that the, the Board of Public Works originally asked for was under subsection N, which was the select board votes. Right. But that was specific to allowing water and sewer debt. And Kay doesn't talk about that. That just talks about general borrowing. I just want to make sure that that's all.
Yeah. I'm not sure if I fully understood whether we had to separate out Kay, depending upon how we did the borrowing. I just want to ask counsel a couple of questions on that. So, um, does anybody else have any other thoughts or are we sort of leaning towards a hybrid? Is that what we're looking at now? Either way. I want to hear from the finance committee. Yeah.
So, I mean, I'm also thinking one other option would be if we were to do a hybrid is that you flip it and that we support the happy hollow and then the water rates supports the, the construction.
I mean, that was a thought I had too. Just because you are in the same room, Brian. So, what the impact would be on the government projection of the dark side of it earlier is additional debt. Though I suppose if it's excluded debt. It might be the most helpful amount of chairs, maybe it's quite convenient to be answered right, from the attorney prior to our meeting. So, it's not helpful. So, we want to digest what sort of areas of work can be. Uh, we could include in the notes for the question, specifically the user fees, if we can charge nonprofits user fees. Because when I did research on it, that's, that's the term that was accepted by several towns around, around us, um, for nonprofits. And then, also, just in your, just to respond to your point about the 20, 20-year amortization, I think is what you were talking about, for a loan versus a 30-year or something where we could get longer. Just keep in mind, we can always refinance. But by the time 20 years is over, the amount will be a lot smaller.
Yeah, we could refinance. I was sort of thinking that we need the relief more up front, because we've got so much pressure on our budget, that's why I was hoping that we'd have a longer term, but it appears to me that, and, you know, we have to apply, and I believe, I believe they are applying in January to this SRF program, and you have to be accepting. They don't necessarily have funds to take on everyone. Sometimes you have to apply a couple times. So, I think we ought to get some more information on that. Let me make a list of the questions. We'll invite Brian to come in, and, um, Michael's going to ask town council a couple things, and I think then we should do that. I would like, if possible, for us to kind of think about having a decision, maybe the December 1st meeting, if not, because this will be, the articles will be due January 15th, and we would be able to communicate back to the Board of Public Works. This is what we're thinking, so that they then can, you know, develop the article. So, all right. Is there anything further on that? I think we will move on to item 10, which I think we saw this briefly at our last meeting, which is to discuss with you and potentially authorize the tele-manager to sign the acknowledgement certificate relative to the center.
And I think that's on page 68 of the package. So, open the floor to questions, comments.
Yes, the question was.
The question was, I thought that we were with that someone had reviewed the documents cited. And given the timeframe, you know, we did that a week ago, Friday, and I was out of the area, and I had talked to Mr. Hummel beforehand. He just didn't think there would be adequate time to try and go through the ECR and all the documents.
Nor was I able to get time with the treasurer to see if there were any liens on the property. Again, Attorney Klein was the land use attorney at KP Law who went through this and had them recharacterize this. This was originally going to be a certificate of estoppel. It was changed to an acknowledgement. Her point was getting in that language to the best of our knowledge, not waiving any defenses and without any obligation to do an inquiry. So, she felt the language, putting that in there, really protected the town or made this benign. Again, this is for the benefit of the buyer, if you read it.
It's the board's comfort level, if you want me, you know, whether you want me to sign this or not. Any comments from the board?
Yeah, do you have some? Anything? I find it benign. So, I don't think it's, I think we do it because I want to make sure that the sale goes through. It does say, you know, the best of the actual knowledge of the end design without a duty of inquiry, which we're best. Yeah, I saw it. But, you know, I mean, that is pretty benign.
And quite frankly, any buyer, any land, due diligence, which I don't know about this side of the property, would be doing their own due diligence, right? They're not going to rely on, you know, blackboard. 90% of the time, these types of, the reason they go for an acknowledgement and are okay with it, is their real concern is just that there's some sort of violation or something that's under investigation that everybody knows about and the person is trying to sell the property without anybody understanding what's going on. So, it's really that limbo period of time that they get concerned about. That's why it's an acknowledgement because, you know, suppose we knew of some violation that was coming down the pipeline, an acknowledgement would be enough for them to say, well, you acknowledge that there was nothing coming down that pipeline. So, I find it to be quite okay. I do as well.
Okay, then, does somebody want to make a motion? Ann, would you like to make a motion? I don't like making motions.
I like seconding motions. Tom, make a motion and I'll second it. I'll move this board vote to instruct the town manager to sign the acknowledgement relative to the town center property. It's one, we're on a dashboard so we've lost the post road within, as it is within our pack. Second. Okay, so ready for the discussion. Otherwise, roll call vote. Ann. Yes. Thank you. Tom? Yes. Yes. Bill? Oh, sir. And Carol, yes. That's going to be, motion passes, 401. Okay. We are at the town manager's report, Ms. McCall. The floor is yours. I'm trying to be brief, Madam Clerk, as soon as I get to it. So, our new management analyst communication coordinator, Ms. Bradica, wanted me to share that the annual report is on the website. Hard copies are not yet available. We will let you know as soon as that happens. Brian alluded to Snakebrook Dam. I have, again, tried to reach out to FEMA due to the shutdown. We're not hearing anything. Ms. Hanson has been out of town, but Ms. Power Spillette has been working on the procurement of a contractor. Bids were received. We've identified a low bidder, and we received a recommendation recently from Pear Corporation, who's assisting with the project. And I think we've reached that frostbite where we are running out of time on the ARPA money. The clock is now ticking on the state $800,000. So, we've all played games like Hearts, where there's $1.4 million, or the easiest expression, you have $1.4 in the hand versus the total of the $2.8 in the bird in the bush, so to speak. So, I don't think it's worth, at this point, continuing to wait for FEMA, who I'm not getting a very good comfort level that we're going to receive that money anytime soon. And jeopardizing the $1.4 we already have in hand. So, when Ms. Hanson comes back, when we sit down and talk about this, we're going to have to consider issuing a notice to proceed to this contractor. I think we have to go forward, or we're going to lose the ARPA money and then potentially jeopardize the other. I would love to have that additional $1.4 million, but I don't want to wager and lose it all. And I think even if the shutdown were to end tomorrow, we're still somewhere in the middle of that FEMA approval process, and it has to go back to Congress, as I previously shared from an email. I would not wager on the fact that we're going to see that in the time period that will allow us to spend it all. So, my inclination is to move forward with what we have, get the project done. It's long overdue, unless the board has any others. I think this is the direction we need to go. All right.
Status of on-site insight reports. We did receive all of the updated reports through July, and then we had to get an updated report on the Council on Aging. And again, I had Ms. Bradica. We've received all those, and they are now placed up on the town's website so that people can view them. We will be handing, and I believe have handed them on to the Capital Improvement Planning Committee, and we will be working on incorporating that in our long-term capital plan. I noted expansion application of our visitor's code of conduct. I just wanted to make the board aware that there have been, as you well know, some issues and controversies in the last couple of weeks. And we previously discussed the visitor code of conduct that we've had here, and I've had to extend that not only from in-person contact, telephone contact. And I now think I'm getting to the point where certain emails that are coming in, you know, using inappropriate language or direct attacks to staff, I think I'm going to have to issue replies. If you're going to continue this process, we are not going to – I will have to incorporate some type of protocol, but it makes it difficult to respond to certain inquiries. If the language or the tone or things, you know, create a problem for staff. So just making you aware of that. My next town manager office hours will be on November 10th at 5 p.m. That's earlier than usual because, as was alluded to earlier, there was supposed to be a community conversation, which is now going to incorporate recent events with Mary and Ryan that's going to happen at the COA, the Council on Aging, that night at 6.30. So I want to be able to address, you know, any questions the public have. And as I'm sure some of you know, those are fairly well attended. I usually get a dozen to two dozen people, depending upon the issue du jour. And it's good feedback. So I look forward to seeing folks there. Just to recap, since the last meeting, as I let you folks know, I did get the first-time attendee scholarship from the International City Managers Association and the Massachusetts Municipal Managers Association to attend the ICMA conference last week. It went from Friday to Wednesday. A lot of the focus was on how to better use data and incorporate artificial intelligence into municipal government. There was a lot of interesting dialogue as well as conversations on the changing face of municipal employees, the transition of the older Gen X and boomer generations moving out and attracting Gen Z and millennials and the dynamics. So I walked away with a lot of good information. I want to have a discussion with my staff about putting together policies on using AI here in the workplace. There were so many companies that are now utilizing it, not just, say, ChatGPT or Google's Gemini, but they want to build a knowledge base of tried and true information that they can pull from. So they're not just selling you generic AI. They're selling you information that they've compiled, and it's going to touch every aspect of what we're doing in the future. I don't foresee that it's going to replace people, but it helps supplement the work we do and maybe make it easier to make some of these complex financial decisions, so on and so forth. So I just want to make you aware of that. I already touched upon the community forum with Mary and Ryan. I did have a meeting today with Tom Lashman, our surveyor, and Abby Charest, our town engineer on miscellaneous properties. We talked about a potential Warren article, and the discussion centered around there's a – they have to do a survey. A lot of the miscellaneous properties we own are around Dudley Pond and Lake Contituate. Apparently, I did some research back in the 50s. The town was condemning and taking a lot of properties that were run down, and at one point, they might have been something we want to sell off, but now as we look forward to the future, how we need to handle stormwater operations and management, the potential for sewer expansion down the road and roadway improvement, what might look as just an unassuming property may have future value to the town. So I've received a couple of specific inquiries. We already ruled one out today, but there are some that are going to go on a case-by-case basis, but they want to do an overall review of all those properties. We're going to put together a list and look at also tax title properties to see what, if any, have value for those three major areas of future expansion. So I'm continuing to work on that to see if we have any articles, and we talked a little bit about street acceptances so that we can – a lot of towns have it as a regular article doing street acceptances of roads that have been built out to town standards so you can get a little extra chapter 90 every year. So that's what we've done in the last week or so, Madam Chair, so if anybody has any questions, happy to answer. Questions from the board?
I did want to follow up on the expansion of the Visitor Code of Conduct. It's, you know, everybody who participates in town government is passionate, and I do think that our staff deserves respect not only when we come in the building, but also when we communicate with them. And I'm – Michael and I had this conversation, and then we came up with the idea is to expand the – this Visitor Conduct Code so that everybody will – should another issue occur, then we can resolve it quickly. The on-site, in-site reports, I do want to say, Michael, it's a very long report. I've been bugging them saying, okay, we'll please have that to the board, but it's about 100 pages, I think you told me. Some of them individually are quite long. Quite long. So – but there's little executive summaries on each one, and I know that we are particularly interested in some of those summaries, for example, the town building. I know we wanted to look at that, so I'll see if I can't somehow get a couple of those out. I've been on my list here. Another suggestion might be, I know you wanted me to, at some point when we have room on one of our agendas, do a quick overview of a slide deck, maybe a couple slides. That's on the operations review with the Collins Center, but I know Michael Fea has been reviewing these on-site, in-site reports as they come through. Maybe we can condense this down to a couple of slides to go over the individual buildings. There are major needs, I guess. Did you say slides, Michael? Do you want to? That's Michael Fea's in slides. Slides. Well, I can do it off my notes, I suppose. I mean, I think – I don't need 48. Oh, thanks, Helen. I think you've done so many wonderful things for us, and there's all these little wonderful bits of information that we can use going forward, strategizing. So I think it's really nice for us to see what you have done. All right. We're on to the consent calendar. Move the consent calendar for November 3rd, 2025, item 1-3-3. All right. Is there any discussion? All right. All those in favor? Ann? Yes. Doug? Yes. Bill? Yes. Carol, yes. Consent calendar passes 5-0. I want to have the minutes of October 20th and October 24th. Do we have a motion?
Adoption of both sets of minutes. I have a second. Second. Thank you. Does anybody have any edits to the minutes of October 20th?
I think on 8-13 – I think somebody else will help me here. Kelsey, I'll notice. Is it M-O-O-U-I? M-O-U-I and the minutes. 8-13, ribbon cutting. I think it's – Oh, it's M-O-O-I, I believe. Oh, yeah. M-O-U-I. Okay. I think we just need to fix that little typo. I also want to call attention to the board on – when we revised the – when we revised the – when we revised the advisory committees, Bill's suggestion was proposals for basically requiring material investment of staff time or town resources be discussed with the board and subject to approval. So I'm not necessarily sure we captured that when we revised it. So I think maybe we should – we'll probably revise what was submitted online so it matches what we voted. How's that sound? Sounds good. All right. And on A6, it says discussion and review of debt exclusion including – and then it says including again. There should only be one including. Thank you. Anything else? Anyone? No? Okay. Let's go to – what are they here? About 10-24, I guess. Does anybody have any edits on A24? 10-24? Of course, I'm sure. We didn't have them. That's all right.
Let's go to the vote then. There's no further discussion. Bill. Yes. Doug. Yes. Tom. Ian. Yes. Thank you. Yes. Motion's passed. Five zeros. And we have quite a bit of correspondence in our package. Does anybody have any comments on that? It's primarily – yeah. Thank you. We're all set. Let us move now to study boards, concerns, and repairs. Who would like to start?
Go ahead. I have four items.
Select board member Levine and I attended an online meeting today with Senator Rauch as chief of staff to discuss remote participation. So there's several bills and legislation on this topic. The bill that the Senate Gentile filed has been sent to further study. It's not hopeful. However, there's another bill that mirrors that one, and that's still alive. That's in the Senate. So we'll continue to talk to people about this topic and see where it goes. Second, it was a pleasure to attend the ribbon-cutting ceremony yesterday at the town pool, where changes were recently made using CPA monies, southern monies. And the facility looks terrific. Many thanks to Ben and Jeannie Dallas for all their hard work on so many levels at the town pool. I think that allows me to be two weeks ago. It's like board member Whitney mentioned the value of having Tamara in this room to capture our conversation for the DTL. So I support that idea. And the fourth item, Chair and I attended a fence viewing session Sunday morning.
Jejuic and Matt with the two involved, property owners, just a course of action. Let's see how things go. We want our record to stay perfect. We're already 1-0. We're hoping for 2-0. He would be 3-0. I was a fence viewer. No, but that's just probably not. Your own records. Bill, do you have any? Two items. One report earlier this afternoon, the School of Facilities Master Plan Advisory Committee and the School Department sponsored a visioning session to define that there are at least 100 people to turn up and respond to some questions posed by the architect and their educational planning consultant and vision for what the town at which we'll see going forward. So it's going for K-8. A second session will be held on the 17th, about between 4 and 6.30, I believe, that will be held, not at the COA Senior Center, but instead at Happy Hollins, the superintendent, to give everyone a sense of existing conditions. So, but that was a very interesting session. Secondly, with respect to concerns, I share the concern that I think we all have about future operating revenues. And to Mr. Fay's point, the Holiday Road site is one that might be worthy of consideration to that. And it might be essential for the board to consider an article for the upcoming town meeting for planning money that might inform preparation of a plan to be presented to the development of the planning board, the preparation of the zone, similar to what I've heard with respect to Alta Oxpo, where the time was done, so it's a good place that success will develop soon. So that's something the board members have said to thank you. Thank you. Ann, do you have your thoughts or concerns? No, I don't. Thank you very much. Mr. Levine. I would just reiterate what I mentioned at the beginning, but to flesh out the details, on November 10th, there is a workshop slash event called Community Conversation, an overview of hate crimes in Middlesex County, which will feature Middlesex DA, Marion Ryan. It's a hybrid event that begins at 6.30 p.m. and will take place at the Council on Aging Community Center, which is 8 Andrews Avenue, and it will be also live-streamed on Zoom. That's it. Unfortunately, I have a few. I keep skipping them, but anyways. Actually, I went to the grand opening at the police today as well, thinking I was going to be observing and come to find out at the last second they said, oh, Tom and I, one of you, speak. Oh, you can both speak. So I said one thing, thinking Tom was going to say something else, but I was the only one, ad-living away. Oh, dear.
And then Doug and I received correspondence from a concerned resident about the additional capacity may be needed due to what's going on with the Medicare programs and the government shut down for the SHINE program. And apparently they may be requesting consideration of us to leave the building, the COA building, open until 4 o'clock on Fridays. And so it's not really an issue now. They did raise it. I did say I would bring it forth. It went disgusting. We agreed that was a good plan. I think it's something we have to keep our eye on. I am going to add my two cents is that if we do, they are open. Anybody can get an appointment from wherever they live. But if we do open the building for expanded hours, I think we would want to say that those additional hours would have to go to Whalen Residence. Appointments would have to go to Whalen Residence because we'd be with the bank to leave the building open. So on November 17th is our next meeting. Because Bill has these other meetings that I don't want to have to be in three places at once, we can't do the meeting at 630 or not early. And we do have a very full schedule. We're going to start talking about streamlining the annual time meeting warrant, which of course is one of our big objectives for this year. We're going to be having the tax classification. Brian and the assessor will be in. That's annual. Can't read all my writing. We're going to look at some additional articles and which articles we have said we would like to submit and then kind of narrow it down to which ones we're actually going to submit because they take a lot of work. I want to make sure everybody has December 15th on their calendars. And also, let's go January 6th for the moment. Put that on. And I have been attending most of the Capital Planning and Improvement Committee meetings. It's a lot of work. It's a big project. It's a big, big responsibility. I think the chair is doing an excellent job, you know, trying to bring their members up to speed. There seems to be some, I mean, we've done a wonderful job. We have these wonderful candidates who all seem very engaged, very focused. I think we're going to be very pleased with that. It's a little bit slow getting going for day off. And having said that. Just one thing. We picked one of our speakers for the Veterans Day ceremony. That's Ian. Yeah. I did confirm that. Because we're all speaking. Yep. No, it's a good one. So having said all that, I would like to take a motion to journey. All right. 942. I appreciate the consideration, but I think you should schedule the upcoming meeting that makes sense of first allegiance, obviously, to this board. So it's better. Well, you know what? Push comes to show. Maybe I'll push it back. We'll push it back to 615. But I really felt, I really like to let everybody be here. But thank you. All right. And Matt, I'll take a motion to adjourn at what? 942? 944. 44. So moved. Second. Okay. No further discussion. All those in favor? Anne? Yes. Yes. Bill? Yes. Yes. Carol? Yes. Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
return to open session of section 7 10 although the agenda states otherwise at 7 15 tonight we will have uh fiscal 27 financial forecast including but not limited summary of the fiscal year 25 operating results fiscal 26 tax fee cap estimates fiscal 27 revenue expense forecast and et cetera we'll be joined it's a joint meeting with the finance committee and the school committee we will also have a conversation with the finance uh director about review potential vote design documents and award the top 8 million 215 000 bonds to raymond james and associates uh following all that we will have a discussion the massachusetts water resource authority including but not limited to financing the next steps followed by a discussion review and potential vote to authorize the town manager to sign the acknowledgement certificate relative to the sale of the town center and we'll have a town manager's report the consent calendar minutes of october 20th and october 24th we will review correspondence select boards for sports concerns there are no topics not reasonably anticipated 48 hours in advance and hopefully around 9 30 we will adjourn so i do also want to know although on this left we are joined this evening by town manager michael mccall and assistant town manager of power spurlet okay so before we begin tonight's meeting i want to thank the board and the town manager for joining members of the community outside the high school today to show our support for our neighbors of color in light of this last week's incidents at the high school while the incident is still under active investigation any action that makes any member of our community feel that they do not belong has no place in wayland the strong showing of support this the community is a testament to the fact that we value and respect one another here in town
i am also going to just go a little out of character with the board's indulgence and move to reports uh concerns select boards concerns for this one topic to see if um individual members have something they would like to say on this as well and um i'm going to start with you doug if you don't mind sure um i think it's been a particularly fraught situation in town over the last several days since we learned about this incident that occurred on the 30th we learned that the next day on halloween and i think something important to bear in mind is what the chair mentioned is that there is an ongoing investigation currently and i think it's difficult for us to not take a beat and wait for that to play out so we have all of the information before we make any type of formal statement because i don't think any of us have have all of the facts right now and so i think it's important to pause wait until we have the information and then i think there's an appropriate time for us to be able to weigh in at that stage but i'm very glad that folks came together to stand in support of residents and friends of color of whalen and we had a very robust turnout today and uh i'm glad all the members of our board were there as well thank you uh tom rebel well i don't have much to add you know a school is a place to foster respect and um looking forward to the investigation being complete so we can get all of that i would excuse me don't have anything to add thank you thank you um you know obviously this was a very upsetting um situation and of course whalen came together and showed support but i think there's probably some overall protocols and general policies that we need to put in place and uh we'll see how things unfold but it there's further discussion that's needed on this on race and whalen and its relationship thank you right now this is um a practice when we have discussions again with the board's indulgence i'm going to see if mr mccall would like to uh also have something to say add uh thank you madam chair no i would echo select board member levine's comments as well as yours um i i thought it was a great turnout and i know we all work to ensure that our citizenry and any of our visitors feel valued here um but i would say that there's an ongoing investigation i'm committed as i said uh some of the board members working with dr fleischman going forward on communication but until such time as an investigation is complete i don't think there's much that we can can add to it from our from this this board thank you of course i'm not done one more before we go off this topic there was um doug's gonna help me with the details here there was already scheduled a program uh next monday that this will be part of our announcements i'm kind of i'm kind of moving along but uh and november 10th at 6 30 to 8 at the uh community center so and it's marion ryan the district attorney for middlesex county um it's going to be holding event workshop on hate crimes i think it was originally billed as an event for both the wayland and sudbury communities and i imagine in light of recent incidents that there will probably be a robust turnout and folks should feel free to attend in person or online great thank you so having said that now um let's move on to um regular announcements and i think we're going to start with one from mr mccall oh thank you madam sheriff i tonight you're going to hear from some of our newest employees um when we get to uh agenda item number three uh julie gaggin who is our new manager of sustainability she'll be here talking with you folks but uh i also want to introduce to you our new executive assistant in the select board town manager's office that is abigail warren who's right here um she comes from a background of working um with non-profits uh managing office settings coordinating a lot of things she has been a great addition to our office it fits right in and we're happy to have her and unless you feel like saying anything i just wanted you folks to have a name and a face because it's the person you interact with quite frequently when you call our office but uh abby's been great and it's week two and we're looking forward to a long tenure with her thank you welcome
yeah yes yes yes that's what i said yesterday okay catching on very quickly she's already sending a list of things to do so i think we're in good steve thank you very much and welcome to the town um i also want to announce that we're having a veterans day um ceremony is next tuesday and thank you again and for um representing us and giving the welcoming remarks so does anyone else have any announcements we're good to go thank you so now i think i'll move to public comment is there anyone has public comment i recognize miss podel do you want to come up here please hi my name is hope podel seven jennison road i just from a kind of a different perspective but looking at it as a citizen resident of wayland and a human being um after this horrible event the other day i did what i always do is uh started to read about uh more intensely than what i had done before hate crimes and uh hate incidences um because it's different than hate crimes it's not um it's a hate incident if you want to look it up it's easier than we explaining it i have to talk a little bit just about my reaction was uh i was dumbstruck it was dumbstruck it was beyond for all the years i worked in uh different social service non-profits and universities and colleges um with some different events long before these kinds of events had labels or names um i feel this beats them all and uh i feel horrible the family or families um that uh are the parents and are guardians of the children that were harmed and uh i i have been active in reading on the wayland community forum on facebook some are better off not bothering and others get very involved in it and it does have had it has had different opinions and different attitudes and one thing i did see was um a little bit more activity and different opinions um different feelings i don't know that it was opinions i think it was feelings and the town of which i just heard the participation on wayland community forum and spoke to some others was kind of sadness hurt and how could this happen in wayland well unfortunately um it has and it is happening in other communities similar maybe larger than wayland but it's here it's now i sent out a list of uh websites for people to take a look at was more for i called it learning and teaching um the learning that while i did a lot um have done more and i think we could all learn more about the history of hate and racism that goes way back and uh lynching um for what i know now i don't know the other um it may be different events that actually happened but nonetheless we're a community that has to come forward whether in small groups and then larger to make sure we really service our children and the staff and the whole community otherwise sometimes it for people who just don't know it becomes a lot of white privilege talk and that's more distressing but that's because people generally don't know what that is and just need you to bring it to a close miss modella okay um so that i can feel and with my friends and community that we are really making an effort to enlighten ourselves and people around us for the safety of the community thanks thank you thank you appreciate it anyone else would like to make documents for you
identify yourself sir when you want this to give us your name and your address sure my my name is uh stephen cass i'm a former wayland resident an employee um did you have a number so i live in orleans massachusetts orleans yes um i also want to speak about the the uh recent racist incident and give the public outcry about you know this is a town that doesn't discriminate and we're not racist and we don't approve of bullying and from my experience here i can say that that's that's just a bunch of nonsense um i was the wayland athletic director from 2013 to 15. i bought a home here thought it would be a nice place to live and work i uncovered massive financial fraud in the athletic program pretty quickly mostly i uncovered discrimination against girls um in the last 35 years the boys have won 28 state championships the girls have won one if you take out swimming there's a lot of discrimination behind that coaching money but mostly there are powerful white coaches they make sure that they get all the privilege um ultimately i was fired because i wanted the girls i wanted all the kids to be treated equitably um and i didn't walk away because i knew my firing was illegal um so i was arrested by some wayland police officers in my home who went to high school with a with a high school football coach had a gun jammed in my back in my living room at 10 in the morning um i actually won a whistleblower suit but i lost my home i lost my career i lost my retirement i lost everything um so for wayland to say you know the people of wayland to say we're good people and we're not about discrimination and we're not about retaliation and we're not about bullying or racism you fired three black school employees the athletic director justice smith maybe go read wallace the met co-director and omar reese the superintendent two who filed lawsuits um there are white people in this town people in power police officers school administrators who have done far far far far worse things so to say you're not racist the evidence is points the other way if you want to prove you're not racist hire a law firm put the corrupt cops either in jail or fire them or take away their pension fire the white school administrators who've done far worse things how can you punish students for discrimination or civil rights violations when the leaders of your schools town and police do far worse things if virgil tibbs train had stopped new wayland i can assure you he would have been treated far worse than he was in sparta mississippi it's easy to breathe too close all done thanks sir thank you sir is um anybody else miss miss miss kelsey is there anybody online who wants to do public comment sorry no there's nobody waiting on mine to make public comment thank you anybody else in the room want to do public comment all right i think we're listening on um the next item on our list is going to be going to have a discussion this is a continuing discussion or at least i thought it was going to be um the electric vehicle first like duty vehicle policy and we are inviting by for attendance olivia blaney was our sustainability coordinator and julie gang i said it correctly manager the sustainability and a project manager so if you want to take your seats up here are you ready to start so yeah we have a powerpoint which i think will help get us through the bullet points so i just want to say one thing i i know we have this conversation offline through uh abby it's we only have 10 minutes for signing because we didn't know that we would we should we have a whole change of action will that be it will you be able to do that within the 10 minutes and allow us um yeah okay so there is i think um people difficulties i have to come over here so we can hear you thank you sorry it's okay we can do it without all of you
hi everyone i'm julie welcome to new i think i'm the newest employee here um i am the projects and sustainability manager for the facilities department um i have a background in civil environmental engineering i spent a number of years in consulting i wrote um municipal master planning master plans um did some wastewater work remediation um environmental remediation and like sewer projects so i have a good municipal background um for the last three years i've been in the town of weston as a sustainability coordinator there um so i'm so sorry for all the changes to the ev policy we went through it over the spring in weston and um when i took a look at the policy that was drafted here um you know when i developed the policy for the town of weston when i do things i spend a lot of time doing research and making sure that like whatever we put together fits within the criteria um that we need to meet and also that is comparative to neighboring communities um and so the policy that you have now um reflects what the town of conquer the town of lexington the city of cambridge um and the department of energy and resources have all put together as kind of like the standard for um your zero emissions vehicle first policy which is different than saying light duty vehicle electrification policy um the policy that you have presented was already reviewed and approved by
doer
it's not fun to me right here
yep
does that work did okay um so that's the policy that you have put forth if you feel that you need more time i'm happy to pass that through because um we have another more pressing thing that needs to get done today um the green communities program do we have our robin can you give me this for a second is this your annual report the annual report is the thing that needs to get on our calendar don't you don't have to concern this okay so you have 10 minutes for this because it's on our consent calendar so that'll be all set all right when we get that far we'll it's due november 7th so no pressure but thank you right okay so you had slides you wanted to show us somewhere okay um so you do know the history of this is that we did see and all a vehicle and then when it came back unfortunately so many people have touched this yeah the ecc came in and then abby took it over and came in and then she left when the person really inherited i spent some time with herself and with michael and then she came in and we said gee it's only going to be the light duty and show us the cost because we're very concerned about cost right and then we made some revisions and so we were expecting just 10 minutes look at it and we've done now we have gone back to a whole different thing just so you know the history of where we did and i watched the previous select board meetings um and i did hear the comments um and there were a couple thing concerns that were raised i think i mentioned this in the email today but one of the concerns was about the green communities program um and its eligibility for continuing funding um based on what's happening at the federal level and i just want to assure you that the massachusetts green communities program is not affected by anything that occurs at the federal level um green communities if i can move slides am i able to um so our most pressing thing is the annual report um the second one is to approve the zep policy but i also want to put a couple other things on your radar um we have a decarbonization roadmap that was drafted um mike and i have not yet looked at it so it's not ready to be reviewed by select board but before we can apply for the climate leaders program that will have to go through you um and be approved by select board and by the school committee um we can do this on any time scale you want so if it's easier to go slower that's fine with me i usually do a lot more working with individual departments before i'm coming here this is my sixth day until the town of wayland so i've not had quite yet that time um but i'm happy to take the time if that's what you prefer um just so you know the next round of climate leaders closes december 31st i think it is possible for us to do this all within that time frame but again if you'd rather spend more time and and process then that's okay too um i'm just giving you some context on doer and green communities because this is a really critical program for facilities um improvements within communities that fit the profile like wayland and we're not eligible for a lot of federal grants anyway so um you know while there's less federal money um that's not really the biggest concern for us green communities is a program that wayland opted into in 2010 and since then every year we do an annual report which looks at our energy usage across our entire building portfolio um we had to pass some local bylaws in order to make that possible um and as a result every uh grant round we're eligible for up to 250 000 from the green communities program for municipal decarbonization work so that's like lighting improvements to reduce our energy usage boiler replacements town-wide street light replacement um we have received 818 000 from the green communities program and what i want to stress most about why that money is so important is that um you know looking at abby's files over the last three years she's um received about 700 000 worth of consent incentives half of that has been incentives that are matched with programs like green communities so while you're getting 800 000 of dollars from then you're probably also getting two three maybe 500 000 in additional incentives on top of that money so these are dollars that really have a lot of roadway um out of all the municipalities within the state of massachusetts over 300 of them are green communities um which is why doer is now opening up the climate leaders program um climate leaders as you can see are these yellow communities and i'm happy to talk with you more about all this i just wanted to give you a little primer on everything um climate leaders is a fantastic program in that it not only gives us 150 000 for technical assistance for a project so that's like hiring your engineering firm that's doing your feasibility study that's looking at your current hvac systems and developing engineering designs it's also up to a million dollars in dollars for your decarbonization projects um which is a lot of money because that's not including all the incentives that you're eligible for so again these are dollars that can stretch really far um and that is a that's a lot of money for a community with the profile that wayland has you know smaller community um doesn't have the ej qualifier you know we don't have a lot of grant programs that we can pull dollars like that from um which is why that's so important in order to be eligible for a climate leader um to apply for climate leaders we have four out of six of the criteria i know previously you were told there was five criteria and i'm sorry for that i did the same thing in weston so that is no one's fault here the language in the program is unclear and doer knows this because i um gave them a lot of feedback back in the spring and we were surprised to find out that we needed to give the decarbonization roadmap um get the approved by the select board today and we have the zero emissions first vehicle policy again that's a draft that's approved by doer already if you're okay with this policy it can go forward if you want more time with it that is okay as well um the next step is going to be the decarbonization roadmap so in theory we could wait and vote on both of those next time um there are 19 inaugural climate leader communities within the state your comparable communities act in arlington ashfield cambridge carlisle lexington um these are all neighboring communities i can tell you weston had their application in in end of june and i put it in um so i'm familiar with the level of work it takes it's um we're expecting to hear this month within the next couple weeks whether or not weston received it and there'll be more communities added to the list climate leaders has 60 million dollars of funding settled aside for their first round of communities there are only 19 inaugural communities um so while it is technically a competitive grant there isn't any competition because even if all 19 communities went for that million dollars there would still be money left over um again this is why this is such a critical moment for us and getting in early gets us a foot in the door towards um being able to do funds a lot many of the projects that our facilities director has on the docket so um the zero emissions first vehicle policy again i know that that's a slight change in the language i want to assure you that it still is only focused on light duty vehicles that's anything less than 8 500 pounds um nothing that has emergency response capability is covered within this policy um nothing that has um no off-road vehicles no fire trucks no snow plows nothing that is critical um is is part of this policy it really is just our vehicles that we use for moving equipment from one place to the other um vehicles that we use for getting from um you know getting to meetings and things like that and getting across town here's our light duty vehicle fleet you've seen this in the last meeting um we have 110 vehicles in our fleet and um what is this about 19 20 vehicles that are light duty so it's a very small percentage of our fleet um that is would be covered under this policy um and i can get you more specific numbers i only have the 2024 fleet list so um that's the policy i'm happy to answer any questions that you have on it um and again if you want to pump this to the next meeting that is completely okay as well next meeting is beyond full i'm sorry to tell you so that's what we have and i'm old so anyway i'm going to open this up to the board the agenda item actually just talks about um the policy so i will say this this is the most comprehensive information and clarity we've gotten on these programs so i wish we had told me this earlier would have put more time or figured out how to have like more time to explain this because now we understand some of these things a little better but i think the agenda i'm going to give me the the agenda just talks about the policy so i think we ought to have some i'm happy to ask a question if we have a method of policy what would be the financial impact of the town sure periods in five years um so the policy the way that it's written and the amendments i made to it make it really clear that when we're looking at purchasing a vehicle we're looking at the whole vehicle cost so the first cost right your initial purchase cost the maintenance cost right um oil changes repairs things that you would need to do to an engine that you don't need to do to an electric vehicle um and the cost of fuel and so when we look at that cost comparative um you know we're looking at vehicles that are within our current vehicle budget we're not looking to exceed that existing budget um and we're only looking to replace vehicles with electric alternatives and or hybrid alternatives and or um fuel efficient internal combustion engines that meet that income that that financial criteria um if a vehicle is 30 percent more than its internal combustion engine alternative what's not that doesn't fit within the scope of this policy um so we're not looking to increase costs you're basically saying that it's like that that county voted in the spring could handle portion yeah if i were the jobs policy correct and in addition we're like oh sorry if you're planning to
you have to schedule replacing vehicles yes so in addition one thing i failed to mention verbally but that is in the policy is that to also look at grants and incentives in that whole financial picture um and part of the implementation on this last page of the policy is to look at our electric vehicle transition plan um and to have that we can get those done for free um and so that would be like a next step and that would give us cost comparative alternatives and a timeline um and that would also give us an ev transition plan um that includes charging stations what we need for charging infrastructure and that'll have more cost compared cost numbers within it and that would be critical yeah to both appreciate vehicle placement costs and also infrastructure which could be nice right thank you so bill is the uh liaison whitney sorry it's bill and i'm sorry and he's the liaison to the ecc so great it's yours as you can i guess michael's like this you're up sir i noticed that uh zero mission vehicle is is not a defined term um this reference several places and policy sure i see you know the acronyms as the word type um just trying to understand whether this applies uh specifically like you white duty vehicles um so as defined by the policy um what we're looking at is purchasing zero emission vehicles first that doesn't mean considering zero emission vehicles first um if you look within the applicability of the policy in that first section it talks about how it applies to all municipal departments um specifically the purchase of road worthy passenger vehicles pickup or utility trucks or suvs um it does not apply to specialized equipment or off-road vehicles there's also a list of exemptions and within the list of exemptions you have a whole suite of um it does not apply to emergency response capability vehicles does not apply to snow plows um it does not apply to police crew cruisers or heavy duty vehicles so yes it does apply to light duty vehicles but the way that we put that forth is by saying we look at our entire fleet and we exempt out all the things that do not fit the criteria that we're looking at rather than it being light duty only which wouldn't meet the criteria the toer is looking for within the policy you know i guess that was the point of confusion for me when going through the draft and that uh i didn't attend the earlier meeting but watch the tape and there was a lot of stressing that this policy was applicable only to light duty vehicles but when you go through uh the uh vehicle the kernel priorities i infer that that uh includes uh pertains not exclusively to light but to heavy duty as well um so if you look at the exclusions though the exclusions um i have yeah yeah so heavy duty vehicles are exempt at most i would say that this policy suggests that you consider fuel efficiency standards for your heavy duty vehicles but to be honest that's not a priority within doer it's not the purpose or intention of the policy and um i mean it very clearly i think the exempt is defined three different times in the within the text the exemption actually uh in the definition and the enumeration and the bullets uh don't exactly align particularly as it pertains to police vehicles which could be under any 500 pounds so i think there's a little uh contradiction that you might want to look at but also i just reiterate the question the vehicle uh procurement priorities is that applicable only to light duty or is the intention to say that to the extent that heavy duty vehicle alternatives come along this would be the priority i mean i think any policy is up to be interpreted by the person that's implementing it as far as i know this is being implemented through facilities is that fair michael um and the only way that we would consider a heavy duty vehicle is if we have the infrastructure in place to be able to charge it and we would need a level three charger before that would be on the table and those are expensive and that takes a significant amount of energy time and planning to be able to be explicit like my duty versus applicability to the uh possible application right yeah i mean if you want to redline this and and point out where that needs to be further defined that's excuse me i i have to tell you we have a national crisis
we have people we're supposed to have interviewed about 20 minutes ago we have a financial summit in 7 15 and we're keeping jalen out to seven to do our executive session minutes which was supposed to be at seven so i want to just raise this rather than make this decision unilaterally or what we should do but i feel that um like i said if i had known this would be a totally presentation which is information we certainly put out should have and would like to have i really don't know what to do because i know what's what you think i'll look at you i think i might have to another meeting yeah i'm really sorry and i know you're going to say we're fine but um we have two other committees coming at 7 15. i'm not be rude this is not my point yeah i think that's and also mr lewis is here so i i don't know what else to do so i'm i'm sorry do you want to we can just have a conversation about the next time we come because we also have the decarbonization roadmap to present and i think that's right definitely have to have conversation offline yeah okay welcome to him yeah thank you thank you thank you thank you yeah have a good minute throw you out it's totally fine okay um
let's um should we do the interviews real quick let's do mr lewis um who's applying for conservation for mr lewis will you want to be one minute you're not even going to be one minute i feel terrible but we're just really behind and i'll mr lewis very very briefly tell us why you are applying for a position we are all pretty much where you are so um just as i mentioned in my application i think the concom's activities can be better streamlined and better integrated into the other things that the sound does um and i've got some you know a lot of background and capabilities in doing that so one sentence that's it i've been moved with this board approved with next member of the constitution to a term expiring through 30 of 2020 second thank you is there any discussion otherwise i'll go right to the roll call vote and yes um tom yes yes yes and carol yes thank you i think you probably know the procedure but mr you know i didn't have time we've got to make up time
okay thank you you'll get a letter from the town clerk okay thank you um have you can you take yourself off how are you hello i'm good we're sorry we're late and we're going to be really fast so can you give us a one minute or 90 second uh explanation as to why you would like to be a member of the energy and climate committee and the student uh representative um i care a lot about the environment and like i'm also secretary of my school's green team so i just think there's a lot that we could do for the town i mean right now we're not even composting in the school because we don't have enough money for it so i think that there's a lot that we could do as a town to do better and to be and be more sustainable and i would really like to be a part of that change or like i i really want to help make well and more sustainable i guess that's why good thank you we all have your information in our packet and i'm going to speak from the board here it's very impressive uh what you've done and and your and your thoughts and what you would like to do so we appreciate you applying does anybody on the board have a question for it i'm just going to make a motion go ahead you can i move that the select board appoint kavia sarukar to a term as the student uh position on the energy and climate committee for your mending june 30th 2027. sir thank you there's no further discussion all those in favor doug yes bill yes yes yes and carol yes there you are you're appointed thank you kavia you'll um receive a letter in the coming days from our town manager's office and once you receive that you can take that letter into the town clerk's office and you'll um get sworn in to becoming the official student member of the energy and climate committee and they'll also give you some materials in the clerk's office as well regarding conflict of interest training etc so wait to receive that letter and then come into town building okay thank you so much thank you for your service thank you very much enjoy um i move the select board enter into executive session so it's massachusetts general laws chapter 38 section 2183 to discuss strategy with respect to the collective bargaining the international association of firefighters afl cio local 1978 is there a second to the motion to enter into executive session second the chair declares that a public discussion of these matters may have a detrimental effect on the mitigating negotiating or bargaining position of the town we're going to have a roll call vote bill yes doug yes and yes yes and carol yes the chair invites attendance by michael mccall town manager council powers for that assistant town manager and jaylen bradica management analyst communications coordinator the committee will rejoin the public from executive session in approximately 10 minutes wait the select orders returning this open session and we're at 7 34 a.m right next agenda item is to um brian we are going to start with a presentation of the bond the bands afterwards all right uh presentation of fiscal 27 financial forecast this is going to be a joint meeting with the finance committee and the school committee discuss and review the fiscal 27 financial forecast we invite attendance by brian keveney our finance director christine patterson the director of finance david fleischman the superintendent betsy galvan the assistant superintendent um so the first thing i want to ask is there's a plenty of seats and if the seats aren't there you want to pull them up so you can see or be part of the program but whatever you want there's a finance committee need to call to order we're already okay it's the school committee need to call to order we don't have a quorum we were told there's a 20 minute delay or something so i think we're waiting so could you text them that we are and we do i apologize profusely we had a number of items that got added to our agenda and had to be including executive session which we had to do um so i apologize profusely for the delay and brian they're getting set up so we're about two minutes we were supposed to do 7 15 and it's seven thirty five seven thirty five yeah it's a really nice adjustment to revise but we advised them all 7 15. we had to add the items in that got moved which is why i announced it earlier so hi david i think we want to select to brian it's it's it's it's it's it's it's working okay do you want to proceed this maybe give me one more minute give me one more minute okay great good job yeah i'm gonna move back because i don't know there's all the edges it's it's it's it's it's it's all the time i always
a moment it's thanks to all my stuff i think that's the call
i think everything else
apologize again for the for the delay um do you want to bring a chair plenty of room up here for everybody um bill you want to come up no april i know you don't let's go around brian when you're ready the floor is yours so this is an annual event that we have um that is obviously done by the finance team brian and michael and i think christine christine has us um on this as well to kind of set the budget discussions and the direction for for the next year which obviously is fyi 27. brian has done a number of slides um do you have a sense brian how long the slide presentation will be 15 minutes i should be able to get through it okay do we want to um to do them all that want so do we want to ask questions as we go through as as we go through we can do it okay so if anyone has a question in the slides and they go through just speak up how do we get these something to come hey yeah there's your screen yeah how is this doing
it is in my inbox i'm bringing it up on my desktop yeah and the slides start on what page in the packet here uh is it 17. yes i'll just minimize minimize i mean you want to pull your chairs up here because we can put some more chairs over here and pull them all in squish in
do you have to call to order oh yes okay why don't you do that while we're waiting for fines and some difficulty pulling the slides up and again you know i'm going to say it to you i'm sorry for the delay we had some additions to our agenda today several i'm sure that has never happened to you never no no i know so i'm explaining close so 740 you can want to select board and finance committee order we have all of the members right then
dr fleschman and we're being recorded by wake him yeah yeah you're not being recorded or dr wake him now or yes okay so we're good to go so thank you everybody for coming tonight michael mccall and myself want to present the fiscal 25 summit and i'm going to go through each slide and talk about what's in each one of them anybody has questions please ask so it's about 50 pages i should get through it relatively quickly but if you do have a question please let us know so i want to first thank you michael mccall carol martin um emma mula erin gibbons dr fleshman christine patterson kathy steinberg kelly powers perlet brian or herlihy paul judice and um other various town and school department we met pretty much straight through the summer and compiled this forecast and without the help of everybody on the screen it would have been pretty much impossible to put together so i do want to thank all those folks well the next slide is going to be the fiscal 25 results i think i missed point so here's what we're going to talk about we're going to go through the fiscal 25 operating results we're going to talk about the fiscal 26 tax recap the fiscal 27 revenue and expense forecast uh new whalen developments and long-term liabilities in financial reserves so to start with we're going to talk about the fiscal 25 results so the town was um appropriated with 107.9 million dollars of expenses and that included transfers related to the uh free cash so we had a town budget and free cash appropriations that totaled 107.9 million and as you can see on the left hand side the total expenses matched the total revenue budgetarily on the revenue side we came in at 107 million revenue actual there was a difference there of 895 000 on the taxation side we came in less 866 000 that's typical we collect about 99 of the tax levy every year so that number of 86 866 000 although it's a large number it's pretty consistent with what whalen experiences next state aid we got about five thousand dollars more than expected local receipts was a great story and we're going to get that a little bit as we go through the presentation it came in 1.3 million over budget and that was related to for the most part investment income returns building permits and motor vehicle um the negative there 2.6 that is expected we expected to use free cash which was uh money that was achieved in prior years we don't actually receive a receipt of free cash it's basically money coming out of our fund balance so that negative 2.6 million is expected we did also collect on budgeted revenue totaling 1.2 so the performance of the year came in as a negative 895 000 at the same time when you were going to use 2.6 million of free cash so that was a relatively good performance in fiscal 25 for revenue on the bottom side you see the actual expenses town budget uh their budget was expend expended except for a 1.1 million dollar turn back the school department had a five thousand dollar turn back unclassified was 969 000 other budgets which includes overlay was 200 000 for a total unspent appropriation of 2.3 so when you combine the negative 895 000 with a positive 2.3 you have a fund balance growth of 1.4 million dollars in the balance sheet so relatively speaking this was a very good year for the town it had a very good collection year particularly with local receipts we did return 2.3 million dollars of unspent budgets and at the end of the day we increased the town's fund balance of 1.4 million dollars this screen the screen on the left hand side just summarizes the turnbacks in the general government uh we returned uh 390 000 dollars public safety was 506 public works was 186 000 health and uh recreation were lower on the unclassified side you had health insurance returning 300 000 reserve salary adjustment we did not use in fiscal 25. we appropriated that for the fire department but the fire department um contract is not settled so it got returned to free cash so the finance committee reserve fund we did not use in fiscal 25 so you're returning there 250 000 so that's generally the largest returns that we saw on the um turnbacks on the right hand side is just the graphics showing that that the public safety was the most and really that was driven by both fire and police not expending their full salary line they had vacancies during the year and if you add all those up there was a turn back we also had some turnbacks in overtime second was general government facilities was the number one give back that had some unfilled position um abby accepted a position from her uh climate control position last year and we also were did not hire yet the custodians for the coa so that was the light largest one on the town side was then the facilities department i won't go into the other ones but i would say that this is a typical turnover for the town and i'm glad to see that at least 2.3 million got returned to free cash so let's talk about free cash the very top number is the 10 million dollars that we received last year the next series of numbers what's a negative is what we recently voted at the april town meeting so we voted about 2.4 million dollars of free cash and what you see the bottom of the sources of free cash that's the performance of fiscal 25 where we're increasing revenue over budget and we're returning full spent appropriations so if you add all these up it comes to 4.7 million the free cash uh which is what the state right now uh most likely would be certified by the end of the week is going to come in around 12 million dollars so those are the the numbers that go into uh reconciling or proofing out free cash dor uses a different methodology they use the balance sheet we're coming up i come up with the same number either way we do it so the certification is going to be around 12 million um and again we'll probably see that at the end of the week question on that yeah the prior year turnbacks is 2.19 yeah because i'm adding in the fiscal 24 um yeah because that's we're not in account including um this is net of overlay so the two point number 2.1 million dollars is net of overlay so it's a different number the other one was 2.3 the other name was it was 1.5 so the the turn back on the town side was 2.3 if you see right down near the bottom then you go to the free cash the 2.1 is net overlay so i don't include include overlay as a turn back and i and i don't um and on the real estate side i reduce the real estate by the overlay amount so it nets out that's the difference between the 2.1 and the 2.3 that you're showing on the screen so free cash i wanted to show this graph if you take a look at a file after the inside 2012 we were around 10 million dollars and really between 2013 through 2017 we had a high use of free cash to balance the budget starting in fiscal 18 or 19 we started to move away from that so we don't use free cash to balance the town budget we use it for other reasons and as you can see there's been a a consistent increase in free cash since then fiscal 24 was the first time we got free cash back to the level it was in 2012 and in 2025 you do see that 12 million dollar number this is what we should be seeing as you see fund balance increase you should be seeing free cash increase free cash is a component of fund balance not the other way around fund balance will always be greater than free cash so this is a good benchmark to be then 12 million dollars in free cash it's the 12 million dollars is a percentage of your fund balance so as your budget goes up we're going to get that in a little bit as your budget goes up your fund balance mathematically should increase which is what exactly what moody's expects and we're going to get to that in a couple of slides the free cash is a little less than fund balance but you do see the output slope a fund balance and free cash is the same graphic going up from from left to right but i wanted to put this in there so you can see the weaning away from free cash from what you did before to where it is today so essentially free cash is part of our fund balance it's a significant part of us it's about 90 percent of your fund balance total that's the remaining 10 percent encumbrances things like that reserve for expenses so arpa um we do need to spend all of our money by the december 2026 as of right now the time we see 4.1 million dollars we've expended 87 percent of it the only project out there and i know linda's working on it now is snakebork dam that is expended around 20 percent of their appropriation we just need to go in and clean up some of these remaining balances of these unspent budgets i know tom holder is working on the mwra i expect that to uh finish uh michael fay is going to be spending the you know the thousand dollars remaining in the fire station in the coa as well as the coa um i'm going to spend the rest of that 321 in the audit and we do have the property removal i believe it was uh north whalen that we got to finish up on and then obviously the 459 000 that why and how much do you anticipate us returning we don't return any of it we got to spend it oh we don't want to return but i'm turning me and sending it back now we're time on this we don't want to see these numbers down here so we recently had a moody's rating michael and myself did the rating call along with hilltop securities and the comments that in kelsey i forgot to mention kelsey um so we had a rating review we reaffirmed the town's triple a rating um what they did talk about as positive was that uh there's going to be no outlook provided to the town that basically means in the past moody's would say triple a moody's whalen is a triple a town stable or it's a triple a town negative it's simply not giving that last word at the end of it because of the size of our outstanding debt they're simply just saying whalen is a triple a rated town there's no negative or positive related to us not having uh any kind of an outlook beyond that whalen continues to be a stable tax-based community it has a high residence income and wealth so those are the positives that moody's cited during the review uh the what can downgrade us so we need to pay attention to this number one in the extended period of available fund balance ratio below 25 percent of revenues the next one is sizable and issuance activity that is not excluded from living limits of prop two and a half we really only have the dpw project that we did not do within outside of prop two and a half other than that town's done a good job of putting most of these projects outside of prop two and a half and we have um significant growth in the leverage ratio above 350 percent of revenue that means that they don't want a community to have um the following would what they do is they take out outstanding debt they take our um unfunded pension liability and our unfunded opep as a percentage of revenue right now whalen is 182 so we're well below the 350 i don't see that as an issue with the town it's just a metric they use in rating town so we're at we're at the 182 as a percentage right and for context if we were b rated or double a rated instead what would our interest rate cost difference be uh well we just borrowed money at um the two inch cost of 3.04 so i'm not i can't give exact amount it would be higher yeah so there is a value and monetary value to being a triple a uh next so let's talk about this because this is important so moody's changed the way that they rate a town in particular the highly rate fund balance on the left hand side is the old way they would take our general fund balance in the uh the fund balance accounts would be committed assigned and unassigned and that would be a percentage of our annual revenues when it was trending around twenty percent this is off the fiscal 24 audited financial statements that is on the low end that really is a triple b rating when you're at that 20 percent rating so they've always advised us and warned us to maintain that at a higher level than 20. what they've done now is they've changed the methodology they've gone from what's on the left hand side to the right hand side which now they're bringing in more funds and we've referred to those as governmental funds it's the general fund it's some revolving funds stabilization funds and they're bringing in enterprise funds current assets if you notice it's current assets with the governmental funds it's fund balance so current assets basically is your cash account and your accounts receivable for the most part your fund balance really does equal not dollar for dollar but it is very close to your current asset on a balance sheet exclusive of um accounts receivable and then they do the new metric based on that so our metric based on um 24's balance sheet i'm sorry part of the financial statements was 24. that is at the low end so if you take a look at fund balance um on the left hand side is the general fund goes back to 2013 and as we talked about before the trend of free cash free cash is trending almost the identical way as this so the general fund has been increasing fund balance over the long term fiscal 13 through fiscal 25 that's what we should be doing we need to increase that fund balance to maintain that ratio on the left hand side as i just said we have to now bring in the enterprise funds the water funds fund balance has dropped from four million dollars in 2013 to today being at 1.4 that is going to be a drain on our calculation because the water fund budget is going to go up their fund balance will become a percentage of their new budget number their budget number is going to escalate because they have more debt service just in this recent borrowing not including if we whatever becomes of the mwra if they take 100 of it or some kind of a mix the fact of the matter is their budget is going to escalate their fund balance is not escalating it's most recently flat mostly because um about two three years ago we told the port of public groups that they could not use retained earnings for any reason until they stabilized their fund balance this was even before moody's come out with this recommend new methodology so that's the water fund what accounts for that trend revenues not meaning expense revenues actual revenues not meaning revenue budgets it has to do with the rate how they do the rates and it has to do with retained earnings the use of retained earnings um even outside of their operating budget they haven't had rate increases year over year current yeah so in fiscal so 25 may have been we were going through this with the order the the 25 rate increase may have underfunded the the revenue budget by almost 200 000 the fiscal 26 rate increase was zero so there was no rate increase at the same time their expenses went up so my fear is that the fiscal 25 6 performance is going to drive this number even down even more so it's really important that the board of public works sets their rates to achieve their voted revenue number now the pending revenue increase in 27 is about 30 percent so they're really going to go from zero to 30 in one year which is a lot so that's why a lot of focus needs to be put on they mean making sure that the rate increases reflect the actual revenue and that fund needs to bring in in that fiscal year and that's really over the long term brian i think i may hop in here um this new relationship the fund balance that includes the retained earnings i guess i want to use right for the enterprise funds really i think needs to be communicated to them and perhaps we should put together a memo i do know that on the new debt policy the debt management policy we do have a sentence in that says enterprise funds will remain retained earnings um balance of 25 percent of revenue revenue that was questioned to me to me by someone and i was wondering why it was 25 now i see why i think we should be really clear that if they don't maintain the 25 the general fund has to make up the delta in order to maintain our rating so do we have a plan to put something out to the enterprise funds in writing well i think we we do need to do that okay so back in 2012 at the indotel meeting the water fund became an enterprise fund and there's language in the warrant that the fund and it came from dep in the abrams school but would have been mark abrams at the time his son mark is now engagement but language in the warrant said that the fund should always maintain 3.5 to 4 million for three reasons number one they mean to maintain 20 percent revenues it mean they may need to maintain a balance to support the capital and another large amount to me so that if there was a catastrophic event or something happening significant to the fund they would have access to cash so that fund started with that in 2013 with 4 million today we're at 1.4 but it is it is really important to get our heads around where this fund is going with their retained earnings and fund balance because it is going to affect the rating down the road and just for context i think they have an extra challenge over the last several years of conservation uh for water bands i think it brought down the water consumption substantially because they as i recall when they were describing it's only their upper tiers that they're particularly lucrative for them and that probably isn't happening at all in that way and i just think we need to be clear with everybody the interrelationships here in terms of maintaining our stellar rating sorry thank you you mentioned so the new hurdle is 25 percent of the new methodology you said fiscal year 24 we were at 25 um that's on the slide yeah so i went back i guess my question is where yeah facility or 25 kind of year-end and i know some of that's probably still so yeah what is that percentage yeah so we don't have our auditors we don't have the drought financials for 25 but for 24 it was 25 so i went back and did the financials for 24 23 and 22. so in 22 we're at 24 percent in 23 we climbed up to 25 and 24 we're at 25. i don't have the financials yet for 25. what we've been trending again according to moody's many triple a towns are between 25 and 40 or 50 percent of fund balance so we're at the very very low end of the scale right now yeah my question is it's kind of feels like to be projected to 25 this is the year 25 is likely less than 25 percent it could it could be yeah but i i don't have those numbers yet yeah i mean maybe to that point if we're talking about that targets for people setting the target you know the bare minimum it's a lot what doesn't know a little more jeopardy right if we're issuing a target of 25 25 is the bare minimum which probably at least considered putting some cushion here thank you so here are the other two enterprise funds wastewater back in 2013 they were a little over 200 000 it was a surge in prepayments of the um the um the benefits so that you can see that they spiked up in fund balance in 2015. for the most part they've maintained their fund balance their fund balance um is about a million dollars right now um actually like 1.3 but the annual revenues are much less than that so their ratio is completely positive the other way the transfer station just started in 21 um today they have a fund balance of around 300 000 so they're on the upper trend which is nice so the other funds are doing relatively well in comparison to their annual revenues so those i wanted to bring that point up so you know in the in the next three years it's critical that our fund balance on all these funds is at least maintained or gradually increases so let's talk about the tax recap so the fiscal tax recap we're also in the midst of doing that we're going to be meeting with the selectman in a couple weeks to go over the draft on 26 recap um here's a comparison between 26 and 27. this is draft we are seeing a you know four percent increase in state aid 13 percent increase in local receipts um transfers from other funds it's 199 that also includes capital funds paying into the into the budget so that's why it's at almost 200 increase but the good point here is that the tax increase of fiscal 26 is going to be 2.66 and i'll show you in the next slide how that became to be so when we went to town meeting on the left hand side that was the expectation of tax at the town meeting in april that we're going to raise 92.5 million dollars in tax to fund the budget on the right the next end column which is the tax which is uh headed december 25 you see in yellow the tax came down 848 000 that's because state aid is expected to increase so our state aid assumption that we went at the town meeting is almost two hundred thousand dollars more than it was in april the other good news event is that uh local receipts is going to go up six hundred and thirty one thousand dollars on the recap than it was when we went to town meeting we went to town meeting we didn't have a full year filled but the fact that we had such a good year in local receipts we can ask for more money on the local receipt side to do it does need to be defended even though you may have it had a good year in a certain category you still need to demonstrate the dor that you're still going to have that in in the future years so um if you account for the fact that state the state assessment on the top came down and the fact that we injected more revenue the use of taxation came down by 848 000 so we went into town meeting i forget the it may have been 3.61 was our assumption on a tax increase but ultimately the tax increase in 26 26 is going to be 2.6 percent so let's talk about the 27 revenues and expense forecast so here's how the revenue categories we've been through these before real estate and personal property state aid local receipts enterprise and revolving fund transfers and sometimes we do get grants and we do use some reserves to some extent and free cash so on the left hand side you see the the box that is the full amount we can raise in fiscal 27 and the very bottom there the total months the town can raise is about 11 16.3 million that includes the use of free cash to 2.5 but starting from the top we start with the expected fiscal 26 tax recap amount again these are estimates so a lot of this is being driven off the current tax recap so we're expecting um the 26 prop two and a half percent number to be 89.3 million we're going to add the standard two and a half percent increase uh we have four hundred thousand dollars for new growth for a total annual max levy of 91.4 the debt exclusion number is 4.3 the 4.3 does not consider the pending ballot question that's coming up but let's go back to new growth when we started the budget group back in july i started with the number five hundred thousand dollars the assessor came back and said he was getting vibes from dor that the number was going to come down to four hundred thousand dollars most recently it's gone the complete other way that we're expected to get more than four hundred thousand dollars for new growth we don't have the number yet it could be five six seven hundred thousand dollars it's still pending with dr right now the assessor is asking for a lot of these properties to be valued at this point and they take the valuation as of july 1st so the reason why we're having an escalation hopefully of new growth is that his staff has been out religiously visiting these locations getting these assessments done and getting them into dor if we do get more money than four hundred thousand dollars that goes into the prop two and a half percent calculation which will help us for a few years to come so let's hope we end up with a positive number beyond the four hundred thousand dollars in new growth so that on the left hand side is the total amount that down can spend in 27 based on the current recap and the right inside is just a pie depicting that again the tax levy for people who are not familiar the tax levy is what we actually put on the recap and we levy to the residents off the recap the levy ceiling is the most the town could ever raise which is two and a half percent of total valuation we would never do that the town's valuation is five six billion dollars the levy limit is the prop two and a half percent calculation that we just talked about on the screen before so here is the town's levy limit on the left hand side you see where things are trending and i did do some conservative outlooks into the next years this will change based upon the 26 final recap but i do have it highlighted down here you do see in the bottom that we do not see even a three percent increase in the whole levy increase and prop two and a half plus excluded it's still below three percent even though our use of tax could be north of three percent the levy calculation is lower than three percent now again that could change when we get some new growth but we did talk about in other meetings where whalen stands with new growth in comparison to other aaa towns and where they stand to other communities but the the takeaway in this screen is that the the levy limit percentage increase is running around three percent for now based on the information we have uh here's just the state aid i just wanted to put this in there you can see on the 26 where i have in the middle or highlighted in red you do see that the um 26 is gonna um the increase in is 744 000 which translates to 27. if we get the 6.3 million number in local receipts and we do well in fiscal 26 meaning that um all the rate increases that we did on all the different departments we didn't increase the fees if we have a good year in 26 we'll be able to put on the 27 recap something like 6.5 or 6.6 million that will help the town and bringing down the use of tax in um dealing with our revenue issue so it is really important that we do have a good year in 26 with the local receipts and this is just a summary of um the tax recap on the right you do see that state aid obviously is the biggest driver we're expecting to see based on historical spending up another 250 000 in 27 even though we got more than that in 26. but we don't know what the state's going to do at this point 250 000 is a conservative number when do we learn that brian is that at the end he says we won't get that until um end of january after the mma meeting usually the governor announces the uh local receipts and give preliminary cherry sheets that third uh fourth week of january so here's the forecast for 27. so again we started in july with the group that i mentioned earlier uh during july and september we developed the forecast really between october and december the guidelines go out the capital guideline recently did go out the departments will be receiving the operational guideline they'll be entering their budgets michael and i and kelsey will be meeting with them as long as well with the superintendent and and his um staff and we'll be developing a draft budget in january we'll be getting the state uh a number that michael just referred to we'll have a better understanding where the budget stands really in january as we did last year and finally in february is when the health insurance number comes in right now we're carrying health insurance in our model at 12 percent and we'll get to that in a bit but that's really the cycle the town goes through in preparing the budget that goes to the annual town meeting so on the town side we have for the fiscal 25 forecast we would include any cba which right now is going to be expiring at the end of uh this fiscal year michael is con is right now discussing some of the labor contracts with a few of the unions so the budget for 25 27 may have their collective value in the amount in there but right now they're not i will also include any steps and lanes that are required by uh their current contract as i said just uh the contracts expire at the end of uh june which really hurt us in developing this fiscal 27 budget the fire contract is still not settled we do have an appropriation in 26 i believe 500 000 for that pending contract but that one is also not settled in 27 we're going to have an escalation in elections we're not going to have any new ftes on the town side um and there's going to be a mix of level funding and level service budgets in order to balance this budget on the town side and here's where the town side forecast stands overall it's a total budget of 24.9 million a 700 000 increase for an overall 3.19 increase on the department of payroll it's a little under three percent on the expense side it's 4.3 we're not expecting any new ftes at this point so we're going into this budget development expecting to come up with the budget around 24.9 again a forecast is not a budget it's just a tool to use to develop your future budget on the school side um they have all the labor contracts expiring at the end of june i know the school committee will be working with the teachers union uh trying to get something done probably hopefully prior to this upcoming town meeting um right now the superintendent is not seeing any new ftes fees they will have to honor any steps and wage contractual agreements on the expense side especially it continues to be an unclear expense and it's difficult to determine and we're still experiencing that um the current at least the current uh trying to transition contract is settled so we're not looking for an escalation in 27 on that contract so the school department is still a work in progress on their numbers simply because so many things are unknown so for forecasting conservatively conservatively we have the school budget a little over 50 million and that really has the payroll at 5.5 percent and the expenses at 5.5 percent first in the expenses that really is driven by the uncertainty of sped they do a good job controlling their other expense sides it's the special ed that we're still um trying to get our head around and we won't know that till probably later in february i would say the payroll we have in there uh 5.5 because even if the school department settled at say three arbitrarily but their steps in lane increases alone bring that up another percentage point and a half so a three percent increase in in cola could mean a five percent increase in wages so conservatively we're going in this with about a 58 million dollar budget increase i'm not going to go through every one of these numbers except for the fact that the uh retirement assessment is up six percent that is coming down because we don't we did this um new financing with the uh select where we will be issued bands and not bonds so we actually have a savings in the idea on debt and interest budget the general insurance number we have in there at 12 percent we're getting mixed information right now but we have 12 hopefully when we get to february that comes down which it did last year we were carrying i believe 10 percent in our forecast last year and we came in around three ultimately so that clearly broke our way let's hope we get lucky twice on that one and the other ones i do have in this overall we're looking at a a um a total budget unclassified a little one to six percent so town wide you put it all together we're looking at 113.4 million dollar budget about a five percent increase now we've had budgets around that in the past but we've also budgets much less than that in the past so we're working on getting that number down and we won't know that until we actually dig into the budgets and see where these numbers stand okay these are the other budgets we do state assessments cherry sheet overlay we fund opaid by tax so you factor in these other ones these are also funded by tax so the amount of budgets that will be funded by tax is 114.3 million dollars or a year to year increase of five percent only because these ones are flat we're keeping the same numbers as we did in fiscal 26. now the revenue forecast now this budget will be funded by state aid at 9.5 local receipts at 6.5 again we're hoping to have a good year in fiscal 26 for us to get that number transfers at 1.4 taxation at 96.7 for total revenue budget of 114.3 and again that's based on our historical receipts on state aid of increasing well above 250 000 we only have 250 000 in there and local receipts i only have going up an additional 127 000 again there's a big jump between 25 and 26 i'm not going to have that big jump between 26 and 27 because these increases that we put in are already taking effect in 26. where this stands on the tax levy calculation so this would be the tail of the tape based on the very first number which is the estimate for 26 you see that 89.3 million dollar number your prop two and a half at 2.2 new growth at 400 000 for the total levy would be 91.4 you add in excluded that at 4.3 so your max levy which is the combination of that is 96.2 your estimated levy which we just talked about is 96.7 so we have a structural deficit here uh 470 000 the budget group what we do is add we added 200 000 to that deficit just to be sure we were not going to bring a budget to town meeting that would not be in jeopardy of not um being in compliance with prop two and a half because our budget is not done with the state until seven months after we vote the budget in the spring so we want to have at least some question in there that's why you see the number of almost seven hundred thousand dollars as a deficit free cash calculations here's the um assumptions at this point the very first number really came out the five-year capital plan of 2.4 million i have tentatively in there the capital stabilization of 250 000 special ed 150 i believe we were 500 000 last year in 26 uh service water quality will continue to fund out of uh free cash i don't expect to give the transfer station a subsidy this year which um by free cash which we have in the past so i'm expecting them with 300 000 to produce a budget in 27 they will not need a general fund subsidy so the forecast said 2.9 is on the high side we haven't appropriated free cash to three million dollars in quite a while so that's really on the high side and keep in mind the more free cash you appropriate you're vulnerable to bringing down your fund balance so we need to pay close attention to that brian i have to add to your problems because the surface water quality has i know they've reached out i don't know who if anyone has heard them but they have it's cyclical and they're having a different program they have to do next year and they're going to need 60 000 so i don't know if anyone has heard that they were supposed to reach out to coast i don't know if they've done that i'm going to tell you they need 60 000 i believe um and i do think that the transfer station subsidy really needs to be looked at we can talk about this later but um there's about sixty thousand dollars worth of trash pickup that gets done at the transfer station that's for the town picking at the fields and what have you um in the current when you put zero subs subsidy in there that means that the rate payers are subsidizing the town expense also their funding model is kind of like the recreation that they're taking in the next year revenue in may and june because you know you they start selling tickets in june tickets uh stickers not tickets so i do think we need to take a look at both of those but well we can make this 2.9 a little better as is the first number right now it's in there at 2.4 last year we end up having a lot of closeouts so when we get to the capital budget at 27 if we can inject a lot of closeout that will reduce the use of free cash i believe the use of free cash in 26 and capital is 1.6 million so we started around two-ish and we brought it down to 1.6 because of the closeouts um some of the things that could go wrong the new growth i have in there 400 000 i'm expecting uh better than 400 000 but it's to be determined state a we have in there an increase of 250 000 transfers is minimal growth there's not much more i can get out of the transfers from these other funds um between our two percent um that's about all they can do and local receipts i'm open for the increase of 6.5 in health insurance we get in there 11.6 million i'm open for something less than 12 once we get to february and get our actual number from west suburban so new developments um this is important because this adds to new growth these are the pending projects that would contribute to prop two and a half which is the st anne's project um the projects that would not contribute to prop two and a half growth would be the terrain development that would be a building permit dunk and donuts will be a building permit um the uh the church is the 169 rice road again a building permit there's not a lot of new growth that could be certified by um doi for that the carol school that's its expansion that's a big big building permit in some level of new growth um the vertis christian academy again is is not growth that would be part of prop two and a half these would be generating welcome building permits that are part of local receipts and here's just a summary of where those projects stand this came from the planner as you can see a lot of it is to be determined under review permits still in process um estimated revenue is still yet to be determined because the building permits have not been taken out of many of these projects i believe the um sanians did take one out they did yep so that's that's not correct but other ones are still in play and work in progress these projects here are the pending ones or potential ones that may be coming as one 212 constituent we have the town center multi-year multi-family development which is 50 andrews f route 20 west multi-development family development we have the route 20 redevelopment district uh the cascade which is the former mahoney's property and 12 school street these are projects that are hopefully on the way that are not pending with building permits right now again is a summary from the treasurer i'm sorry the terms of the planner a lot of it is still in play to be determined and it's difficult to quantify revenue at this point so we've been putting in uh no determination yet so we don't have numbers on these potential new growth items i wanted to put this in there just to show where town stairs what stands with the land if you take a look at the open space but plus the wetlands really 40 percent of the whalen's land is unbuildable the rest is a significant amount of the land and whalen is in wetlands or if it's in or it's an open space so there's not a lot you can do uh with new development and new growth in the town because of these land masses uh long-term liabilities which does affect the town's finances in our moody's ratings so right now in the middlesex pension fund we're expected to be fully funded in 2036 our unfunded liability right now is 58 million on the opeb side we're expected to be fully funded in 2047 the unfunded liability is 42.1 these numbers here moody's does look at and they view these as being managed these are the financial reserves right now the opeb account on the left hand side is 33.5 million general stabilization is 5.1 recreation is 50 000 capital is 2.2 and the estimate for free cash is 12 million at this point and that's it 48 pages so thank you jordan it was really comprehensive and i liked that the share you included um some slides on the the new growth possibilities in town and projects that are somewhat uh being discussed and some that are being permitted um i'd like to open it up obviously to anybody who wants to have some questions normally i start um with the select board but anybody wants to speak first raise your hand otherwise i'll start up here all right let's spend it because i know you're ready so while we're all here there's 10 acres of land i believe you know holiday room i think it's on the jurisdiction of school
because we have such a small commercial place so that may be a topic that might be worth discussion thank you um ryan um the f-127 tax let me forecast a projected deficit of 670 931 that assumes uh that does not assume the re-classification of the debt that's right right that's right it does include the bands it does so and if the uh principal is about seven hundred thousand coming here on the the payment for that project for 27 700 000 it's the three hundred thousand dollars i'm just gonna hop in on your question if you don't mind was a three hundred thousand dollar um reduction in debt service approved in the original 1.8 deficit say that again carol yeah on the slide it showed there was a three hundred thousand dollar reduction in of the debt service due to the issue in bands versus funds was that included in the original forecast so technically it would be a one-father grant so our assumptions on the budget came down eight hundred thousand dollars i was here like about about a month ago when i did a presentation that number was about eight hundred thousand dollars higher i did put in the adjustments of the bands and bonds um but i was using four percent so the the actual band that we just got was 2.6 so it's going to come down we're going to capture even more savings once i get the debt schedules from the bank does that mean we potentially don't need to go the exclude the reclassifying of the debt or we still need both no you still need to do it because it not only helps you in 27 it helps you in the out years and if you don't do it then that debt service will be part of the override conversation number so as moody's did say in their rating to always do large projects by excluded debt and that's just in falling in line with that so bill i hopped in on your questions you'll finish yes okay thank you and then i guess when i have turn next yeah just a quick question brian um at one of our meetings a few weeks ago you gave us a budget summary that looked out 10 years specifically around what we'd be looking at for shortfalls and potential overrides and it started in fy 27 and then went up until fy 37 and it seemed to be compounding by about two plus million dollars or so a year is that still where we would be yes the only difference would be if we got a significant amount of new growth in 26 27 if that number increased then the overall override number would come down because that doesn't get calculated in the prop two and a half percent calculation but overall yes those big numbers don't go away they do go away if we did the levy to exclude it on the dpw and they would also diminish like i said if we got a more new growth than we've been experiencing and i'm no expert on municipal finance so this question may just be me not understanding but can free cash not be used to plug any of this this deficit that we're looking at each year like if we have 12 million dollars in free cash and we're looking at a two million dollar deficit one year we can't tap free cash well we didn't talk about that at the budget meeting basically the conversation was whalen has been disciplined not to use free cash to balance the budget and they they moved away from that what if we just do it for one year and explain to the auditors moody's it was a one year fix just to get over a non-override how would that affect the rating and i don't think believe it would affect our rating what we would probably need to do is limit the use of free cash in total in other words you saw the 2.9 million dollar number we couldn't do 2.9 and then another five six hundred thousand dollars something would have to be taken out on somewhere else we still need to be conservative without use but to answer your question you can do that that is possible we did talk about that at the budget if everything went the wrong way in february would we entertain using free cash as a one-year plug and how would that be viewed by rating and we all felt at the budget meeting that that would probably be okay as long as we explained it was a one-year uh action only so one of the other problems that we've experienced will have used uh free cash in the operating budget brain will confirm is it creates a a lovely bonus prize for the next year because you've got exactly that lost the new part so it it's kind of a kicking of the can situation i think brian probably could use a better phrase but it's really not a good practice to do but it is if you really need it it's there we did it once i think during covet on me to fund opep and then of course the next year we had to come back those like pam will remember and it was just a huge thing we had to not put you know five i know we had to put seven whatever the number was and it's it hurts so one of the other ways we could use free cash is that the budget that we've produced for 27 probably not have a salary reserve salary settlements as we've always done um back in louise's here we brought up the fact that we would appropriate that amount as a separate article and put it into a stabilization fund most towns do that yes they appropriate that amount of money for unsettled contracts not in their general fund budget but outside the general fund budget if you put it in your budget and you don't use it just like we saw in 25 you appropriated 286 000 you didn't use it it went to free cash we have 500 000 in the 26 budget the five contract is not settled that's going to go to free cash that's not what we intended to do by putting it as an outside article put it into a stabilization fund so even when you get to the second year you're not appropriating two years in the general fund budget you're only appropriating one and then you're pulling the money out of the stabilization funding it lowers the use of tax so you will probably see a budget that does that and to your point doug we we may entertain funding that with free cash which would be outside the general fund but we don't know that yet that's one area where you might be able to use free cash to fund a it really is a general fund budget expense but it's not in the budget because it's it's not settled because many times always how it impacts your rating no it would not impact the rating okay i think on a long-term basis moody's previously criticized or or gave guidance against that so you you don't want to get in that habit and we've moved away from that i mean you rely on that for your capital budgets but both brian and i worked in towns previously that used that model that he talked about putting uh your salary reserve building it into your stabilization funds so that's something we're both looking at um and do you have any questions yeah i just had one um when you're doing calculations on the potential growth from um projects that we have in the pipeline economic development projects that we have in the pipeline are we looking out when we maybe there's like set numbers or you know estimates on how much even though we are receiving those you know building permits and fees and so forth are we accounting in any way uh for the added costs on just our overall system for projects like uh um projects where they're a non-profit and we're not going to see specific revenues from it i know we don't have those expenses in the forecast what those could mean like um the um the property up on carroll street if they expand it may mean more fire and police um presence up there in in different services but no we do not have those expenses in the forecast because again those projects are still in play there in work in process but you're right those are good expenses we do have to account for if they become to fruition then we need to extend money to care for them and that's where we come in with the the policy that i started sharing with the board that we're at a point where we need to reach out to some of these non-profits and explain the situation and encourage them to contribute as being uh neighbors and members of the community okay and then the only other second question i have is um when it came to um the the debt ratio that you were talking about really early on i think you said we have about 25 in debt um have we looked at i again i i really really understand that the um need not to use free cash but whether paying down some of that debt would in fact significantly help us on the debt servicing costs associated with that debt well in order to pay it down you'd have to appropriate the the money to do it and but but moody's also took a look at our total debt plus the unfunded in the pension and the um open we're at 182 so i think we have manageable debt right now when i said early in the meeting that moody's just gave us a triple a rating no outlook no language and that's because we don't have a very large amount of debt outstanding we're pretty much paid mom down most of the high school debt it still remains the biggest expense we have but for the most part it's being paid down and we did refinance that about five years ago and saved a lot of money um the other one will be this the coa um i believe we borrowed coa 3.9 percent when we borrowed that it was under four percent it was about 11 million is it about 11 it was 11 million that we borrowed and you don't want to roll off too much debt because you want to keep a certain level amount as things come off you want to put others on in it so that you have that capacity in case you need to borrow something larger in the future okay all right that's it thank you so much thank you all right um erin do you i just can you clarify for me when you come out at negative 700 ish if the vote passes on the ballot does that basically wipe out and we come out even or because isn't it about 700 that yeah so if the dpw was um it's that or to be yes successful that 700 wipe out that deficit would be even they're basically pretty even right okay right and it's 700 because we got a lot more local aid local receipts on our recap so that increasing fees and things like that the motor vehicle um really helps us bring down that deficit we had a very good year investment income because a lot of the money that we had in cds and treasuries was the coa money well that money's been spent and used to build the facilities we know we're not going to get that kind of revenue on our recaps and doi knows that so we have a although we're asking for a lot of the recap it is well within their guidelines that's also assuming that none of the numbers that we have in there change we've estimated certain things for uh local aid and health care and those could you know last year nobody anticipated the increases they saw at the gic and others and we actually benefited from a lower rate with our joint purchasing agreement with suburban so um there's still a note but that goes a long way to helping that that right that ballot question so i think that's part of the story right is that we focus on how important that is to preserving level service level funding we have not adopted we the town have not adopted
to 59 what was it section 18b that allows us to communicate with residents yay or nay or any extra information and all that michael speak to this so who's us though that's the town there are only a handful of towns that can send out say a voter information a red book on a local election but we can have overall right right but people uh independent groups could have have forums there's um i'm happy to share with the other boards here um some of the some of the guidance the town government yeah but i'll share all the guidance that came out from the office of uh campaign and political finance as to what you can and can't do and so we're still working on language we've got a few things going on about we'll put up an faq page frequently asked questions explaining a lot of the terminology that brian had about what's a levy limit uh levy capacity and explaining excluded and levy debt and what the mechanisms of this vote are and we can do some of the technical aspects but we cannot take positions in our day-to-day capacity if we're invited to certain events and asked you could then maybe inject some opinion but other than that we have to we when i say we kelsey and i are working on this in the background we we can only really explain this is what it is this is what's happening and this is why you know and then just as a sidebar we are holding a forum the select was holding a forum on this for residents to ask questions and we'll be rolling out the faq on december 1st but you can give a lot of information we're not sharing an opinion as my point send you the bulletins and advisors this is christian okay just summer first for the select board meeting and december 7th is the vote 11th 11th okay all right just um i'll go down anybody aaron no no christina hey oh i actually do have a question all right do you guys have questions i can't see you okay okay when you say too busy bacon bread back there when you say no ftes or town side um that just means no new ftes over the fiscal year 26 fte count or yes okay we're not adding any new positions if anything we're trying to eliminate some through attrition as we may not refill some so we're not adding any new positions no new positions and we may not refill some of the old ones right um my next committee so um i think that got a reasonable understanding and thank you brian for pomos all together the big question for me is fiscal 28 29 30 and the process of getting us all up to speed as to what we're going to need to get there so it's no question for you today but collectively we need to start thinking about the future of overrides and how to communicate this to the team and for the record i believe we are going to have an article we're going to sponsor an article so that we can distribute the voter book that yeah we are pushing back all right i'd like to think so um um yeah um and asked the question i was looking at asking about expenses from all these um not for property you know extensions and so on um so i won't do that again but hearing the answer i mean i have an idea how this works but i really encourage the town at large to be aggressive and asking for pilot names i think that's just kind of crazy not to so in our last meeting a couple actually two or three meetings ago that select would kind of had a mini brainstorming of potential additional revenue sources it's not was not one and done we started with that and one of the things that we identified and michael identified was let's let's look at a pilot program so he actually presented a draft uh program to us um the last meeting we had right and we're going to see a revise of that um the next meeting and we're putting together a letter and a strategy and we've identified all the folks we would speak to because we do think that um particularly as they expand beyond just the basic house of worship for example that they use once a week that they are in fact utilizing town services and when they don't contribute they're adding that cost to you and i as residents so we are looking into it did that you also go that's it thank you
so i guess that the biggest questions you need on budget items set local schools and still as we have said it's always a big question and often one if you don't get into late in the game and then retirement because is what we have in there a six and a half percent right right that's is that that seems like another is that a firm number is it very conservative no the instance when do we get that it's the middle the middle six is a two-year assessment so we got our 26 in our 27th assessment so that that's a high number yeah and then i guess you've got 12 for insurance that that's still conservative um well it was you know last year we budgeted about 10 we came in yeah it's under four right so it's all called lower and increased last year so it's 12 percent uh hoping the other thing although i've been a lone holdout the last two years the they voted to use some of their fund balance to lower the payment to the towns by about a percentage um so um i'm sure they'll look at something similar if it's higher than 12 percent in an effort to minimize the impact on it because we're not the only cities in town you know that the only city or town that's going through this are some of my neighbors are going through the same thing or had just gone on right and um i also want to take this opportunity to publicly thank pam roman for agreeing to rejoin the finance committee yet again after she's retired to retry it two or three times and um i now sit on the finance committee appointing board and of course i didn't accept that so unfortunately bam thank you pam and phil would you like to introduce your newest member the new finance committee member for its first phase today yes do you have any questions and do you have any questions sir good all right thank you did you have a question i'm sorry i didn't mean to no i'm good thank you yeah i'm just going to copy of the slides we didn't get the deck it seems like i can i can send the individual deck and you can distribute it all right thanks great all right well i thank everybody i think it was a while um hold on one second here um i do want to say one thing that they want to ask something yes i do want to ask something michael when is the guideline coming out and i know you have scheduled to give us some dates because we'll be getting some more budget information here a guideline guideline so it's funny you mentioned that brian and i have been talking about this in an effort to get better numbers he had asked for some budgets from some of the departments and normally we would be sending out a letter right about now we're going to change how we do things brian and i were thinking of doing some additional uh one-on-ones with the departments um before we formalize our guidelines um but we'll probably get something out this week uh to people of how we plan to do that and then of course they will be looking at budgets that are due you'll be some giving us something for the end of the year
we get to work out the dates right um let's skip that in writing though so okay thank you all right everybody yeah so that's fine you need to do
stick your bread I'm going to put it in general for a while. I'm bringing the select board meeting back to order at 8.54. Okay. So I think the next item was a nice discussion. I think we need to go back now to number seven. And Brian, Kevany is still with us. He wants to talk about signing the BN Awards. I can sign it. Or number seven. I think you're right. Yeah, yeah. To Raymond James and Associates. Would you like a motion? Well, we'll let Brian have one sentence. By providing the information, I did a cover memo sort of explaining the interest rates. I know that you folks signed them. So if you do have any questions, be happy to answer it. We need a vote. We need a motion, correct. I move that the select board authorized execution of the paperwork associated with the sale of $8,250,000 to Raymond James and Associates, winner of the bidder, winning bidder for the bonds on October the 21st. And further, it's a which town award. It's another big capital market for the national financial services of LLC. With $1,350,000, $4,570,000. $1,350,000. $1,350,000. $1,350,000. $1,350,000. $1,350,000. $1,350,000. $1,350,000. I have a second. Second. Ready for the discussion? All right. So this, to rephrase what I said earlier, it was the bonds, the $8 million of loans, and then the $8 million of bands that were reported for. It was bands, there's 1.3 bonds, we'll say $8 million. Okay, great. So it's the two things combined. There are about 30 documents that the board has to sign, and those will be available in the town manager's office tomorrow. And there's no further discussion, all those in favor. So it's going to be Tom. Yes. Bill. Yes. Ann. Yes. Yes. And Carol. Yes. Thank you, Brian. The motion passes 5-0. Thank you for your time tonight. Appreciate it. All right. So now we're going to move to a question. Yes, yes. I asked the system manager. Those documents, can they be signed electronically if you don't? I don't. I don't think so. Oh, thank you. Those are wet. Can you have all the way to sign? You need three, three, I'm going away. Three, two, right? I think you need the majority. You need the majority. You need all of them. So thank you. Ann, if you would like to come in, too. Thank you. You have them ready.
I mean, I can go get them. Yeah, they're in the office. Yeah. But who wants us to sign? I need to sign one. I'm going to sign one after. What do you mean? You do sign them? Yes. Okay. I'll go get them. I'll just go get them. Bye. And then Ann, can you come into the building to sign if she wants? And if you would like to sign, too, you might go into the town manager's office to sign. I think we have a few days to sign them. All right. Thank you. So shall we move on to the next item, which is going to be discussion of the Massachusetts and the MWRA, including but not limited financing in the next steps. There were two items in the packet. We've got one is that we have the official request from the Board of Public Works. I should say the recommendation as to how they feel that the $38 million project should be funded. And then further down, there is, you'll see a spreadsheet that shows, and I've highlighted it on mine, just a potential impact of a water rate increase should everything be funded through the water rates. But when we read this recommendation, they actually feel are looking at maybe a hybrid combination where they fund through water rates, the Happy Hollow Treatment Facility, which is the $14.2 million, and that the town, they're asking us to fund the construction costs, the MWRA connection, which is the $20.5 million. Obviously, we would be applying for and hopefully accepted to the SRF program, which would give us 20-year-long 0%. And also, there was a discussion, and you'll see further down, of the RAS, if we were to receive any PFAS proceeds, the Board of Public Works is asking that those we use to offset costs of the Happy Hollow Treatment Facility. I did indicate that there's still an executive session, we have not released any funds, we've not received that many funds, but that we should probably, and I will put that on the next executive session that we have, that I think we should probably look at making a decision as to strategy for any funds that we receive through the PFAS litigation. So, I'm going to open it up to the Board. Oh, I want to say one of the things. I thought it would be good for us to have a general conversation tonight. The Finance Committee has received this recommendation. I've awarded it to the Chair for them to also apply, and hopefully they'll have a recommendation for us after tonight. And then on the 17th, we can review the Finance Committee recommendation. And I've asked that the Vice Chair and the Chair and the Board of Public Works join us. And probably, I believe, the Director of Public Works may join us as well so that we can have a more robust conversation. So, I just thought we'd get the components here on the table, and then we'll go see what questions we need to gather information for for the 17th. So, how does that sound? That sounds good? I think we've heard from the Board's side of its own discussion, because I think it's it.
Okay.
And any comments on the recommendation?
Either way, taxpayers have to pay this cost. It would be interesting to hear from the Finance Committee, of course. But we discussed this issue before the Board.
I'd like to hear from the Board further on his thinking about making a line item on water and how it was made for this plan. So, both the pipes and the new teams. So, I think that's your turn. Yeah, those are two water questions. But I think I, the Board of the Board, the couple of lines, with my position on the use of the hearing for other members. I think that if you look on the chart, that's why I have the spreadsheet put in. And again, it's not. It just gives us a ballpark idea. But if you look at this, let's say your water bill is $500 to $1,000 now, and your average water bill is $700. Your new bill is going to be $1,200, which is an increase of $500, you know, to support all of these. Obviously, the initial capital flow comes through first, and then eventually the whole, because we're not really going to have the full, the way I understand that Michael probably knows better than I, the full impact of that debt until about FY29. So, year one, we'll pick some of it because it's a capital cost. And you can see that they've put that in these columns here, the Happy Hall of Debt. The other new debt service is column A, and then B. And to complicate matters, some things aren't in this. We have a corresponding projection of what the increase of property tax would be. Nope. We have that since the time says. The other thing I think we need, and maybe, Michael, you can help us with this. This is one of the things, if you don't mind, by hopping in here on this, is I think we need to understand the town's capacity. So, we have a debt matrix that says that we will not have more than 100% of our operating budget with debt. Well, today I heard we have these other obligations to make us at 182. But currently, in the market it showed last year, we had about $53 million of debt. We just deferred this $8 million, but it's already passed. So, if you put that into my mind, it comes out to be about 61. One, if we needed to, so I think we need to understand what is our capacity to still maintain our bond rating, what's our borrowing capacity. But is that affected, Madam Chair, if the cost path to the water rate won't? No, but I'm talking about on the other proposal. In other words, it's part of, like Bill said, what's the impact on the tax increase if we do it, the borrowing, the general fund. I think we also have to understand what's our capacity. You know, essentially, it's like how much is left on our credit card. Because if we only have $40 million, maybe there are some things in the capital plan coming down that we need to allow some funds for. Do you think that's a good question to ask Michael?
I wasn't 100%. I'm trying to make some notes about getting tax projection impact and a few other things from Mr. Whitney's question. So, if you could repeat the question. Yeah, I think we need to understand what is our capacity to borrow within our debt metrics. Maybe it's nothing. Maybe it's not a good, maybe it's an irrelevant question. But I think we should understand if we were to support some of this project, does that, in fact, you know, where does that leave us with debt capacity? All right. What was your other question?
The question is, what are the work? Thank you. What do you think, Anne? I think all the numbers are the same as we've seen them before, except that he's just allocated some of the funds being supported by either the town or his group. So, none of it looks surprising or different to me.
And I mentioned my position before when we last talked about it in this room. I kind of start from the position of where Bill is, but am more in the hybrid camp, just because of the size, the overall size of this project. I feel like I'm now looking at these numbers to offset some of the significant water increase for some $13 project, which I met recently with Cliff Lewis, and it doesn't seem like there's a precedent of a project of this size that he can recall in a number of years. To offset that, I thought we would do some portion on the debt, the excluded debt. So, to me, that just made the most sense, but I understand where Bill is coming from. I don't feel as strongly about it as Bill is, but that's my mindset. So, if we were to do excluded debt, then that has an A and a B as well. Do we do, for the lack of a phrase, normal excluded debt that follows a vote on the ballot and then a vote at telling them you need to support the project, or would we look at the excluded debt that, what is that, 59? No, definitely A. And E, N, K, N, whatever it is that allows the select board. So, there's that. If we go to debt, that's also, that's a decision we can make too. So, I'll make a list of these questions for us for the next time. Sure, I'm trying to follow. So, is the proposal from the Board of Public Works that we go, the normal debt exclusion with respect to the MWRA portion, the happy hollow portion would be water, the sum debt? I think they are planning on applying for this SRF loan. You know, if they get accepted, it's a 0% loan, we could also be part of that. And then we would make, I think, right, Michael, and then we would make a decision how, what type of exclusion that would be. They didn't, the Board of Public Works didn't say. They didn't? Is that what 59, 21 CK is? No, that's the one. Additional debt exclusion. No, no, it is not. I don't think so. N, N is the one, it's the one that the. Yeah, this is, yeah, this is, this is the. This is your A bucket. This is the additional debt. Yeah. I'm sorry, I'm not sure. I hear some of the Ns. Yes. Ms. Britsch. Yeah, this is the ballot, that's all. Yeah. Right. We're not going around, we're not going around the vote, which I think we've all agreed was better than the alternative. Like, we should just bring it to the town. So that's their recommendation. It's, it's, they haven't changed their recommendation. They would say. I did, they were all water rates before. They would still, no. Not, not for the hybrid. Nope. This has been it.
Did you have something else you wanted to add in? No, I'm just saying it, it hasn't changed since they recommended the hybrid. This is the same. And this was backed by town council. When she came in to talk about it.
So we would have to find out too. If we did additional debt exclusion to fund a portion of an SRF loan, is that, is that acceptable? Is that allowed? I get two loans. Perhaps we get one loan and then we, and then Brian does an accounting measure that splits it between, which is what we would vote at the town meeting article. I, I can say, I have to have a conversation with Brian. How's that sound?
What happened here in our next discussion? This is a better idea.
Okay. So what we want to know is what's the property tax increase? What's our debt capacity? If we, we did an SRF loan, who do we then vote that under debt exclusion? Because part of it would be water weights. So do we need two loans or one loan? So, um, and then I think one other thing we also want to talk about is that, uh, two other things we want to make a decision, like I said, on the disposition and, um, the, the PFAS funds as we, we see them, um, will they be used to offset, you know, the water filtration system or will they be used to offset the, the, uh, the, the construction? And then finally, I think we also want to know, um, or recommend, we might want to recommend back that the, uh, these, this spreadsheet does, and I'll note in the notes, it does not indicate, uh, that there is a nonprofit user category. Um, so I think that, um, that was one of the concerns when this was first brought up, um, by Michael and, um, I think Brian originally was that if we don't, if we put this all on the tax rates or anything in the tax rates, whatever portion we put there, um, the nonprofits wouldn't be paying their fair share of the construction, would be putting it all on the, on the, the, the taxpayers. That's it. And then finally, there's another little thing. If you look at the bottom on these notes that I think we have to consider is that the, um, it says down here, municipal water usage is built at tier one, regardless of the amount of water used. And there is a projection showing that if this was all funded by water rates, that our current water bill would probably go up by about a hundred thousand. Does that sound about right? I didn't put the number in my head clearly. And I'm a little bit concerned because we have enough pressure on the operating budget without adding another a hundred thousand water rates. So I don't know, we might, we might want to look at saying, you know, if we fund some of this, then we won't, you won't give us an increase in water. I don't know what that, what our thought might be. Um, so let me put together some of these, let's invite Brian in. I think that sounds good. Kind of make sure one of the questions is confirming the interest rate on, uh, any loans that will be financing this. In other words, if there's a, maybe more than one note here, right? Could be. Mm-hmm. So we want to confirm that, uh, both are zero percent or only one of them. I think there's also, uh, financing with design costs, which is not sort of zero percent. Yeah. So the interesting thing is I think the zero percent loans are only 20 years, which is such to me, a short term for such a long-term asset. Um, you know, if the rates come down, maybe it makes sense to us to think about financing thing over 20 or 30 years or something. It's a math problem. It's a math problem. Exactly. I'm not sure what everyone thinks. Michael, do you have some thoughts on any of this, what we're saying? I want to go back and ask, uh, counsel a couple of questions about the Mass General Law 5921C and Kay, because the, the one that the, the Board of Public Works originally asked for was under subsection N, which was the select board votes. Right. But that was specific to allowing water and sewer debt. And Kay doesn't talk about that. That just talks about general borrowing. I just want to make sure that that's all.
Yeah. I'm not sure if I fully understood whether we had to separate out Kay, depending upon how we did the borrowing. I just want to ask counsel a couple of questions on that. So, um, does anybody else have any other thoughts or are we sort of leaning towards a hybrid? Is that what we're looking at now? Either way. I want to hear from the finance committee. Yeah.
So, I mean, I'm also thinking one other option would be if we were to do a hybrid is that you flip it and that we support the happy hollow and then the water rates supports the, the construction.
I mean, that was a thought I had too. Just because you are in the same room, Brian. So, what the impact would be on the government projection of the dark side of it earlier is additional debt. Though I suppose if it's excluded debt. It might be the most helpful amount of chairs, maybe it's quite convenient to be answered right, from the attorney prior to our meeting. So, it's not helpful. So, we want to digest what sort of areas of work can be. Uh, we could include in the notes for the question, specifically the user fees, if we can charge nonprofits user fees. Because when I did research on it, that's, that's the term that was accepted by several towns around, around us, um, for nonprofits. And then, also, just in your, just to respond to your point about the 20, 20-year amortization, I think is what you were talking about, for a loan versus a 30-year or something where we could get longer. Just keep in mind, we can always refinance. But by the time 20 years is over, the amount will be a lot smaller.
Yeah, we could refinance. I was sort of thinking that we need the relief more up front, because we've got so much pressure on our budget, that's why I was hoping that we'd have a longer term, but it appears to me that, and, you know, we have to apply, and I believe, I believe they are applying in January to this SRF program, and you have to be accepting. They don't necessarily have funds to take on everyone. Sometimes you have to apply a couple times. So, I think we ought to get some more information on that. Let me make a list of the questions. We'll invite Brian to come in, and, um, Michael's going to ask town council a couple things, and I think then we should do that. I would like, if possible, for us to kind of think about having a decision, maybe the December 1st meeting, if not, because this will be, the articles will be due January 15th, and we would be able to communicate back to the Board of Public Works. This is what we're thinking, so that they then can, you know, develop the article. So, all right. Is there anything further on that? I think we will move on to item 10, which I think we saw this briefly at our last meeting, which is to discuss with you and potentially authorize the tele-manager to sign the acknowledgement certificate relative to the center.
And I think that's on page 68 of the package. So, open the floor to questions, comments.
Yes, the question was.
The question was, I thought that we were with that someone had reviewed the documents cited. And given the timeframe, you know, we did that a week ago, Friday, and I was out of the area, and I had talked to Mr. Hummel beforehand. He just didn't think there would be adequate time to try and go through the ECR and all the documents.
Nor was I able to get time with the treasurer to see if there were any liens on the property. Again, Attorney Klein was the land use attorney at KP Law who went through this and had them recharacterize this. This was originally going to be a certificate of estoppel. It was changed to an acknowledgement. Her point was getting in that language to the best of our knowledge, not waiving any defenses and without any obligation to do an inquiry. So, she felt the language, putting that in there, really protected the town or made this benign. Again, this is for the benefit of the buyer, if you read it.
It's the board's comfort level, if you want me, you know, whether you want me to sign this or not. Any comments from the board?
Yeah, do you have some? Anything? I find it benign. So, I don't think it's, I think we do it because I want to make sure that the sale goes through. It does say, you know, the best of the actual knowledge of the end design without a duty of inquiry, which we're best. Yeah, I saw it. But, you know, I mean, that is pretty benign.
And quite frankly, any buyer, any land, due diligence, which I don't know about this side of the property, would be doing their own due diligence, right? They're not going to rely on, you know, blackboard. 90% of the time, these types of, the reason they go for an acknowledgement and are okay with it, is their real concern is just that there's some sort of violation or something that's under investigation that everybody knows about and the person is trying to sell the property without anybody understanding what's going on. So, it's really that limbo period of time that they get concerned about. That's why it's an acknowledgement because, you know, suppose we knew of some violation that was coming down the pipeline, an acknowledgement would be enough for them to say, well, you acknowledge that there was nothing coming down that pipeline. So, I find it to be quite okay. I do as well.
Okay, then, does somebody want to make a motion? Ann, would you like to make a motion? I don't like making motions.
I like seconding motions. Tom, make a motion and I'll second it. I'll move this board vote to instruct the town manager to sign the acknowledgement relative to the town center property. It's one, we're on a dashboard so we've lost the post road within, as it is within our pack. Second. Okay, so ready for the discussion. Otherwise, roll call vote. Ann. Yes. Thank you. Tom? Yes. Yes. Bill? Oh, sir. And Carol, yes. That's going to be, motion passes, 401. Okay. We are at the town manager's report, Ms. McCall. The floor is yours. I'm trying to be brief, Madam Clerk, as soon as I get to it. So, our new management analyst communication coordinator, Ms. Bradica, wanted me to share that the annual report is on the website. Hard copies are not yet available. We will let you know as soon as that happens. Brian alluded to Snakebrook Dam. I have, again, tried to reach out to FEMA due to the shutdown. We're not hearing anything. Ms. Hanson has been out of town, but Ms. Power Spillette has been working on the procurement of a contractor. Bids were received. We've identified a low bidder, and we received a recommendation recently from Pear Corporation, who's assisting with the project. And I think we've reached that frostbite where we are running out of time on the ARPA money. The clock is now ticking on the state $800,000. So, we've all played games like Hearts, where there's $1.4 million, or the easiest expression, you have $1.4 in the hand versus the total of the $2.8 in the bird in the bush, so to speak. So, I don't think it's worth, at this point, continuing to wait for FEMA, who I'm not getting a very good comfort level that we're going to receive that money anytime soon. And jeopardizing the $1.4 we already have in hand. So, when Ms. Hanson comes back, when we sit down and talk about this, we're going to have to consider issuing a notice to proceed to this contractor. I think we have to go forward, or we're going to lose the ARPA money and then potentially jeopardize the other. I would love to have that additional $1.4 million, but I don't want to wager and lose it all. And I think even if the shutdown were to end tomorrow, we're still somewhere in the middle of that FEMA approval process, and it has to go back to Congress, as I previously shared from an email. I would not wager on the fact that we're going to see that in the time period that will allow us to spend it all. So, my inclination is to move forward with what we have, get the project done. It's long overdue, unless the board has any others. I think this is the direction we need to go. All right.
Status of on-site insight reports. We did receive all of the updated reports through July, and then we had to get an updated report on the Council on Aging. And again, I had Ms. Bradica. We've received all those, and they are now placed up on the town's website so that people can view them. We will be handing, and I believe have handed them on to the Capital Improvement Planning Committee, and we will be working on incorporating that in our long-term capital plan. I noted expansion application of our visitor's code of conduct. I just wanted to make the board aware that there have been, as you well know, some issues and controversies in the last couple of weeks. And we previously discussed the visitor code of conduct that we've had here, and I've had to extend that not only from in-person contact, telephone contact. And I now think I'm getting to the point where certain emails that are coming in, you know, using inappropriate language or direct attacks to staff, I think I'm going to have to issue replies. If you're going to continue this process, we are not going to – I will have to incorporate some type of protocol, but it makes it difficult to respond to certain inquiries. If the language or the tone or things, you know, create a problem for staff. So just making you aware of that. My next town manager office hours will be on November 10th at 5 p.m. That's earlier than usual because, as was alluded to earlier, there was supposed to be a community conversation, which is now going to incorporate recent events with Mary and Ryan that's going to happen at the COA, the Council on Aging, that night at 6.30. So I want to be able to address, you know, any questions the public have. And as I'm sure some of you know, those are fairly well attended. I usually get a dozen to two dozen people, depending upon the issue du jour. And it's good feedback. So I look forward to seeing folks there. Just to recap, since the last meeting, as I let you folks know, I did get the first-time attendee scholarship from the International City Managers Association and the Massachusetts Municipal Managers Association to attend the ICMA conference last week. It went from Friday to Wednesday. A lot of the focus was on how to better use data and incorporate artificial intelligence into municipal government. There was a lot of interesting dialogue as well as conversations on the changing face of municipal employees, the transition of the older Gen X and boomer generations moving out and attracting Gen Z and millennials and the dynamics. So I walked away with a lot of good information. I want to have a discussion with my staff about putting together policies on using AI here in the workplace. There were so many companies that are now utilizing it, not just, say, ChatGPT or Google's Gemini, but they want to build a knowledge base of tried and true information that they can pull from. So they're not just selling you generic AI. They're selling you information that they've compiled, and it's going to touch every aspect of what we're doing in the future. I don't foresee that it's going to replace people, but it helps supplement the work we do and maybe make it easier to make some of these complex financial decisions, so on and so forth. So I just want to make you aware of that. I already touched upon the community forum with Mary and Ryan. I did have a meeting today with Tom Lashman, our surveyor, and Abby Charest, our town engineer on miscellaneous properties. We talked about a potential Warren article, and the discussion centered around there's a – they have to do a survey. A lot of the miscellaneous properties we own are around Dudley Pond and Lake Contituate. Apparently, I did some research back in the 50s. The town was condemning and taking a lot of properties that were run down, and at one point, they might have been something we want to sell off, but now as we look forward to the future, how we need to handle stormwater operations and management, the potential for sewer expansion down the road and roadway improvement, what might look as just an unassuming property may have future value to the town. So I've received a couple of specific inquiries. We already ruled one out today, but there are some that are going to go on a case-by-case basis, but they want to do an overall review of all those properties. We're going to put together a list and look at also tax title properties to see what, if any, have value for those three major areas of future expansion. So I'm continuing to work on that to see if we have any articles, and we talked a little bit about street acceptances so that we can – a lot of towns have it as a regular article doing street acceptances of roads that have been built out to town standards so you can get a little extra chapter 90 every year. So that's what we've done in the last week or so, Madam Chair, so if anybody has any questions, happy to answer. Questions from the board?
I did want to follow up on the expansion of the Visitor Code of Conduct. It's, you know, everybody who participates in town government is passionate, and I do think that our staff deserves respect not only when we come in the building, but also when we communicate with them. And I'm – Michael and I had this conversation, and then we came up with the idea is to expand the – this Visitor Conduct Code so that everybody will – should another issue occur, then we can resolve it quickly. The on-site, in-site reports, I do want to say, Michael, it's a very long report. I've been bugging them saying, okay, we'll please have that to the board, but it's about 100 pages, I think you told me. Some of them individually are quite long. Quite long. So – but there's little executive summaries on each one, and I know that we are particularly interested in some of those summaries, for example, the town building. I know we wanted to look at that, so I'll see if I can't somehow get a couple of those out. I've been on my list here. Another suggestion might be, I know you wanted me to, at some point when we have room on one of our agendas, do a quick overview of a slide deck, maybe a couple slides. That's on the operations review with the Collins Center, but I know Michael Fea has been reviewing these on-site, in-site reports as they come through. Maybe we can condense this down to a couple of slides to go over the individual buildings. There are major needs, I guess. Did you say slides, Michael? Do you want to? That's Michael Fea's in slides. Slides. Well, I can do it off my notes, I suppose. I mean, I think – I don't need 48. Oh, thanks, Helen. I think you've done so many wonderful things for us, and there's all these little wonderful bits of information that we can use going forward, strategizing. So I think it's really nice for us to see what you have done. All right. We're on to the consent calendar. Move the consent calendar for November 3rd, 2025, item 1-3-3. All right. Is there any discussion? All right. All those in favor? Ann? Yes. Doug? Yes. Bill? Yes. Carol, yes. Consent calendar passes 5-0. I want to have the minutes of October 20th and October 24th. Do we have a motion?
Adoption of both sets of minutes. I have a second. Second. Thank you. Does anybody have any edits to the minutes of October 20th?
I think on 8-13 – I think somebody else will help me here. Kelsey, I'll notice. Is it M-O-O-U-I? M-O-U-I and the minutes. 8-13, ribbon cutting. I think it's – Oh, it's M-O-O-I, I believe. Oh, yeah. M-O-U-I. Okay. I think we just need to fix that little typo. I also want to call attention to the board on – when we revised the – when we revised the – when we revised the advisory committees, Bill's suggestion was proposals for basically requiring material investment of staff time or town resources be discussed with the board and subject to approval. So I'm not necessarily sure we captured that when we revised it. So I think maybe we should – we'll probably revise what was submitted online so it matches what we voted. How's that sound? Sounds good. All right. And on A6, it says discussion and review of debt exclusion including – and then it says including again. There should only be one including. Thank you. Anything else? Anyone? No? Okay. Let's go to – what are they here? About 10-24, I guess. Does anybody have any edits on A24? 10-24? Of course, I'm sure. We didn't have them. That's all right.
Let's go to the vote then. There's no further discussion. Bill. Yes. Doug. Yes. Tom. Ian. Yes. Thank you. Yes. Motion's passed. Five zeros. And we have quite a bit of correspondence in our package. Does anybody have any comments on that? It's primarily – yeah. Thank you. We're all set. Let us move now to study boards, concerns, and repairs. Who would like to start?
Go ahead. I have four items.
Select board member Levine and I attended an online meeting today with Senator Rauch as chief of staff to discuss remote participation. So there's several bills and legislation on this topic. The bill that the Senate Gentile filed has been sent to further study. It's not hopeful. However, there's another bill that mirrors that one, and that's still alive. That's in the Senate. So we'll continue to talk to people about this topic and see where it goes. Second, it was a pleasure to attend the ribbon-cutting ceremony yesterday at the town pool, where changes were recently made using CPA monies, southern monies. And the facility looks terrific. Many thanks to Ben and Jeannie Dallas for all their hard work on so many levels at the town pool. I think that allows me to be two weeks ago. It's like board member Whitney mentioned the value of having Tamara in this room to capture our conversation for the DTL. So I support that idea. And the fourth item, Chair and I attended a fence viewing session Sunday morning.
Jejuic and Matt with the two involved, property owners, just a course of action. Let's see how things go. We want our record to stay perfect. We're already 1-0. We're hoping for 2-0. He would be 3-0. I was a fence viewer. No, but that's just probably not. Your own records. Bill, do you have any? Two items. One report earlier this afternoon, the School of Facilities Master Plan Advisory Committee and the School Department sponsored a visioning session to define that there are at least 100 people to turn up and respond to some questions posed by the architect and their educational planning consultant and vision for what the town at which we'll see going forward. So it's going for K-8. A second session will be held on the 17th, about between 4 and 6.30, I believe, that will be held, not at the COA Senior Center, but instead at Happy Hollins, the superintendent, to give everyone a sense of existing conditions. So, but that was a very interesting session. Secondly, with respect to concerns, I share the concern that I think we all have about future operating revenues. And to Mr. Fay's point, the Holiday Road site is one that might be worthy of consideration to that. And it might be essential for the board to consider an article for the upcoming town meeting for planning money that might inform preparation of a plan to be presented to the development of the planning board, the preparation of the zone, similar to what I've heard with respect to Alta Oxpo, where the time was done, so it's a good place that success will develop soon. So that's something the board members have said to thank you. Thank you. Ann, do you have your thoughts or concerns? No, I don't. Thank you very much. Mr. Levine. I would just reiterate what I mentioned at the beginning, but to flesh out the details, on November 10th, there is a workshop slash event called Community Conversation, an overview of hate crimes in Middlesex County, which will feature Middlesex DA, Marion Ryan. It's a hybrid event that begins at 6.30 p.m. and will take place at the Council on Aging Community Center, which is 8 Andrews Avenue, and it will be also live-streamed on Zoom. That's it. Unfortunately, I have a few. I keep skipping them, but anyways. Actually, I went to the grand opening at the police today as well, thinking I was going to be observing and come to find out at the last second they said, oh, Tom and I, one of you, speak. Oh, you can both speak. So I said one thing, thinking Tom was going to say something else, but I was the only one, ad-living away. Oh, dear.
And then Doug and I received correspondence from a concerned resident about the additional capacity may be needed due to what's going on with the Medicare programs and the government shut down for the SHINE program. And apparently they may be requesting consideration of us to leave the building, the COA building, open until 4 o'clock on Fridays. And so it's not really an issue now. They did raise it. I did say I would bring it forth. It went disgusting. We agreed that was a good plan. I think it's something we have to keep our eye on. I am going to add my two cents is that if we do, they are open. Anybody can get an appointment from wherever they live. But if we do open the building for expanded hours, I think we would want to say that those additional hours would have to go to Whalen Residence. Appointments would have to go to Whalen Residence because we'd be with the bank to leave the building open. So on November 17th is our next meeting. Because Bill has these other meetings that I don't want to have to be in three places at once, we can't do the meeting at 630 or not early. And we do have a very full schedule. We're going to start talking about streamlining the annual time meeting warrant, which of course is one of our big objectives for this year. We're going to be having the tax classification. Brian and the assessor will be in. That's annual. Can't read all my writing. We're going to look at some additional articles and which articles we have said we would like to submit and then kind of narrow it down to which ones we're actually going to submit because they take a lot of work. I want to make sure everybody has December 15th on their calendars. And also, let's go January 6th for the moment. Put that on. And I have been attending most of the Capital Planning and Improvement Committee meetings. It's a lot of work. It's a big project. It's a big, big responsibility. I think the chair is doing an excellent job, you know, trying to bring their members up to speed. There seems to be some, I mean, we've done a wonderful job. We have these wonderful candidates who all seem very engaged, very focused. I think we're going to be very pleased with that. It's a little bit slow getting going for day off. And having said that. Just one thing. We picked one of our speakers for the Veterans Day ceremony. That's Ian. Yeah. I did confirm that. Because we're all speaking. Yep. No, it's a good one. So having said all that, I would like to take a motion to journey. All right. 942. I appreciate the consideration, but I think you should schedule the upcoming meeting that makes sense of first allegiance, obviously, to this board. So it's better. Well, you know what? Push comes to show. Maybe I'll push it back. We'll push it back to 615. But I really felt, I really like to let everybody be here. But thank you. All right. And Matt, I'll take a motion to adjourn at what? 942? 944. 44. So moved. Second. Okay. No further discussion. All those in favor? Anne? Yes. Yes. Bill? Yes. Yes. Carol? Yes. Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.