November 17, 2025 – Select Board – Video & Transcript

November 17, 2025 - Select Board

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Good evening, Warren, as chair of the select board, I'm going to call the meeting of the select Monday, November 17th, 2025 at 630 p.m. to order. We are meeting in the William Town Building in the select board meeting room, which is obviously at what do you want? One may watch with a meeting link that can be found on the calendar, on the web page. Pursuant to Chapter 2 of the Act of 2025, this meeting will be conducted in person and by remote means in accordance with the applicable law. This meeting may be recorded, which will be made available to the public on WACAM and 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 for the link on the calendar. We respect, excuse me, we request public comment be limited to two minutes per person. So with me in the room tonight, we have Mr. Faye and Mr. Whitney. Mr. Levine will be joining us shortly. And Robbie, is Ms. Bresley online? Okay, thank you. Let me know. And I forgot to use my gavel, so here we go. We're also joined by the town manager, Mr. McCall, assistant town manager, Kelsey Spir- I was for left. And the meeting is in the room. Mr. Levine has just walked into the room. So our agenda tonight will be to review the agenda for the public, announcements, and public comment. We will have a meet with our town clerk to discuss, review, and vote early voting dates for the upcoming special election, and also review the updated Wayland brochure. At 7 p.m., we will have a public hearing on the tax rate and the tax classification. We will be joined by the Board of Assessors, the Director of Assessing, Ron Garou, and Kevin Young, Finance Director. At 7 p.m., we will then meet with our finance director to discuss and potentially vote on Massachusetts Water Resource Authority financing proposal that has been put forth before the board. Followed by a discussion, followed by a discussion view in the Collins Center's combined organizational operational review recommendations. We will be tabling the item number eight, which is the discussion to vote on potential amended, non-amended sick leave policies. And we will have a fairly lengthy discussion, starting hopefully on 8 p.m., on the upcoming annual town meeting, warrant, and setting the calendar. When possible, look at a possible articles that the Select Board may support and recommend be put on the warrant. That will be followed by the discussion on additional revenue-generating ideas. There are no topics, not reasonably anticipated, but Chair, 48 hours in advance, and hopefully around 9-9-15, we will adjourn. So, before we get in, we'd like to know if there's any announcements from the board. Yeah, just that the new ownership that we've been on Town Center, and I'm going to call, I think, as effective then, and we look forward to meeting with them at some point. That's what I hope. Okay.
Anybody else have any announcements? Michael or Kelsey? All right, let's move to public comment then. Is there anybody in the room who wants to make public comment? Myron, just state your name and your address. Do you want to have a seat, please? Steve Myro, Red Barn Road.
The Conservation Commission has scheduled a public hearing this Wednesday to consider the adoption of regulations for the stormwater and land disturbance bylaw. There is no public comment period prior to the agenda. The draft regulations, which are available to the public on the website, are from March of 2025 and generated a large amount of critical feedback. The consulting firm hired to address these comments delivered a first draft of revised regulations on September 9th, but it has never been discussed in a public meeting or made available to the public, even after public records requests. I received an email from Linda Hansen on Friday that it is still undergoing internal review, so it is unclear what they would be voting on. These regulations, at least the draft for March of 2025, unlike that of any other town that I could find in Massachusetts. They've copied rules out of context from more urban communities, such as Newton, in fact, they looked at four different communities. There's been no financial analysis of the cost to the town or to the residents of the town, and it will require additional resources for the Conservation Department. And I think it can show that it might be substantial. There have been no data collection, analysis, or modeling to assess the long-term environmental impact. And other towns with tree preservation policies do this on an ongoing basis, including the towns that they used as model communities. The commission has also ignored the recommendations of the consulting firm, which I believe was in a packet presented to you some months ago. Such as the creation of a standalone tree preservation by law, which is what every single community that they looked at did. No town has added tree regulations to a stormwater bylaw outside of the context of the stormwater regulations. And also, one thing to note is, actually, none of these towns have tree preservation bylaws created or enforced by their conservation commissions. Because it's outside of their statutory authority, according to state regulations. This effort has been going on for more than five years. And at a recent meeting, the conservation commission chair said he was going to force a vote no matter what shape the regulations are. And that's just not reasonable. So, I'm asking, I have two requests of the select vote tonight, which, first, can you use your powers of persuasion to try to prevent a vote on an issue like this, this week? If necessary, ask the town council to get involved. And I'm hoping that there's someone on the select vote I could talk to offline about this, because there are dozens of issues. I sent in comments with maybe two dozen issues. I had dozens more. There was just so many things wrong with these regulations that I just couldn't spend the time to do it. We've got to wrap up, but we can connect you. We're all liaisons to different boards and committees in town, so we can connect you directly with our liaison to the Conservation Commission. You know, connecting them. That would be time. Which, when I was done with some. We stood back. We stood back.
Okay. T. Faye.
Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Is there any other, Robbie, you'll look to see if there's any more public comment online. I see none with it. Does anybody in the room want to make public comment? Okay. So, having none, I think we're going to make public comment. We'd like to invite our town clerk through the week to join us, please, for the next two items. And we will start with the early voting dates. The list of this is in the packet. I've been advised. It's on page six because I couldn't find it earlier. In the regular packet. In the regular packet. Yes. Thank you. So, may we go ahead? Thank you. Thank you. Three-week town clerk. With the special election coming up on December 11th, I wanted to go over a little bit on voting in person for early voting. So, the Votes Act of 2022 made in-person early voting optional for local elections. And since that time, we've been consistent with the board's position that we have not offered in-person early voting for our local elections, only the vote by mail. But with the special election scheduled for next month, but with the special election scheduled for next month and the limited time frame to inform residents, I felt it was important to make this option available. So, as required by the Votes Act of 2022, I convened a meeting of the Board of Registrars. So, at that Board of Registrars meeting, out of the four, there were three of us. So, we clearly had 50%, and we did vote to make the recommendation to the select board to offer in-person voting. If you were to vote on that this evening, I am proposing the schedule of Friday, December 5th, from 8.30 a.m. to noontime, Monday, December 8th, 8.30 to 6.30, and Tuesday, December 9th, 8.30 to 3.30. All in-person voting would take place at the town clerk's office, and we'd have a few voting booths set up in the hallways so that the residents could mark their ballots in private. We will also continue to offer vote by mail, and as a matter of fact, some ballots have already gone out, and some have already started to get returned. We've unlocked the ballot drop box out by the flagpole, so people are taking advantage of that. And to move forward with this schedule, I would just ask that, if you are so inclined, to vote on this schedule, and I believe the draft motion was included in your packet. And if approved, we will update the town clerk's website, main page of the website, Waylon's Facebook pages, to ensure that the residents are aware of this special election and the opportunity to vote in person early. I can't worry about it. We only did vote by mail for the local election. I'm sorry, you're asking about the local election, right? And on election day. I'm sorry. I can provide those to you in an email. Could you do present those numbers? I just forget it.
Thanks. Sorry.
Any other questions? Yes? I'm curious about the duration of the Friday, December 5th is proposed to be 8.30 to 11.30, Monday, 8.30 to 6.00, Tuesday, 8.30 to 3.30. I'm just curious about your thinking. This is a really good timing. We feel about being in person building your pen. What end? Yeah. We chose the other three minutes. How we chose the time frame? 30 minutes before we close up. I think you just said until 11 on the Friday. I was actually proposing until noontime. So I'm not sure if we've changed the schedule since Friday, December 5th, 8.30 to noon. This is 11.30 on the thing, but I'm sure we can. I mean, yeah, I mean, yeah, we don't close till 12.30. Yeah. So I was trying to make it 30 minutes before we close. Good. We need a motion. Yeah, we need a motion, but you have the document in your packet. I don't see any online here. I'll hear you out. Okay.
It's in the main packet.
Okay. I move that the board approve the request by the town clerk and accept the board of Registrar's recommendation to offer in-person early voting at the Whalen Town Building at the town clerk's office on the following dates, Friday, December 5th, 2025, from 8.30 in the morning to 11.30 in the morning. No. What? You can do new town. Till noon. Monday, December 8th, 2025, 8.30 in the morning till 6 p.m. And Tuesday, December 9th, 2025, at 8.30 a.m. till 3.30 p.m. Do we have a second to the motion? Second. Thank you. Are there any further discussion? If not, all those in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Motion passes 4-0. Zero. And I think that's it. He's going to join us for the next item as well. In the package, you'll have the copy out of this brochure. And just to give it a little context there, you'll remember then in the spring, the spirit company came, spirit company, spirit committee, came before us and said, you know, we need to put some more information out to folks about town meeting and truly watched our meeting and said, I have a suggestion. We can update the brochure. I know the dogs said, I'd like to help with some of the language. And I think we even shared the document with the original spirit council members. And so I think a lot of people have had input. And that's teed up. And now it's back to you. So tell us all about it. So I would like to invite Merlin up. Yeah. Merlin's been the brainchild really behind the design of this between her and Doug. And so Merlin, we probably haven't met the select board members yet. So we want to start. So I had originally put together a very rough draft of this brochure. Jalen and the town manager's office have done some work on it. Merlin comes in and she's got all of these technical skills that we are really taking advantage of. So the brochure that you have in the packet is the right now final result of Merlin and Doug working on this together. But Vice Chair Levine joined in on the effort. And between the two of them, Merlin's been living in Wayland for 19 years. So she offered valuable insight to both long-term and newer residents who might find this brochure helpful. And so we tried to do some highlights on it of the town, boards and committees, different activities that goes on that would encourage residents to possibly get involved and a way to highlight the town for any prospective new residents wanting to purchase or rent in Wayland. So we hope that this brochure becomes a useful tool to strengthen engagement and to help residents feel more connected to the town. Well, both Doug and I have input some of the questions from either Bill or Tom. Although then first I have to say it's fabulous, but sorry. We actually have hard copies if anybody would like to have one in person. Do you have copies of it or not? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, but it's such, it's much more impressive. It's a trifold. I'm happy to see you when I see you as well. I think it's very attractive, as Tom said, and the subference is great. I hesitate to ask a question, though. The town highlights the fourth door, featuring local grocery stores and farmers. Mark, could it be a test apostrophe, or should there be no apostrophe?
Oh, right. Mrs. So-and-so and the commons are here tonight. For the next printing. I think we can start. No, no. And I wanted to say this. They had graciously held the printing up, I believe, until we saw the fact. Am I correct? Yeah. Okay. So if we have any thoughts, this would be the time to share them.
Yes. Yes, we received a comment over the weekend. Somebody said to pack it, so we will take that into consideration. Let's just, can we solve Bill's comma question here? What would you think, what do you think it should say? I think you're right. It should be as apostrophe, because it's not a single farmer, right? Multiple farmers might be just farmers plural. Without their apostrophe, if it's not a possessor or something. That's probably something. I've raised the question, but I'll assume it should be a little bit. Is it plural or plural? Do we have multiple farmers? Well, there are more. There are fairly several farmers. Yeah. I like to the example. Russell says, Russell's farmer's prostrophe market.
Mr. Beck, yes? During the comment, one of the weekend, I'm comfortable with the highlight sheet breaking. In other words, you're not saying how long is the control, saying that these are highlights in the example of the public offices. I don't know about that, but they're a feature of the feature. Oh, that's what's in the next one. I'm comfortable with the next one. That's great.
Now, remember, you participated, so I'm going over here. Kelsey or Michael, did you have any? I assume you have seen this. You're good. Everything's good. I have to tell you, I appreciate, you know, it was my big idea, of course, to ask Trudy to come back in to show us the finished product because I thought it was so terrific that she took the initiative to come up with a solution to a question or an issue that was raised before our board. I thought it was really nice to come and present the final product. I didn't realize they were getting ready to go to the print, and they held it up for us, so I appreciate that very much. You're up there. Do you want a motion? I do. Do you want to have anything else? Okay. I'll just add that the goal is to put one of these in every annual census that we mail out in January, and if we come up with the budget to make extra copies for the public buildings, town hall, library, COA, to put, like, a brochure stand in each of the public buildings. I think so. All right. I think I'll check. You don't have anything else that you want to add? Merlin, why don't we have a motion? I'm subject to some final modifications. Over the next couple of days, I move that the board approve the Welcome to Whalen, Massachusetts brochure slash trifold pamphlet as appears in our packet this evening. Thank you. Is there any further discussion? So, Mr. Fay? We'll be able to find ourselves in the community. Hadn't crossed our mind? And we could look at that. Yeah. All right. Yeah. So, we could at least email them the PDF, and they can print and fold. Yeah. Yeah. Follow me, sir. I can't teach you the potential company, but they didn't use to them. Oh, yeah. It's a very good suggestion. As you know, we have already expanded the select board's expense budget for the year, and this is an excellent suggestion on the PDF. Perfect. All right. We have a motion on the floor, so take a vote, please. All those in favor, say aye. All right. Aye. Motion passes 4-0. Thank you very much. Thank you, guys. Appreciate it.
So, it's not quite 7. I have to wait until 7 to start it, because it's a public hearing. It's about 10 now, isn't it? So, I'm going to do a couple other quick items first. Thank you. All right. What? I can move the consent calendar to 1. I can move the consent calendar to 1,000. Everybody okay with the consent calendar?
Except 4. Yeah. That's why I wasn't going to do that one, no. Okay. Except for what? Number 3. So, can you give the motion? Tom, why don't you make a motion with the items?
1, 2, 1, 1. Okay. I can move the consent calendar calendar 17, 2020, for number 3, and but for number 4. Okay. So, the motion is going to be items 1, 2, and 5 through 9. Second. Okay. Discussion, please.
Who? Bill, right? Mm-hmm. Why don't you speak to that? Oh.
It's a little funny. But we're not talking about that because we're removing the others first. Oh, we're moving on the others first. Right. Thank you. Just moving very quickly. All right. If there's no further discussion on items 1, 2, and 5 through 9, we'll have a vote. All those in favor? All right. All right. Motion passes 4-0. Okay. Let's go back now to number 3. The, um... Which, let me just say what it is because people are listening. This is the, um... Interagency Mutual Aid Agreement sponsored by the Milsex Chiefs of Police Association. Okay.
So, um... The purpose and authority of Section 1 enumerates the various purposes, uh, for having essentially mutual aid for, uh, police. And there is an enumeration of possible instances where this might be involved, uh, such as natural amendment and cause incidents requirement, exceptional police actions, to avoid played violence by a mob action, and so forth. Another one is the demonstration. Another one is demonstration. One demonstration could be constitutionally protected free speech. If there was a violent demonstration. If there was a violent demonstration, if there was demonstration outside the limited limits of where a demonstration should take place, that seems fine. I mean, I would just pay for someone to basically point to that and possibly abuse, uh, some first human, uh, police speech rights or, uh, some people that are all concerned about the inclusion of the term demonstration. Mr. Um, I would you like to address that question? I believe we've signed this in the past, and to select the number Whitney's point, I would say this, this refers to everything as a law enforcement operation. I don't think that just because things were listed there implies that, you know, it talks about natural or man-made, uh, incidents, natural disasters. It's for assistance. If we had a thousand people convene on town center, we would not have sufficient law and personnel just for crowd control or travel. Yeah. I think this allows, um, agencies the flexibility when they need additional assistance to bring them in. I, I don't read everything, although it's grouped in with some other things such as, um, mob action, civil disturbance. I don't read it as necessarily, uh, looking to bring outside, uh, agencies in to, uh, limit free speech. I think it's really the ability to bring outside agencies in whenever we may need some type of assistance and not everything in that list. And it's not an exhaustive list, um, is all for bad. There's plenty of benevolent causes in there for assistance after storms, natural disasters, and just helping out. Do you think it would be helpful if you modified it, like said mass demonstration, which assumes a lot of people, or you'd remove it out? Yeah. Something to add effect. Something to add effect. Something to add effect. There's some sale or type of foreign addition. I would say on the national level, uh, in my opinion or abuse, uh, um, I'd suggest some kind of modifying it. Um, before we think about modifying, I just want to ask one quick question of the town manager. This has already been approved or is being presented to how many communities? I don't know offhand, but it does say, uh, amendment. It would have to be executed by all the pardons. So if we were to make any change, I would gather we would have to send it back to the mass chiefs of police. Um, and I'm sure, um, um, select board member being worked as an attorney for the Commonwealth that, um, agencies or organizations such as the chiefs of police association. This one is the sponsored by the middle sites. They usually vet these through their own counselor as well. I can see where, um, these notices were because the word demonstration is much less, put this way, it stands out compared to the other descriptions in that sentence. I think that's the reason to look hard at the presence of that word. But having said that though, the, uh, this is a contract. This doesn't trump state state statute or constitutional obligations. So I can live with it, but the word demonstration, the other descriptions of organized efforts in that sentence. Mr. Whitney, does that work for you? I will not vote for it. So, you know what? Do we want to vote on item three and then go to item four? What do we want to do? I may ask some of your questions. If the board chooses not to approve this, is that going to stop the area of town from assisting us if we need it, if any of these incidents have occurred? In my prior experience, when I worked in a different jurisdiction, that the intermunicipal agreements had to be renewed on a regular basis to ensure mutual aid, I would have to speak with Chief Berman to see if we, this is with the Middlesex Chiefs Association. We may have other agreements with our neighboring towns in addition to this that I don't know. I didn't ask him that question, but I'm sure I can find out in short. So, why don't we table number three and two? I've got my chart here until the next meeting. How's that? Does that work? All right. What about number three and number three? Yeah, number four. My question. Hang on a second. Number four, just for those listening, is that we are approving the town manager as a signatory for the Entwrap engineering service and tie-in bond. This is one that we, for the wastewater system. Okay. Thank you. One comment. Kind of gave us a . Thanks, Stephen. This waste water facility was built too large for the needs. It seemed to be an engineering . The town should have nothing to pursue. Many years ago, which is real life. The professionals involved. The first question is, with time gone, one of the engineering companies would advise a town to build a facility so large. Larger than the need. The second question is, what's the main point of this building now? Is it to change the system so that it could simply some dollar, even though this building would say the same size? I'm sure through you to select board member Fayden. My last conversation with our town engineer is, you are correct that this needs more flow or input for this to work as design. I do not know who the original engineering firm was. I can get an answer for the next meeting. I know that the engineer has indicated that you're looking at options to have a Title V solution so that we can get this up and running, but there would also be a need. I know she was exploring ways to perhaps bring in other properties around Wayland High School so that we could get adequate flow into this to make it run properly. It might be easier if I have the town engineer come next time, maybe answer some of the questions for you. I don't know enough about the specifics. I have a general overview of the plan they provided me, but I'm not prepared to answer any detailed questions just because I didn't have a memo and I'm going off on my last conversation with the engineer. You know, I have a lot of hard regard for tying bond, but I'd be uncomfortable giving them a contract if they gave us the advice. I understand. Years ago. Yes. That was not the advice. As far as the other users, I know the board will discuss the idea of running a pipe from the bond area down to high school. It's a very expensive development, but that may be something worth the circuit. So we will defer this as well. It's not a motion on the table. It was on number one. Okay. Yeah. One of the point, I know also that reference is made to replace the system with an innovative slash alternative system. Innovative gives me thoughts. I'm all for state of the shelf rather than state of the art. Okay. It might be well to ask the engineer, given that we're going from a different standard to the title . If the one's proposed is . Especially given a PFAS problem. I think since we're all being a bit humorous, I'm all too familiar with those innovative ones because they're coming to another place where I have another domicile and a single home they are. And horrendous. I can't imagine what they'd be in a large scale. All right. So I think we're good with consent. I'm going to move on now to the. We're going to hold this to the next meeting. Yeah. We would put this on the regular agenda. I think so. That's what I was thinking about. I was going to ask you what you thought about. Next week when I see you on this. Yes. But now we're already in agreement, so we don't have to discuss that one. All right. So next on our agenda is going to be the public hearing on the tax rate and the tax classification. I'm going to have to read the whole hearing information first. Before I do that, would you like to call the Board of Assessors to order and then I can recognize. Thank you. So Steve, what you'll want to do is say your name. And it's your members of the board of assessors and chair at the moment and chair acting chair. And Monday, November 17th. And I'll order the board of assessors meeting for those of the back to read the preample. Okay. Pursuing to chapter. Are you going to read that? Because I already did that. I did that. And if I will say say remotely participate. I'll have a call to order by local vote. Philip Parks here. I've got McNeely here. Steve Cliford here. You have a quorum. Thank you very much. So you are a cross order at 7 o'clock. At 7 o'clock. We all have a drink. We're ready. Okay. Meeting over to wrap a meeting. I just do one second. Oh, watch this. No sense. We all have it. We're ready. Okay. I'm meeting over to wrap. I just, oh, watch this.
Town of Whalen Select Board will hold a public hearing on Monday, November 4th, November 17th, 2025 at 7 p.m. in the Whalen Town Building at 41 Pichita Road, Whalen, Mass, and remotely via Zoom. And the link will be available on the day of the meeting, and it is on the calendar. On the town's web page, the Board of Assessors will present data relative to the setting of the FY2026 tax rate and its effect on whether a uniform tax rate will be maintained for residential, commercial, and industrial properties and whether an open space discount and or residential and or small commercial exemption will be approved for the fiscal year 2026. In addition, town officials responsible for preparing the tax recapitulation submission to the Massachusetts Department of Revenue Revenue will review and answer questions from the public concerning the proposed FY2026 tax rate. Public comment will follow. Anyone who is unable to attend the hearing in person or remotely, they submit written opinions to the Select Board, again, at 41 Pichita Road, Whalen, Mass, or by email at selectboardmembers at wayon.mass.ma.us prior to November 17, 2025. But this notice was posted in the Metro West Daily News on Friday, October 31st. So I think I'm going on that. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to... Mr. Kevin, are you going to join us as well for this? Would you want to come up, Ryan? So we're inviting our Director of Assessing, Ms. Blarue. We've got the Board of Assessors present. We have some staff members from the Assessors as well. Thank you. And Steve, we're going to have... Steve, do you don't want to stay? You want to come up? Yeah. You want to come up to be part of the Board. Yeah. So let's bring a chair forward. Sorry, I didn't mean to put... We just need a chair for you. Okay, great.
The floor is yours. And the slides are in the packet. They are the same as the one that's in the supplemental packet. There was just a one type of fix that's in the supplemental, so we'll use the main packet. There was one other column. Yes. Complete edits that is not in your package, and I will go over the same name. Okay. So do you want to use the one supplemental then? No. No, the main. Exactly. Which slides do you want us to follow along on?
The slide, at the top of the slide, it would say, Property Assessment Review Continue.
I will go there very quickly. Page 13, regular packet, and page one and the seven. Page 13, regular packet, and page one and the seven. Page 13, regular packet, and page one and the seven. Property Assessment Review Continue. Third column from the right, FY26 percentages. Should read class one, 95.9296%. The subtotal of 95.9296%. Class three commercial, 2.7598%. Class 4, industrial, 0.0809%. Class 5, personal property, 1.2297%. And CIP subtotal, 4.0704%. My apologies to the public.
Would you like to begin? Thank you. We'll start at the beginning again. So welcome. The purpose of this hearing is for the select board.
Adopt the town's tax policies for fiscal 2026. Please note the tax rate has yet to be approved. The results of this hearing do not determine the tax rate.
Action required tonight by the select board. Number one, to vote to maintain a single rate or entertain a split rate. Number two, vote whether to adopt a residential exemption. And number three, vote whether to adopt a small commercial exemption. This year is an interim valuation year. The Department of Revenue certified assessed values on November 4th. The average single family dwelling last year was $1.14 million. It increased to $1.23 million. That's an increase of 7.78% from last year. This change was based primarily on calendar year 2024 cents. So if we look at the review of 25 valuations versus 24, the change of percentage, the change in tax, excuse me, the change over a period of 10 years. I want to note that class one residential is not only single family, but it also includes condos, multi and vacant land. So that's all residential. Residential was 95.9296%. Commercial, 2.7598. Industrial, 0.0809. And personal property, 1.2297%. Our exempt class, which is class nine, was 6.5% greater from last year to this year as well. You can see in columns starting from the right, working left, those three columns, the continuous increase in residential percentage. 10 years ago, 94.9%. This year, 95.9%. Good growth. New growth was also certified on November 4th as $59.7 million assessed value or $934,000 taxable value. New growth in 2025 was $558,000. So that's an increase of 67.39% this year. Thank you, Paul. Susan. If I could, and I know Mr. Kevin, you may chime in here. I think at this point in time, it's worth noting that Mr. LaRue and his staff did a tremendous job of going out and assessing properties. I know there's some questions about the budget task force numbers. We had put in an estimate based on historical values of $400,000 for new growth. And there are a couple of factors, both Mr. Kevin and I had looked at it, that approximately 10 years ago, there was four people working in that office. And shortly before I came here, there was relatively, essentially two people working in that office. Mr. LaRue has brought in some great staff that are here tonight. His assistant recently became certified through the certification process in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. And realizing the position we were in financially, they went out in Diddy Yeoman's work. So I know there's some questions about, you know, how did we come up with the number that we used in our budget? We looked at the 15-year average, the seven-year average, and the three-year average. And Mr. Kevin, you know, we did go with the conservative number, but in the last couple of years, $400,000 was an estimate. We were going to use $500,000. We went a little conservative with the $400,000, and then Mr. LaRue and his staff then went and did an excellent job getting out in the field and doing the updated assessment. So I just thought, while we're touching on new brokers, we should mention it here and then. Thank you.
Let's take a little break. Would you like to introduce your staff members? The assistant assessor, Tamara Akeem, and the administrative assessor, Peter Foley. Thank you for joining us. And we reaffirmed the due diligence. Believe it or not, folks, we're still digging out of COVID through attrition, through many no's at the door that we can't see interiors. And they did a bang-up job. Any way we could, we did due diligence to get to that number, and we're very, very happy with that number this year. Thank you, Michael.
If we look at the current slide, this is a five-year look back. And again, last year was $35.9 million. This year, it was $59.7 million. If we look at the fiscal year by value by class, this is a lot cleaner than the slide I had everyone change the numbers on. So we can see, again, residential is certainly Wayland, 95.9296%. The keynote here is $477.9 million, or 8.03% increase in total value in the town from last year to this year.
How is your tax rate calculated? It's the levy, town spending, over the taxable valuation, the assessed valuations. And if everything stays where we are today, that's looking at a $14.83 per 1,000 tax rate if uniform is selected this year. That's a decrease of 80 cents from last year, last year being $15.63 per 1,000.
Graphically, a historical recap of the average single-family tax bill. This is a 10-year look back. In 2025, the average value was $1.12 million. This year, it's $1.23 million. Last year, the average family tax bill was $17,8,000. And this year, we're looking at $18,000.26.
The percentage of value difference is $1.48 in the dollars, plus or minus $405. Again, based on the average single-family tax bill. This chart actually shows the impact of new growth on the tax rates. The historical percentage over the last 10 years, again, we've increased by percentage. Three percentage in the residential class.
Wayland remains and continues to be more a residential community. So, if we would venture to not have a residential factor of one, which would result in a single tax rate, a residential factor of less than one increases the share in commercial, industrial, and personal property. Since Wayland is 95.9% of its revenue is residential, a slight reduction for residential would put a large increase on commercial, industrial, personal property. In fiscal year 2025, only 127 communities voted to have a split tax rate.
If you look at this further, MGL law allows a shift up to 150% of the tax burden between the classes. Again, adoption of a residential factor of one results in a single tax rate. The town has always taxed properly and equitably with a single rate. And the impact on the property class rate is as follows. So, if we have a residential factor of one, uniform tax rate would be $14.83 per thousand. If we were to shift that 150% tax burden between the classes, residential would be $14.52 per thousand. And CIP would be $22.25 per thousand.
So, what's this do to the average property as an example? So, a value of $1.2 million at $14.83 is $18,000. The average commercial at $1.6 would be $24,000. If we shifted to 105%, the average commercial increase would be $1,200. If we shifted to 110%, the average commercial would increase by $2,400. Shift to 115%, the average commercial would increase $3,600. And if we were to increase to the max of 150%, that increase would be $12,000.
So, we're not talking about open space discount, other communities. Well, actually, Bedford Mass was the sole community that had an open space discount, and they do no longer. So, most communities, as Wayland, we have no parcels classified as open space. In Wayland, 37 parcels participate in the Chapterland program, which results in more savings than if they were designated as open space. And under the Chapterland program, discount ranges from 75% to 98%. Well, what makes me – I know I ask you this every year, but is it a policy that the town adopted to not do the open space? I know a lot of the properties we've put under – I'm just going to start with that one that we bought off of. Rainstone, I was supposed to say, but I didn't think that was right. Was it Rainstone? The property we bought in Rainstone, we gave them a Chapterland discount. Is it a policy we have, or do we have the option when the properties come forward? The Chapterland program is an application each year by those already in the program, and we do accept new people in the program or new parcels in the program upon application. Again, they have to have five acres of land to begin with, and then we would look at the use of that land, whether it be forest, whether it be agricultural, horticultural, or open space recreation.
This is where 352 communities – well, to answer your question whether or not it's a bylaw, I don't know. It just seems to be out of practice. I'm sorry. Go ahead. It means no one's a CR application situation, I think. Yeah, I mean, if it's different, then very important. No, I believe you gave them a significant tax deduction. So my question is, you know, do you know what it's supposed to be? No, no, no. All I was going to say is, Rob, Mr. LaRue would correct me, but Chapterland program is way more flexible than open space. Isn't that what kind of drives people to choose that, because there's more flexibility and savings if we were to go through the platform? And it's easy. There is the pro bono for the town that we put liens on Chapterland parcels for first refusal upon sale. So there is a – we're holding the card for the future. If the town is interested in these parcels, it should make months. And I've seen it correctly that the parcel I'm thinking of is not probably in this because I believe we've purchased it or some of it, but most of it. I'm curious as to what – why the town puts all the properties in the Chapterland, which offers a greater tax relief to the owner. And, of course, it puts – shifts that burden back onto the tax. There's – versus the open space discount. But anyway, especially as we're looking at, you know, revenue programs, you know, do we need to go – have we signed something? Have we made a policy? Do we need to go back and look at that?
Take on that project after tonight's meeting. Well, just throwing it out there. Thank you. Thank you. So the residential exemption, the parcel must be owner-occupied, primary residents to qualify, must apply annually, and results in a higher residential rate. In 2025, only 20 communities adopted a residential exemption.
To continue the details, residential exemption includes all residential. So once again, it's single family, it's condos, it's vacant land, et cetera. A reminder, the average single family this year is the $1.2 million. If you were to take the average residential value, again, that combination of residential parcels, and you lose it by 10%, we're looking at $117,016 in reduction in assessment. That would be an increase of $88 million borne by the residential class. The tax rate of $1,625 would be the residential rate exemption if it is adopted. Some examples. The average single family value property, the tax savings would be $162.92. A higher value, that $1.6 million. Tax increase of $360. A lower value, I've changed this number this year. Over the last five years, we've been using half a million. A lower price in Wayland today is about $800,000. So that tax savings would be $775.
Granting a small commercial exemption. This exemption is for commercial parcels occupied by businesses with an average annual employment of not more than 10 people during the previous calendar year and assessed values of less than $1 million. In 2025, only 14 out of 352 communities voted this exemption. The intent is to give a tax reduction to small commercial property owners at the expense of the larger commercial and industrial costs. So in summary, the Select Board has a job this evening.
Number one, to vote on, well, to vote on three tax policies. Number one, the selection of a minimum residential factor. So a factor of one yields a uniform rate, a single rate. And tonight that would be $1,483,000, and that's a decrease of $0.80 from last year. Number two, whether to adopt a residential exemption with Wayland having a low number of non-occupied properties. And this shifts the burden of residential levy from lower-valued properties to higher-valued properties. Again, only 20 communities have this residential exemption. Then more tourist destinations, the Cape, the Islands. Number three, vote on whether to adopt a small commercial exemption. This exemption is for commercial properties under $1 million in value, 10 employees or less. This exemption benefits property owners, typically not small business tenants. So this concludes the Board of Assessors' presentation. And on behalf of the Board, the Board would now ask the Select Board to take action by vote. So again, there are three items on the team. Thank you very much. Does anyone have any questions for Mr. LaRue or the Board of Assessors' presentation?
Yes, sir? Yeah. Okay. I think we're good. I do have one quick question. What is the impact on this increase of the new growth that will impact FY26 budget? How does it impact the FY27 budget?
I hope they have a crystal ball. Got it.
Rephrase the question, Karen. What are we looking at for FY27? No. Internally, we see a lot of building permits. We see a lot of developments still happening in town. Personal property, we do have a vendor. And we feed that vendor everything that comes across our table. And we're out there canvassing as well.
Probably go with a half a million. And then Brian can fill you in more what he sees on his side of the table.
It's a continuing, moving number. And again, kudos to my teammates.
We take it serious. We try to get out there. Our goal is digging out of COVID by June of 2026. We hope to be right on track for anything on our plate with building permits. And also within the bylaw of once every six years, seeing every property in town. So we're being very aggressive.
Levine has a question. Just a quick question for you, Mr. Leroux, that I've been curious about for some time. When a vacant commercial property has a tenant, and if there's some build-out done, does that make a measurable difference? And I know it's case by case. But does that make a measurable difference for the town in terms of the revenue that we're getting from them? We'll track that building permit from day one, and we'll visit occasionally to see what percentage is complete. And we can also take advantage of supplemental taxes on that particular location, depending on percentage complete by June 30th. You know, it depends on, you know, the building permit, the actual construction. And so it varies, project to project. Thanks, Pete. Because this is a hearing, I'm going to ask if there's, I don't think there's anyone in the room that wants to have a public hearing or comment. Did we receive any that were mailed? Does anyone know if we received any emails? I didn't see any. And I don't think, is there anybody online? Robby wants to make a public comment. This is all online. Okay, great. All right. So then, hopefully, I close the hearing. There's no questions in the comments. I assume the members of the assessors are good as well. I'm seeing hands raised. Okay. So we're going to close the hearing. And now what the board does is that we consult with the town manager. Sometimes we tell counsel, which is not necessary. Oh, Brian, I didn't ask you. Did you have any questions? You didn't have any. So I'm supposed to write out. Sorry.
All the assessors close their meeting or do you want to wait? I'm closing the hearing. Okay. Then we go to the next step. So the next step is, everybody else, I've closed it. So now we have three requests before us. And these are the three right here on this page that we need the discussions for. So let me have a motion on a minimal residential factor. How would you like to do this? We're going to vote on the, we're going to make motions on each one of these three things before us. We'll have discussion and then we'll vote on each one individually. So the motion is to have a factor of one. So the motion is to have a factor of one. Okay. Do I have a second? All right. Is there any discussion on this? Anybody have any comments? I've always felt that less than 3% commercial tax revenue shouldn't take steps to make, like, life any more difficult for businesses and towns. And so that we think it seems like it. If you look at page 26 of the packet, these very helpful illustrations demonstrate the changes in the rate that I have a really tremendous effect on residential taxes and it's significant effect on commercial. So I think we take a second recommendation for that. All right. As Tom mentioned at the outset, we recently have a new owner at Town Center. We're all looking forward to working with. I think that the motion made makes sense. Okay. It's enough for the discussion then. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Motion passes 4-0. Is that being doing really honest? Yeah. We need to move this board. Do I have a second, please? Second. Okay. So in discussion, I just want to mention there might be 21 communities because I think East Ham now has adopted this as well.
When I'm not here, I'm paying residential exemption elsewhere, and I find it really, really not the money. It's the divisiveness of it. So I really do not support this myself.
Anybody else? Let's go to the vote. I can do it. Okay. Let's go to the vote. So I just want to mention that it's in the positive, and if you are not supportive, then you vote accordingly. So all those in favor of a residential exemption, say aye. All those not in favor, say aye. Say no. No. No. No. No. No. Just say all those in favor, say aye. Those opposed. No. We got the no's name done. And would you like to abstain? No. I'm in there. Okay. So the motion does not pass. That's going to be zero for zero. And then on the third one? I think we're going to drop a small motion. Second. Is there any discussion? And again, accordingly. So all those in favor, say aye. All those opposed, say no. No. No. And I'll abstain. Motion does not carry. Zero for zero. I think we have some people to sign. We will probably do it at the end of the evening. And I believe in the executive, Ms. Warren, has the other two that need to be signed. We are only responsible for signing our ones. No, yours was taken out. I took them out. Yours was in the town collection. Okay. We left them with equity. Thank you very much. Do you want to adjourn your meeting now? Yes, please. And we'll get you to adjourn the meeting at what time is it? 7.30. 7.30. 7.30. So it's in favor, say aye. No second, please. Second. Philip Marks seconds. Thank you. I'll be remote. I'll be remote. Aye. Aye. Steve Plitkart, yes. All right. Thank you very much for coming. Thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. All right. You will. So next on the agenda, we will ask Mr. Kavanaugh to stay with us because he's going to speak to us now via the textbook application. Okay. Please speak.
And that just starts on the next page right after this. He needs to be right. He needs to be right. He's right. He needs to be right. No, we're doing a touchy-topic paper test this morning. Okay. We're still on number five, right? You want to be looking at this sheet here. What page is that I was going to do?
I'm going to be on page 56 of the packet.
Okay. For those who are following us at home, page 56. I actually had a question on page 40, these parties as well. Go ahead, Brian. All right. So good evening. Rob's going to stay with me in case there's any questions that come up. So in quite a while now, I've been putting out an analysis of the recap. What you have before you is the fiscal 26 recap in comparison to the fiscal 25 recap. And what Rob said is that we're going to be, you know, working with DOR in the next couple of weeks to get the recap certified and get a tax rate set. So we're all going to have that done in a couple of weeks. But the form you're looking at today is just a summary of the 26 recap against the 27. So in total, if you take a look at the form on the left-hand side of the very top, we appropriated $121.6 million in total appropriations. That's a 5% increase over fiscal 25. Within that $121.6 million, the appropriation is the town of budget, which is $107.9, which in fiscal 26, was a 3.45% increase over 25. In order to fund the $121.6 million expense budget, we have to bring in revenue sources. In addition to the 121.6, we also have other items, which are state assessments, cherry seed assessments, and overlay. Anyway, overlay in the 26 recap is $340,000. In the past, cherry was $244,000. Currently, on the balance sheet, we were carrying a little less than $500,000 in total overlaid, which is on the low side. We were carrying $500,000 10 years ago in the recap. So Rob and I talked about it. We decided to bring that number up a little bit. So in order to fund the total budget of $122.1 million, we're getting from the state $9.3 million, which is almost a 5% increase over last year, or $432,000. We won't know our state number for 27 until January, when Michael goes to the MMA meeting in January. But for fiscal 26, it's $9.3 million. Local receipts is a good story. On the recap, we're putting down $6.3 million. Last year's budget hit $5.6 million. We actually collected $7 million in fiscal 25 with local receipts. The driver of that was investment income and building permits. We're going to put on the recap $6.3 million of fiscal 26, and we're not going to bring in $900,000 of investment income. We made $1.6 million last year investment income. Two or four months of this year, we've already collected $500,000 in investment income. So when we do the local receipts, which we'll be doing in the next couple of weeks with DOR, they'll ask questions about why is this number up? Why is this number down? And then typically we'll show them what our performance is in the first four months as they get a level of comfort. So we're pretty confident that the $6.3 million will be accepted by the DOR. Next is enterprise funds at $6.3. That ebbs and flows depends upon how much they want to spend. Same with CPA. It was $1.6 million the previous year, which is $1 million again. It's about how much they want to fund projects besides the set-aside. So that one goes in and out. Free cash, we used $2.4 million. Previous year was $2.6. Most of the free cash we're using is in capital, the capital fund. In fiscal 26, that number was $1.6 million. But $27, we haven't got there yet. But $2.5, $2.4 is what we've been seeing in the last bunch of years on free cash. So I would anticipate that that trend is going to continue into $27 and $28. Transverse from other funds. That was $4.1. Last year was $1.3. That went up simply because we had a lot of capital projects that closed out, and those became eligible as transfers to other funds. We had a significant amount of closeouts in the capital budgets. That's why that number is up so much. So the tax, what that all means is the total tax that will be raised, which we refer to as the tax levy, is $91.8 million. Last year, it was $89.3 for a 2.8% year-over-year increase. The year before, the fiscal 25 increase to 24 was $5.13. So we've gone from $5.13 two years ago to this year, a tax increase of $2.8. And a lot of that has to do with more state aid, more local receipts. I know that the select would approve a lot of increases in permits, and we're actually seeing that in our numbers. Kelsey was also very involved in doing that. So we're starting to see some of these numbers come in, which is a positive thing. So at the end of the day, the tax recap rate is $14.83 that Rob talked about earlier compared to last year at $15.6. And one other item, too, was the full valuation of the town. The town's full valuation went up over 8%. For those who have been around for a while, we went through a couple of years, where full valuation was flat. We've been seeing a relative increase in the full valuation. Rob even said earlier that the average home value went up from $1.1 to $1.2. So right now, the full valuation is $6.1 billion in the town compared to last year at $5.7 billion. So we're seeing a good number trend there. So that's the summary of the recap. I've done this for at least many, many years running. I don't go through the full recap, but Rob and I would be happy to answer any questions you have on the full recap. But if you did take the time to look at it, really, the first four pages is a summary of everything. Everything behind that are subschedules, CPA schedules, enterprise funds, transfers, overlaying. I'm sure I'm missing a few. But really, the first four pages that you look at is a summary of all those numbers. So again, another good year on the tax recap. Michael did say it early, but a big driver of the new growth was the fact that if you took over the last 16 years, the average, if you took out River's Edge, the average new growth was under $500,000. The last seven years was under $500,000. The last three years was over $500,000 because we saw a significant spike because Rob and the staff were out there doing the evaluations. The department was stabilized with staff. So we're starting to see positive growth in that. When we took a look at the original forecast in the summer, we put in $500,000. Then Rob came back and said he wasn't so sure we're going to hit the $500,000. And we dropped it to $400,000. As these properties were brought in with their full valuation, I think it's July 1 is the value that they bring them in. So again, it came up to $900,000. $900,000, except for River's Edge, we have never hit in quite a while. So again, if you took a look at over 16 years, the average was under $500,000. So if you took a look at what happened last year, what went against us in the forecast was the retirement assessment. We were hoping for a three. We got a nine. But then the health insurance, which we had in as a 10% increase, we got a three. New growth broke our way. So the new growth at $900,000 will contribute in the Prop 2.5% calculation. It only helps us when we get to fiscal 27. Kind of off track for this, but the new growth is a part of that. So the anticipated unused levy for fiscal 27 will be about $2.6 million. What are you left? $2.6 million.
Does anybody have any questions? I mean, the new growth is about new construction and additions for the forest building for it. That's right. And what explains the larger expected increase? In fiscal 26? Well, we brought in, was it 12 properties in LaunchOA? LaunchOA went from one parcel, 12 apartments, to one parcel, 12 condominiums. And those individually brought $660,000 per unit. So that was a nice kicker.
And again, we're still climbing out of, it's embarrassing. It's still climbing out of COVID. When you say climbing out of COVID, is it because you still have to go out and make assessments on properties? Bring them up to valuation? We're closing our billing permits from 2021 to 2022.
Calendar says 2025. So it doesn't look good. But it's, we'll be back on track to in 30 minutes next year.
Okay. Is that relevant to that point? Oh, yes. Okay. Go ahead. Ms. Maru. Ms. Maru, I just, you had said sometimes when you go out, people greet you at the door and don't want to let you in. It's my understanding, and you can correct me if I'm wrong. If someone doesn't let you in to do the assessment, you make an assessment, and they lose their right to contest that. Is that correct? They can, first of all, we are refused entry, and we can't do anything about it. We'll make a value judgment based on, was this property advertised in the NLS recently? And we'll look at anything we can gather from online. We will take a look at the exterior and give our guest fair and equitable assessment what might be on the inside. From there, if the owner is unhappy with their assessment, they have an abatement application procedure that they could apply. And if they are denied and they're yet still not satisfied, they can take us to the appellate textbook. But as part of the abatement procedure in the town of Whalen, as is in most communities, we state up front. We must see inside and exterior. And if we're not allowed in, it's denied. It's denied. Thank you.
You can ask me a question. You did. I'll say. You had a question on the free cash. No, that was for you. Oh, that's for me. Okay. We'll take that one. I can advise them. Okay. Okay. So I asked the question wrong earlier. I'm going to re-answer. So the increase in the new growth from the projected $400,000 now to the $900,000, how does that impact the levy amount for the FY27 budget? Does that give us $500,000? Or does that give us a percent of what? Well, the $900,000 will become part of the prior levy. That'll get a 2.5% increase. On the 527 levy calculation will go up 2.5%. The $900,000 in fiscal 26 will be added to the fiscal 27. We don't have that. We can add it. Let me limit. Yeah. I guess. Yes. The question is, how much does that help us with that deficit really is my question. To answer your question, I think what you're asking is, how does that help us with the budget? Right. That gives us about a $300,000 window roll. $300,000 off the $700,000. And it may be a little more when you factor in the 2.5%. Because new growth is brought into the levy limit and is compounded by the 2.5% calculation. Some of that growth already is a calculation.
Oh, that's right. So we have help in the 12% still. And they're projecting 12%. So we should be good. Mr. Fay. So, Mr. Liu, of the commercial monies we've received, what percentage is Ulta-Oxpo's value increased by $30 million based on a 2024 sale? What percentage of that being overall overseas to that?
The percentage of that being overall overseas to that? No, that's a lot. I get a bunch of jobs on it. The overall, just within the commercial sector? Right.
I'll be looking that up. I'm going to explain. You don't need a vote from us, right? You don't need a vote from us on the recap. No. Okay. And good luck when you submit that.
Because I know you're trying to get a bounce on the local seats. Can I just ask a dumb question that I actually should know the answer to? The overlay is for abatements and ATV cases, right? Not just ATV cases. Send them here a lot of people. Look, it's in case we pay them for. Well, that's what I'm saying. But even abatements, that comes out of the overview as well. If somebody is granting an abatement, it could get affected. Right. Abatements, exemptions, senior tax workup, the gross amount of senior tax workup, ATV cases. We try to cover outstanding real estate and personal property liabilities. Okay. Over the last two years, the board has sparked by its word and the bylaw in town to match circuit breaker exemptions. That has doubled. Same amount of participants, but the exemption on the overlay has doubled. Thank you. Are you good? Good. My question. Are we all set on this? So then I want to thank Brian. I think he's getting the answer. Oh, he's opening up the numbers. Okay. Sorry. I appreciate it. No, it's not that.
Well, Bill, when I'm late, you can just, you know, look next door there.
Thank you, 70%. But over half of our commercial equity comes from one place.
Yeah, it's $30 million. That's the increase. Yeah. Oh, that was the increase. They were getting it, baby, because they weren't full. And now we're booked. All right, I'll read it all. Good. Thank you so much. Thank you. Well done. And professionally, as usual, we will get that signed and into the office before the morning. That'd be great. And I can get back a lot of the one BLS gateway and you can submit this to this process. Good. All right. Thank you very much. So our next agenda, we'll ask Mr. Kemi to stay with us. We are trying to determine what our thoughts are on the MWOA financing proposal that we've received from the Board of Public Works, $38 million project. We're going to vote on it, which we're going to vote on at Tauming this spring. And we had some questions. And so I sent them to Brian, and he sent us some information that's in the packet. Thank you. And so I'm going to, I think if you don't mind, Brian, I'll start with the four questions that I had, and then you can tell me which sheet goes with which. And then the Board may have other questions. Does that sound like a good approach? It does. Okay. So the first question we have is, what is the town's capacity that found the MWOA? In other words, what happens to our availability to fund other large projects? Should we fund a portion of the $38 million? And will funding any portion of that adversely impact the town's AAA bond rating? And I think, what page do you have that on here? Because it's in here. Anyone know the page number? It would be in there. It's titled, Debt Statement of the Town of Oiland.
Debt Service Taxation Impact? No, it's. Well, you have this memo. It's the memo? It's the memo. Go to the memo. Blooper. Memo's on which. Thank you. And it's entitled, Debt Service Tax and Station. It's the fifth page of that memo. It's titled, Debt Statement. Yeah.
You got it? Yeah. Debt Statement? It's page 61 in the packet. Page 61, everyone. All right. Do you want to walk us through it? So this, I always, with the assistance of Hilltop Securities, which is the place you would go to to get this information with bond counsel. So on the very top writing number, you see that the 5.7, that's the equal, that's off the tax recaps at the full valuation of the town last year. Some of these numbers are a little stale since we've just updated the recap. However, the numbers get better if we apply the higher amounts. But what this schedule is telling you is the full valuation is 5.7 billion. That means the town could have raised 5% of that, which is that number you see on the left, coming down to 288 million. Currently, right now, we have $76,000 of outstanding debt. What we also have is $40 million of debt that has been issued, has been authorized by an issue, and I added in the MWRA. So that $40 million includes the MWRA borrowing. So you guys are with me so far? Sorry, this is on the potato listings for tax rate, tax levy. You can look at this. You can look at page 61.
So your calculation shows the debt already fully in, if we were to fund it fully through the general fund. The question was, I believe that you asked was, what's the town's ability to raise debt if we do the MWRA? So what we did was, we brought in, what we currently have is debt outstanding, and we brought in debt that has been authorized by an issue, and I added in the MWRA. So that total amount is $117 million. We don't owe $117 million, but potentially we could. Below it is the excluded debt. Those are the excluded debt amounts that are included in the $56 million. So the second number from the top does the calculation for you. Basically, what it's taking is taking the full debt, the gross debt of $117 million, and it's backing out the excluded debt. So the town can raise, you know, the unused capacity is $201 million, which is the original number on the top, $288 million, less the $86 million, brings you to the $201 million. So let's go through it again quickly. So the very top portion is our full valuation of $5.7 billion. You've got the full debt that the town is obligated right now. Plus, we added in potential new debt, which is the $40 million. So the total debt is $117 million. Bottom numbers, D, E, and F, is excluded debt. Those numbers are already accounted for in B, I'm sorry, which is the total outstanding debt, which is 76. So we're not counting that twice. So the way you calculate this is that you simply just take the $288 million that you can raise, and you subtract out from that the excluded debt that brings you to the 201 on the bottom, which is what we can still raise, which will never go there. But that's the answer. We're under our capacity by 201 million. Hang on. Where does Moody's look for us to be as a AAA community? They kind of like us not to have bonds payable more than 100% of the budget. However, they also understand that towns need to enter into large capital projects like new high schools, new COAs. And when you do that, that throws that number into kilter. And they understand that. They also understand to do those large projects, you buy excluded debt. As you saw in the reports, they don't want to see anything funded by levy debt. Large projects are excluded. So the metric is that they don't like to see bonds payable more than 100% of the annual budget. The debt service, which is the principal interest that we pay, they want to keep that 10% or less. Debt service is different than bonds payable. So it's 100% of your budget. So the metric here is that the town is in fine standing. We're $200 million below our threshold. So I'm just going to add one quick thing. You're often hearing the finance committee speak, and it's in the finance committee report about the debt metrics. These are the two numbers that Brian's referring to. The 10% is the debt service. And then the 100% is the... Wands payable. Wands payable. So just to kind of tie it together a little bow for you, if that helps. Thank you. Did you say that the MWRA debt is included in 30.9? Or is that just not yet... No, the MWRA debt would be included in the third number on the left, the 40 million. Section B, the last one.
I'm sorry. The MWRA is included in the 40.5 million of unissued debt. So in fact, it's not yet out of the box. It hasn't even been approved yet.
It's a kind of place there.
Right. So I think that... Go ahead. So it's going to be on a process to provide a sheet of the MWRA assessments. So every event. And the assessments basically the annual bill based on use. If you want to trigger the sheet of debt, don't put it at that point. But my question goes to assessment. I don't know if I'm going to add an additional cost of 10.
Well, coming... We had an MWRA in Winchester. And I always saw the assessment as the usage of water that you paid. But I think the term assessment is usage. That's right. As opposed to assessment over value.
As I said, on this question, I'll go to the next one. Okay. The second one, Brian, was what is the property tax impact of funding the MWRA via taxation? That is the impact of funding the 38 or the 22 or the 14 full project construction costs or happy hollow plant. Because we're looking at all three or four. Funding none, funding happy hollows, funding the construction or funding it all. So what would be the tax impact? So to answer that question, I did put the memo together. That's the memo. In order to answer that, you have to come up with your assumptions for fiscal 29. You're not working on today's assumptions. You're looking out three years. So I put together a memo, which basically brings in how I did the estimates, what I considered. And I've also put in the limitations of the assessments. The second page, which is the graph here. You want to go to the graph. They built the table. Talk table. The top table is how I got to my numbers that I used to do this analysis, which is the fiscal 29. So for fiscal 29, I'm looking at the top. I'm projecting that the average single home assessment is going to be 1.39. That's really just 2.5% growth over where we currently are. I know it's been trending higher, but I don't want to go too high and give a false number. But I'm using 1.3 million. The tax levy comes straight off the budget file that the group worked with during the summertime. And again, that's all predicated on all the overrides passing, as I said in the first page. Then I project out a tax rate. Then I project out the full valuation, 6.6 billion. So I'm using those numbers. And the bottom table, what I did was I took three assumptions. One, the general fund is going to finance 20.5 million. They're going to finance 22 million. 28 million and 38 million. The amounts highlighted in blue is the average, is the 1.3. Typically what you talk about is what's the impact of the average family. But I put in all different home values, and you can see the effect of those. So the annual increase for the 1.3 is 2.12. That times 20 brings you to 4.2 million. So under today's assumptions, if we finance $20.5 million in the average tax, the average home value in fiscal 29 was 1.3, that homeowner would pay approximately 4.2 million. That's predicated on none of these numbers ever moving, which is not realistic. So this is a snapshot in time of what this would be. 4.2 million. 4.2 million. 4.2 million. So the 20, the total is 4,000. So they're paying $2.2 million a year. Well, that's something. You didn't see what they said, $2.2 million. No. 4.2 million. So the second page actually spills that out. That's the tail of the tape, how it got to the, what, 1,200.
Bring out the defibrillator.
Well, you know, we're paying attention. So the second page, I just explained it further. Again, those are the same numbers. And again, it's this page I'm talking about right here. If we used a 20.5, it would be an annual increase of 212 for a total of 4.2. Again, that's predicated on these numbers never changing over 20 years. And that's not realistic. This just gives the board a ballpark of what this might mean. And so then, like I said, I did that for the 22 million. I did that for the 38 million. Show you the effect. And the other question Carol asked was. Just one question. So actually, Brian, this is beyond awesome, of course. I love this. This is clear now to everybody. So it shows us what we're, if we vote for something, what we're actually voting. Actually, one of the options is going to be 14 million instead of 20. So that would drop a little bit, a third of that, right? So the 212 would go down to maybe 140? I mean, I have this. I can do it with any number. I get it. Because if we just have happy hollow treatment, that would only 40. Oh, like a hybrid. But I was assuming the water was going to pay the 14 million. Sorry? I was assuming the water department was going to pick up the 14 million. Well, they've asked that, but we're looking at everything. You know, does it make sense for us to pick up any, pick up at all, or either or component of the project? So whatever. But this is terrific. Okay. Anybody have any questions on this? This is good? We're good? See anything? Okay, Brian, go ahead. Sorry. So then, so that's the analysis Carol asked me to do. And then the very last one, Carol said, well, what if we finance this over 30 years? And I'm watching the Board of Public Works meetings, the person from the state said, if you go out 30 years, I believe, and I just heard this the other day before, after I had done this, that I think if I heard it, Marty, you would be charged four tenths of 1% as an interest rate, interest rate, which is extremely low. I thought that was almost like free money if you went on an additional 10 years. This calculation, I thought that the person from the state said, if you went beyond 20 years, you'd be paying four tenths of 1% as an interest rate. And that to me sounds extremely great. This has been my question since the beginning of this. How much would that be? We'd like that be really cheap money. Yeah. Three years. We'd really spread it out. But I think. I'm not sure what to say could do that. But my analysis on the very last page was 4%. Right. And you can see the impact of what that would mean on the same 20.5 million. Maybe the Nats, huh? Some bond rate for this stuff. But typically this, we always do four. And again, you're projecting out a few years. I mean, at 4%, you can see it's quite a significant amount that the interest would be on 20 million would be 50 million? Over 30. Yeah, 15 million. It seemed like that's more than what you've bonded. It seemed like not a great idea. But if you think it's going to be fun. The other question we had, which I put on here, and I know the answer to this. On the state revolving loans, the 20% of the 20 years, 0%. If you only need to apply for one loan, whatever amount it is, say the 38 million. And then, of course, internally, we can parse it out if we were to go with the 0%. I don't think we have to apply for two loans. I think we only have to get one. Yeah. Yeah. I did listen to that, too. And it appears as though we spend the money first. So we'd have to make sure that we don't spend a significant amount of money of our cash and then get reimbursed. In other words, you wouldn't want to spend $5 million, draw down the town's bank accounts, and then get reimbursed. So it really has to be a pretty good understanding of construction timing and the reimbursement cycle. Because if we haven't gone through one state, one before with the pipe that goes with his edge, we'd have to get a sound understanding of the cash flow requirement for that. Because we wouldn't want to be spending $5 to $10 million and then get reimbursed. We could probably only go a couple million, then get reimbursed, get a couple million, get reimbursed. So there's got to be a sound process in place to do that. Before we go off of this, these were the four questions that I put together based on our conversation last time. I hope I got every question everyone wanted. And then do we have any questions on the responses to the questions? And do we have any other new questions for Brian? Before I go on to the next thing, which I hope Brian will stay for the rest of this discussion.
I guess my question, Brian, is if we actually ended up borrowing all of it, both the treatment facility and the MWRA connection, and we're conservatively saying $38 or so million, would I roughly double these numbers? They would definitely go up because things will go up in the future. I mean, instead of looking at $20 million, which is what you're using here throughout, because, you know, we have two projects here, essentially. We have to build a permanent treatment plant at the Happy Hollow Well, and we have to pay for the MWRA connection. And my understanding, the latest numbers, the last time we connected with the Board of Public Works, was the two totals equal $38 million. So if I were to run that analysis versus the $20 million, I'm thinking, is that going to essentially double what people are doing? They did put the $38 million in the numbers. Yeah, but in reality, over the life of the loan, if that happened, you'd be paying far more. The average family will be paying far more than $7,800. Let's go up. Because all these metrics will change in the future. You would have to do 20 separate calculations and add them together. You're probably talking $7,000 to $10,000 at $38 million. $79,000 anyway, $7.9 million, Brian. Yeah.
Okay, thank you. Michael, should I bring up my suggestion or should I say something? Hang on a second. You're going to get a chance to have your suggestions. So we're good on that. All right. There's one thing we haven't done that I would like to – actually, this is going to be worth your turn. I don't – we've gotten a recommendation. We've gotten a request from the Board of Public Works. We've gotten a recommendation from the Finance Committee. We have heard here and there from both the town manager and the finance director. But I think that I wanted to formally do that as part of tonight's discussion next, is to have input from them. And then I want to have a conversation about the PFAS funds and a couple of things before we figure out what else questions we have. So who would like to speak for us, Michael or Brian or Kelsey? Kelsey said no. I'll start with that. I still want to go back and check, based on the types of votes under the Massachusetts General Law, Chapter 59, Section 21C, is the Proposition 2.5. And I know we initially talked under Subsection N, where you can divert some of the fees over to the taxes. The Select Board has that vote. But the Board of Public Works acts about Section K, which is a traditional voter-approved exemption from the debt. So I'm just letting the board know I'm going to rephrase a question in the town of council just to make sure we can do that, because the language is fairly specific about water and sewer debt under Subsection N, but I want to make sure we can still do this under K. When we talked about this in the past, I had expressed some concerns that if it went to the tax rate, some of the nonprofits may avoid paying their fair share. But I know we're also working on a pilot program. But my initial thought was to have this go through the rates so that those using the actual water would pay for it, I realized that could change how much water is drawn. But I've also had some conversations, and I'm going to hand this over to Mr. Keveney in a moment, is that there's some concerns about how this would be paid going forward and how best to protect the town in terms of whether or not we would have to support the board of public works in the payment of those fees? And would it be better, I'd say more risk-averse to borrow maybe the entire amount? So we've had those conversations, and Brian has a couple suggestions. But initially, I thought solely on the rates. If the board is inclined to split it, I think then we have to really go back, as we talked about with this pilot program, to ensure that the nonprofits are going to pay their fair share. So that's something we're working on. It's in process. We'll continue to go there. Mr. Keveney has talked to me about a proposal that might say put it all on its debt. And at that point, I'll hand it over to Brian and his reaction. Do you mind if I just hop in here first? Excuse me. We're saying that we recommended it for town. I know.
So I want to say this, that part of my other part of the memo to Brian was just summarizing what we had said. And I said, the board spent time discussing the financing issue and had not taken a vote. But consensus seemed to be that the board, well, if we were to fund any portion of the debt, it would be via traditional debt exclusion. So, of course, this also went to Michael, which is what he's referring to. I think there was a real huge consensus that we were uncomfortable with that section. And that left the decision to the five of us and the flexibility, which may or may not, our decision may or may not stick with the future board. So, and thus we would need to think about if we went on the April ballot. We are still considering our options, including recommending funding via the water rates to help form our decision. We need your help. So that's where we are. Are we just trying to gather information here? I'm still mulling this in my head as well. I will say this, though, having attended numerous Board of Public Works meetings, that they also are thinking about putting in, where are we going to do something with debt? They are going to put in a nonprofit rate, you know, construction rate or whatever. You're kind of like we have that admin fee or something like that.
Or they may just call it construction rate for everybody and it applies to everyone. They can do that. As long as they have. They can do that. Maybe they could just do, I mean, I think Ann mentioned this, too. They have to do it for everyone. So they're just, you know, also it's in a discussion as an option. But instead of putting it in the rates, for example, they might just call it a construction fee, MWRA construction fee, and then it applies to every account.
I don't know. They were discussing it anyways. To capture those who wouldn't. The whole thing. The whole 38. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. All right. Fine. I'm sorry. Thank you. It's your turn. So I'm talking to my boss.
And figuring out how to fund this. And I always was of the mindset that the water fund should pay for this. Really the whole thing. That was always my thought from the beginning. But in reality, I'm worried about the water fund's ability to make these payments in the future. Given the history of raising rates, given the current fund balance, that if they even were going to pick up the $14 million, the general fund was going to pick up the tax. They would have to have a layer of review over their right set. In other words, Michael would need to be involved or the board of selectmen in ensuring those rates were set to achieve the revenue needed to bring in to pay the debt service. Right now, there is no layer of review that takes place. So I'm in the mindset to do the following. Raise and appropriate the debt as general fund excluded debt. The general fund makes the payments. The enterprise fund on an annual basis pays an indirect to the general fund, reimburses the general fund for the cost of the debt. Because of this reason, if we said $20 million goes to the general fund and $14 million went to water fund, four or five years down the road, if the water fund got into financial trouble and needed a subsidy from the general fund to balance their revenue, which they almost did in 26, we would have to fund that by either free cash or by tax, which is exactly what you don't want to do. You wouldn't want to be paying this debt by giving the water fund a subsidy by tax. That tax would be levy debt. So how do you check kind of all the boxes? Like I said, you're appropriated as general fund debt. You pay it out of excluded debt and you pay the debt related to that. You charge the general, you charge the water fund on an annual basis, the annual debt service. But you would still need to ensure that they set rates properly. Under either scenario, a layer of review needs to take place to ensure that the revenue comes in in the future for the water fund to make those indirect payments. What this saves the town from is to having to jump into making a subsidy payment and impeding an override. Because if you had to pay the water fund by tax, that would have to become part of your future override number. If you had to give them free cash, reoccurring, that would impede your uses of free cash. This kind of checks all the boxes and makes it a case where debt's paid, it's paid by excluded debt, the general fund gets reimbursed. So there's really no hit on the taxes because you're getting the money back from the water fund. But a layer of oversight still needs to take place on the water side to ensure that the rates are set. And the revenue is brought in to meet all of their expenses, including this higher indirect. That, to me, saves the town from dealing with a five-year problem out there where this could come up. And the current state, having about a $1.1 million fund balance, and DOR are almost demanding a subsidy at 26, and they're looking at probably a 30% rate increase in 27. But this kind of gives the town a layer of security that they're not going to be vulnerable to paying a subsidy by levy debt or free cash.
You've heard of another municipality employing this tactic before? Well, we sort of do it with the ambulance fund. I want to say eight years ago, we bought a million-dollar truck. And annually, the ambulance fund pays the general fund, the debt service related to that ambulance fund. The ambulance fund at the time couldn't pay. They didn't have the funds to pay it. So every year, the ambulance fund pays the debt service related to the general fund, plus a normal indirect. So we're currently already doing that. That's why I started to think, why can't we do this with the water fund? So CPC funds the debt service, the Mainstone, same thing. Mainstone pays this directly. The $400, the $371,000 comes from CPC. Yeah, they fund that directly. That's the general fund. But if they were to default, we own that. So when we looked at the tax recap, and I said I had a question on page 48, this was the question I was going to ask. Because on a tax recap, Brian explains it. I mean, I get it, but I want to just add one little extra two sentences here. And on the recap, there's a sentence there that says retained earnings issues. If one of the enterprise funds does not meet their revenue projection or enough to cover their expenditures, when we do the tax recap, Brian has to say, oh, they defaulted by, it's a default by $20,000. That automatically goes on here. It is a tax to the residents, but it's one we never, ever voted on at time meeting because it came, I've got it right, right? It just comes on afterwards if they don't have the funds. Well, let's say the water fund had $100,000 of fund balance. Right. And they overspent, they start the year with $100,000. I was like, I know they got a billion. Let's say it's $100,000. And they went through and they ended up having $200,000 of expenses more than revenue. They would have an actual cash deficit of $100,000. Then DOR would step in and make you raise that on the recap. But if the water fund does have a million dollars, at the end of the year, if expenses exceeded revenues, they still have that million dollars to fall back on. DOR wouldn't make us do anything unless the value of the fund balance was less than the annual loss. I bring this up because this did come up at a recent meeting at the Board of Public Works where they said, should they default for the time we cover it, to which I said.
The town is responsible. That's what I said when I watched you. What? That isn't fair to the taxpayers, sir. So your proposal, and just to summarize it, is that technically all of this is funded through the water rates. However, we carry the paper under the general fund. And then they reimburse us through the indirect. We call it an indirect. In other words, a payment to the town. This protects the town. I will tell you one benefit that I see here is it's funded through the water rates, but because it's coming out of the general fund initially, it's all taxable, deductible on our income tax, right? Yes, it would be on the tax bill. But then you're going to get it to bracket. You're going to get you in the bracket. You're going to be in the bracket now because it's up to $40,000. So questions and comments from the Board on this proposal? Yeah, I have for a while. I put out a memo in 2016 when the embalmer was here, sent a letter to Chris Brown and Mann. And when their fund balance dropped from $4 million to $2.5 million, we had a meeting with them. And the concern was that you've brought down your fund balance almost in half. Just two years later, they used $1.3 million, which Louise and I were against, to buy the meters out of the retainers. So their fund balance dropped at a very fast rate to the point today where it's at a million. So that experience is certainly available to place in the entire box of this project.
That's true water rates. Is there your concern? How did public concern affect the political agency? Well, if I heard you correctly, my concern is the fact that if rates are not set properly, and the proper revenue is not brought in, the fund balance will continue to drop to the point where DOR will step in and say that the fund needs a subsidy, and they can do that. Next question is, how does that affect decisions we have for them? Well, that you really can't control, but I would say the user has the ability to cut down their water, you know, not use the dishwasher five days a week, use it twice, cut back. You know, they can do something to reduce the usage of water. They can do that. The water restrictions, we seem to have those every year. So over a long period of time, we're selling about the same amount of gallons of water because the droughts or the bans have been really consistent over a two-decade period. So you're getting pretty good data on how many gallons the water fund is selling. We could expect that people will start cutting down the usage of water if they want to reduce their water volume. That would be a normal thing for somebody to do. But presumably, the restrictions go away if you've got the demand for the supply with the MWRI. No, no, no. Not entirely. Permit stays in place. We will still be restricted to 68 gallons per person per day. That is our permit. We don't get unlimited. I think others who joined prior to us, the way I understand it, did go to unlimited. But you retain your restrictions. But between Happy Hollow and the MWRI, I mean, the point of going up to the MWRI is that we have insufficient supply, right? Right. We can't meet the current demand, but we cannot exceed what our permit is. So we're only allowed to pump X now per gallon. We're not pumping that now. We're going to bring up to the level that we're allowed to pump, but we're not going to be able to pump beyond what our current permit is. In general, yeah. But you also have the MWRI, if you look to the next. We'll have to get Tom Hulley to give us an answer on this, but there's the permit. I think it's 68 gallons. Well, Madam Chair, you're saying that even if we join the MWRI and we set the formula at the MWRI, what was the success of the 1585, 1585, 85% down a lot of 15% in the level of business, anything that they will continue to impose a lot of resources. No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying that we have – we've got to get someone to answer this by the way I understand it. We have a permit that allows us to pump X amount of gallons per day, per week, per year, whatever it is. Currently, we're not able to do that in the non-detect, but even once we go into MWRI, even if we went 100% MWRI, that limit still stays on what we can pump. That just has nothing to do with if we have restrictions or not. It's how many we can get once we can pump per day, which is why they say to folks who come in and want to put an irrigation system in and then say, what kind of restrictions, I think we need to get that answer from somebody, not me. I'm not explaining – I get it, but I'm not explaining – do you know what the answer is, Brian? I would think there'd be a limitation on how much water the MWRI would allow you with. We could probably assume that, like Tom says, 85% of the water supply is going to be coming out of the existing system. You can assume there's going to be water bins in the future. Does that mean that we can turn on the spigot, the MWRI higher to bring more water in? I don't think so. I think the MWRI caps us at a certain amount, but Tom would have to give more of the color on that. Somebody writing that down. We need that from Tom.
The fan is blocking you out on me, Tom. I used – We think it will be – We actually want to use because of the increased costs of water.
Wait a second. I want to have hop in here. This is a construction program, so the costs are going to be there, regardless of whether we increase or decrease our water usage. Water usage is not part of this. I think what a public book said is when they came in. But in the bills that people get, there'll be a line. That's kind of the additional costs. Maybe it's just the – Debt service. Yeah, it doesn't. Maybe it's just the happy hollow, however we all fit. But the question is, do you anticipate it will be less water used because people haven't paid more? I think the debt service, my understanding, would be the same regardless if you used less water or more water. You're still going to have to pay that debt service fee. We're going to the hotel, right? And they have an all-you-can-eat buffet, right? That's a bad example. If you eat the breakfast or not, it's irrelevant. You're still going to pay the hotel. So I think that's really where we'll – does anyone else have any questions? It's a very interesting thought. So, Brian, how can – how can – how can – how can – how it works to adjust the rates to raise sufficient revenue to pay the debt service? I think going forward, I think the – probably the selectman and through Michael probably needs to be involved in that process because in fiscal 26, there was no rate increase. And DOR, they were looking for a 9% increase in revenue. Through four months, their revenue was almost flat. We're not seeing the growth. So it's important that they increase the rates to bring in the revenue. 27 looks like possibly a 30% increase. And they think you go to the spring budget, you go to spring, you vote the budget, but then you get to June, and the DPW sets a rate to bring in a certain revenue total that many times doesn't agree with what town meeting voted. So they're bringing in – they're voting to bring in less revenue. Right. Not adhering to the town meeting vote. So how do you prevent that under this scenario? I think something needs to go to town meeting, providing that the town manager or the board of selectmen are involved in that process to ensure that the rates are set properly. Can the town meeting oblige board of public works to set the rates properly? Well, there's a special act that established them. So I'm not sure that they – that we can intervene. I'd have to check into that. Yes, you do have proprietaryness on the fact that they are the water commissioners and by state they can set the water rates. However, Tom knows what I'm going to say because he's done this too, isn't he? There's a little thing called the enterprise article, and all enterprise funds have to come before the select board and tell us what their budget is going to be for the preceding year. But we, the select board – this is where we have control. We, the select board, vote to recommend a budget for each of the enterprise funds to town meetings. It's called the enterprise fund. It's in this book. So this is maybe – ordinarily, we sort of rub a stamp that comes through, and maybe this spring we need to be a little – take a good look at this and have it come in. And there's another issue here besides paying – that would be this construction cost. You heard Brian say it last week. Everybody's got to get to 25% on the retained earnings, and they're at 20. So they need to come up with another $200,000 there, maybe over a couple of years, so that – for the fund balance, right? Well, mathematically, that – you know, the percentage right now, they've got about a million. Their budget's going to go from $4 million to $5 million to $6 million to $7 million. Keep it up with this projected MWRA. Right. That percentage is going to keep dropping. So we have to back to that end as well. So maybe what we need – to answer your question, somebody's question, that's where I think we can have a lever. We can say, now, what's happening here? We want these rates up. And then we can have this whole argument and discussion with them. Does that make sense to you? That's all. I've been interested in that with the town concept of applying on this to some end. Right. It's on this issue.
I mean, it does sound like we have a problem. It's a great solution. Very clever. Part of me is – are we tackling the issue? Hang on. And the issue is we need to have a dialogue here about setting rates, expectations, on what the right word is. What are you thinking, Tom? Yeah, another way to – it's another way for this Board of Public Works in the future Board of Public Works to raise the rates sufficient to meet the debt service. And – That's it like that. Yeah.
The – what's necessary and sufficient for operating the debt service and, as you say, on balance. Also, I wonder if – if the current Board of Public Works or if there's an agreement to the Board of Public Works is the binding on future Boards of Public Works. Exactly. Another question, I guess, is, you know, this equity question.
So the – the debt service is paid.
It's really kind of part of tax bill that people get paid for. It's based on the assessed value. So you have 2,000 of assessed – of equal assessed value. One concerns a little water. So it's a lot of – you know, are the rates compensated? But is there an imbalance between these two homeowners paying the debt service or is the fact that this is the potential in the water consumption? I think in the – I think in the chart that we've seen, they are assigning a different cost – percent of the consumption cost to each tier. Like tier one, if you – we had this on our packet last time. Tier one, I think you – if your budget bill is under 500, it's going up 700 between the – in-line capital costs for things like the second water tank plus the MWRA. Well, the budget as a whole is made for it, but the individual homeowners, I suspect – Say that again. I suspect that, you know, as you say, there are various categories based on consumption, different rates based on – and if the water rates are appropriately adjusted, so there is sufficient – a gross amount of sufficient revenue to pay the annual debt service. But the individual homeowners having the identical assessed value are paying an identical amount toward the debt service, even though their consumption is different. So the town government is – so the town itself isn't equal from the enterprise fund, but the individual homeowners are still – Well, I mean, I think it's the same with anything. I mean, we have road construction, and we put in, you know, between the money to get 700, 800, sometimes a million dollars towards roads construction. We all contribute to that cost, even though we may not – in fact, we definitely probably don't live on all those roads that get repaired each year. We may not even utilize those roads as part of running our municipality. But the difference is that with this particular amount, we're consuming it. No, this is just the construction cost. The $38 million is just the construction cost. Then your water bill is on – you know, your water usage is added on.
No? Well, it's true. The construction cost is the construction cost. Right. And $38 million someplace. Right. So in the symbol of workers, how are we paying it back? If it were all in the water rates, it would be – the water bill would reflect the consumption and the, you know, pro rata share of the debt service. But the taxes, I don't think they do it. They pay them to be the valuable account. Likewise, on the non-profit, the for-profit. Right. Am I not saying it right? Yeah, he's right. If he had to say a $2 million home, they'd be paying a tax bill that's greater than a million-dollar home, they would be an imbalance. If it all went on the taxes, that the owner of the $3 million home would be paying a higher share of the debt simply because the value was home as opposed to – if it all was on – if the entire amount was on the water fund, the user would be paying it based on consumption. It would be – it would be totally equitable. But in this case, this is going to be – excuse me, this is going to be in the water rates technically. We're just providing the funding because they're reimbursing us. How they parse it out, those are the tiers. This is your water consumption rate. This is your construction rate. And that's number – tier one. That's your price. But even my analysis is – Bill's right. What I described as a way to do it is it's not an equitable charge to the homeowner because the person with the $3 million home will be paying more than one – but the one thing I mean that the person with the $3 million home may not even have any kids in the house. With a somebody with a million-dollar home, they'd have four kids and use a lot of water. It's on the tax bill. We're going to – so it's – they would be paying a higher share. It would not be equitable. I've got to think about this. If it was on the water bill, then they would be paying based on usage consumption. And you could create a debt service charge based on – right. You know, your trends on how much gallons per day you use. If your bill you use 100 gallons a day, you could do something like that. And that way you catch the nonprofits and some of the commercial entities that use even more. But that would just be your debt service. It would be calculated one time and you can pay. See, the thing is, to me, we're just a vehicle. We're like the bank, literally. How they calculate the rates and what everyone pays is actually still going to be at the water department calculating the rates. We've said you've got to raise this much money. And how they charge on the different tiers is up to them. Mike, saying it differently. They break it up by, I think, three tiers, if not four, four tiers. And within each tier, there's a consumption amount. You know, I forget what Tony uses. I say gallon. But there's another measurement they use. And they just simply apply various rates. Right. That consumption to come up with a number. That's how they do it. And so they're going to say, this is the total amount. Well, I don't think you have, if the total cost was born, or the total cost was born, I think you don't have these issues of nonprofit. So, for example, the questions, your concern, which is a legitimate one, probably even though the rates would be insufficient to, if it was sort of the span, the operating expense, on balance, threshold. And other capital projects that they are on. They have a lead program that's coming. They've got to fund this like a million dollars.
All right. So, where does this leave us? We have a couple of questions for town council. We have a question for Tom on the permit. And.
I have nothing to do with that. Okay. Is it going to be, will we hit this page or this page? Go ahead.
The water fund? It was, I believe, before 2013. It became an enterprise fund in 2013. We tried for that. I think it was an arm of the general fund. It was hard to figure out when I looked at the stuff. So, what if it was a town that burned? Funded by. And then the money would come in as a local receipt. Mm-hmm. And. It's going to be the finance director. And the finance committee would recommend the budget. That would be part of that. Plus, that is a settlement of work. You probably still have to do something with that chapter. They would still be involved with the rate set. The money would come in as a local receipt, as opposed to what our revenue would come in the general fund. Prior to 2013, that's exactly what happened. So, I mean, that is an option to, you know, dissolve it as an enterprise fund. Bring it in as a DPW department, which it was previously. But I think that you probably have to go back to DPW rate setting requirement of the bylaw. And do we have to then take it to town meeting? Because wouldn't we have voted the enterprise fund? We create them at town meeting, the select board recommends. I think I'm looking at Tom. Does that sound correct? We have to go to town meeting. We have to go to town meeting. Yeah. So, we would have to have a really good reason why we felt that was appropriate. We're uncomfortable with the current budgeting process, but we also haven't had a really good conversation, you know, I think, with the board about that. So, perhaps that's our first step. Why do you like that idea? Why are you suggesting it? What's the advantage? The advantage is you're not relying on the trustees of the enterprise fund or the directors of the enterprise fund to raise the rights. So, right now, there's a disconnect between the entity that raises the rent and the entity that pays the debt service. So, they will be doing the same.
Well, to be honest with you, the debt service from this construction project does not start until FY29, right? The debt service from the end of the day. The debt service starts fiscal 29. Fiscal 29. When we're going into, we'll be talking about 27. So, we technically could go to town, you know, do some more due diligence on this once we get this approved and perhaps take whatever steps we felt, if we felt that was the way we wanted to go.
And gradually, for saying those people who are working on this alternatively, it's a very interesting. The idea, I think, out of the box, and I think it addresses the sufficiency of the borderline to pay the debt service. I guess I still have the question of the equity, as did from the four parts and the non-profit. But I hear you, Michael, that drove on the non-profits to a paper pilot, but they're not obliged to do that. And we've got a couple of proposed projects, whether it's non-profits. But I think, excuse me, did Michael have a suggestion that we do on this project per gallon rate? Just take the whole thing. So, you have your usage. I used 300 gallons. But now, on top of that, kind of like I'm going to get that electric bill, the delivery fee or whatever. This would be my MWRA construction fee would be X dollars times my 300. Wouldn't that be equitable?
Yeah, but we do go to the property terms. Well, we can, because we can have them set the rates as the water commissioners and we can still run this through the general fund, because they're only reimbursing us. They're saying, well, we need $6 million to pay the debt service for this year. We pay it. But then we say, hello, you're going to pay us back. Then they have to set this rate over here that we want them to make it be equitable. So, then they do, I like Michael's idea, this per end-of-way construction fee. It actually, technically, it goes away after X years, long after we're probably still there. I thought that, I think, if the board thinks that sounds reasonable, of course, we'd have to talk to the Board of Public Works, but.
When you anticipate a decision on your end, you've got to take a look. Oh, I'm not going to make it. No, I said, I would like us to make a decision. You know, in December, maybe next meeting. When we had the agenda meeting, my trusty assistant here said, oh, we're just going to vote it this week. I said, well, that sounds lovely. We'll vote on the agenda. I did look at him like this. Really? Okay.
So, I think we'd like to do it. I'd like to do it. I was hoping next meeting, if not the 15th. The Board of Public Works needs to be able to put their article together. So, they need to know. I mean, the text could read, authorize the town to borrow or support, and then it will be through. And then you could list the possible funding sources, debt, debt, water rates, whatever. And then we can, you know, just get it through the town meeting simply. But we need to be sure. The motion has to say it. I think it's good that people know that they can. But again, it's not coming into plan until FY29. You know what, though? You've never told me, you know, our book is hard. I think you want to make decisions now. Right. It's hard decisions. Right. So, don't vote. I have no problem with that. Don't ask me to vote tonight. Is anybody ready to vote tonight? Just not. No. Okay. So, Brian, I think we need to, I think we had a couple questions here. One for Tom, a couple for town council. Maybe we kind of work on, sorry. Yes. What are our next steps, though? I don't see. I don't either. I'm trying to get us to a pen. There's not an easy solution. Would it be helpful to have Tom Holder?
And this is going to be one of the things that we've talked about. Tom Holder, keep in touch with something that we've got to be directed throughout the state.
I've seen what's worked, what has worked, how it has worked out, how it has worked out. He may be helpful in that. Would it also be helpful to sort of, in a simple way, number of advantages, disadvantage of each product?
Could you do that for us, Brian? Proposing the cons? I have to get all the options. Make sure I get them all. On this proposal, your own suggestion is what I think. That's what you want, the pros and the cons on the, Brian's suggestion? Yeah. I mean, we could each do our own. Okay. You know, if one option would be 100% to have the advantage of sort of clarity and straightforward. The Brian, the professor Brian described it as the potential that all the funding, the water revenues is sufficient to be in most of the town for the good service. But we wouldn't plan to do that, number one and number two. Is it equitable? It's not, it's not so, it would be 100% water, but if you've got revenue in the same place. But again, is there any guarantee that the rates would be said such that it would be good? Well, Tom did mention that, well, Carol said, it is your article. Selecting to bring the enterprise fund budget to article, maybe we can ask town council. A select board can also, let's say demand, but have some language in there that rates would be set an acceptable amount to bring in the state of revenue in order to town meeting. Because what goes to town meeting is a revenue number, one number. But behind that is revenue totals for each one of the line items. And that is submitted to us early on. So we know exactly how much money for a line item they want to bring on. Since it already is your article, maybe town council can add more to the article. It puts control over the selectment that says basically, you will bring in this money to the setting of sufficient rates. So when they get to the June, which is when they set the rates, they need to bring in a specific number. What we're talking about is the water usage charges. It's 95% of the revenue. So maybe town council can add some language to the article that ensures that the proper revenue would be brought in. That way, the debt service remains in the water fund. We all don't want to be five years down the road. But the general fund has to jump in and give them the money because that's just going to impede the town services. Maybe Michael can reach out to town council and see if there's something that can do that. I think, Brian, we might, if we did that, we would probably want to carve that out as a separate article because we're not going to have that same language for other enterprise funds. So for the transportation, the wastewater, we're not going to end the recreation. We're not going to say, or is that okay language to put on all of them? I think it might be, we can check with Captain Murray, but you are bringing a specific number to town meeting, to raise. You should be able to instruct the border public works to ensure that the rates are set properly to bring in that specific number. Yeah. That's something less than that. The idea that you water divide is effectively, that the water rates should be sufficient for a hundred percent of it. Yeah. That's what my thought was all about. So, we're adding this layer of the town that, you know, exactly, just to ensure, I guess, that hopefully the problem is for the patient. I think if we're going this far, it should say debt service, operating expenses, as well as maintaining the general fund. Yeah. Oh, like fund balance. Yeah. Yeah. Fund balance. Yeah. So, we ask for those to line item items. So, should we ask for all of them to join us as well? Yeah. And you could have a second article, just for the debt service for the law. I mean, you have an article for the enterprise funds, for their operating expenses. You could have another article for the water fund, simply for the debt service and have the language in there. I think I like Michael's approach, but we'll see what telecommunications says. Yeah. It's the main item. It's the main item. It's the main item. It's the main item. The telecommunications is the darkest. That's the next item. Mr. Holder. My view, but. Okay. So, I do want to repeat. Would you like telecommunications plus Mr. Holder here, or? No. Okay. Yeah. Well, this is it. All right. But I agree with Bill that I'm not really sure where. I'm going to be very optimistic. Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is it. All right. But I agree with Bill that I'm not really sure where. I'm going to be very optimistic, which is my job. We're going to get closer to a decision next time. So, everybody. I'm looking at Doug. Everybody can make Doug be able to say to me, we're going to vote this one. Yeah. No, I think we need. I do want to make a decision. I really think it's a very difficult. Before we go off this topic, I do think we have to talk about one thing, which is the funds that are coming in from the PFAS litigation. Now, we are still in, last we were, we were still in executive session about this. I'm not sure. I'm looking at this to tell manager here that is that something we have to say in the executive session. But I think we need to make a decision as those funds come in, what we think we would like to do, you know, with them. That would be part of the article? I think it would be part of the article myself that we would apply that I would envision it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Funding sources would include, if we chose, we wanted to apply it to the total thing. And obviously, there's an awful lot. We still have to put the 38 million. There's an awful lot of contingency. It's like 30% in this project. And everybody, I think, is kind of hoping that we may see a lesser finish, especially if we have a strong project manager. But I do think we also have to have that PFAS discussion. We still have the same executive. Can we put it out in public now? Because I don't know if it's a good point. Well, I will double check. I think we've signed off on many of the settlements. Mr. Kevin, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think we're starting, we have been receiving funds. I don't think the board is going to show that out of us. Usually it comes to the town. It comes to the town. Exactly. The town for the public works. Well, this is why I said I want to have this conversation, but I'm not sure whether we can have it in open or we can have it in executive. But it's on my agenda as part of this financing question of when we need to resolve. I think we can. I'm inclined to believe we could do an open session. But when I speak to Attorney Murray, I will. I will put them in for the next. But I will tell you when we participated in the opioid settlement discussion, there were guidelines that were promulgated by individual states, attorneys general, and we're limited to how we can spend those type of funds. I'm not aware that there was any, just off the top of my head, requirements that that be spent for mitigation. But I would imagine it would make sense if we received those because of the hazards and the cost of the town for the PFAS that it'd go to some level of mitigation. Then we'll move us to the next item if we all go. Thank you, Brian, very much. Thank you, Brian. You really helped us, Brian. And guess what? We'll probably reward you and have you come back on this topic. Thank you so much. Good night. Good night. All right. So the next one is real quick. Michael wants to just give us a heads up on what has happened with the Collins Center. We got to get a grant and some good news and that would be a good topic for right now. So this is now on the select board page under external reports. You can find a copy of this combined organizational operational review. Again, this was done with grant money that we had worked with the school department and just coincidentally today is a photocopy. We'll put it in your correspondence. We received a hand signed note from the office of the governor, from the Lieutenant Governor, Kim Driscoll, just commending us on performing this. Looking at the key short term and long term benefits to the town of Whelan and that we successfully utilize this grant for best practices. We participated starting back in December of last year with the Collins Center. There was numerous interviews done staff at all different levels. I participated in some various staff members participated in some. Initially, we were looking at human resources facilities and payroll. They gave a general overview. They talked about how there's still a lot of silos and communication issues. They looked at what was going on with the human resources. Then delved into payroll and a little bit of IT as well as facilities. And they made some recommendations. They provided us some draft work charts. And I'm happy to say that concurrent with their review, working with the, we have Michael Fay who's new. Nick Lombardi is our new IT director. Dr. David Fleischman and I have been working together on a lot of issues. They have a new business manager up there. We've been working with our budget working group and Mr. Keveney. We were starting to anticipate some of the same issues. So when we had some turnover, for example, in our human resources, they suggested we eliminate the benefit manager position. And when that person retired, we didn't fill it. We promoted Ms. Ryan to be a human resources director. We hired in Ratana So, who is going to be our human resources specialist. So we've already started to follow what they're doing. We're our two new IT personnel directors, both in the school and the towns. They're starting to collaborate. We're looking at ways to improve some of the service delivery there. We're contemplating whether there's something we can do with payroll. Mr. Keveney has talked before with me about some ideas. I can tell you that Mr. Fay has worked closely with the school department in helping to realign the organizational chart there, eliminating some of the confusion that was here in the previous administration as to who reports to who. We've implemented a work order system, which wasn't there before. And that has really helped to define people's responsibilities and who's reporting to who, as well as tracking the progress and making sure that we are getting on task and helping to complete many of these capital projects that have been in the backlog. So, it is a useful guide. We're starting to implement it. I didn't make any slides. Because I know it's like when Whitney is a big fan and I just couldn't get to it. But if you go through, there are some diagrams of some proposed org charts. And I'm happy to give an update. We only received this in around September timeframe, but we're working on this. And I'm happy to give updates along the way as we progress. And I do want to tell you that when he asked if he could put slides, I said yes, but brief. And then he gave you no slides. Didn't I say brief? No, I did. Thank you. Well, I decided the letter, the timely letter from the Lieutenant Deverell was the best show and tell. And we'll put that in your correspondence. We're a little fine. So, I'm going to tell you, we are tabling number eight. A note on that earlier. So, now the next big thing we really have to do here is we want to start and we want to start thinking about the warrant. This is one of our objectives is to streamline the warrant and also we need to get the process rolling. So, on December 1st, which is our next meeting, the calendar starts because we are going to have a part of our discussion will be to open it. So, what we did first was we put together a team. It's good. I just lost both things. We put together a team of four folks, two from the select board, myself and Doug, and then two from the staff, Kelsey and Jaylen. And so, of course, Kelsey and I get ready, Kelsey. I'm senior veterans of this and teaming process. And, but we felt, you know, it's important for others to know how to do it. And in Jaylen's new role, this is something she will be taking on eventually by herself. But anyway, for this year, we have a four person team to work on this. And the first thing we did was Kelsey and Jaylen put together this draft calendar. It's pretty much last year's, although again, we've cleaned it up a little bit more. And I think it's ready to roll and we need to, do we have to vote on this? You don't have to vote on it at all. So, we're going to distribute this. I've had a couple of department heads ask, if you see something that's not quite right, just let us know. It is, like Michael just said, a guide. So, we get from A to Z and we know the dates. And it kind of covers a lot of things in here. And that's basically it. So, does anyone have any comments on the calendar? Other than it's fabulous. Did you want to add anything? No. Okay. No, I think it's pretty straightforward. It's basically the same calendar we've been working with, with some edits for the last three years. We've cleaned it up quite a bit, I think, over the last couple of years. I do want to say on the very bottom, the start time is at 6.45. And I think at other meetings, we said we would probably start 6.30 this year. So, are we all in agreement to that, 6.30? Yes. So, what did I tell you? What parts of the calendar? Yeah. Do you want to say something about the deadline for the petitions? I think it's in there, isn't it? Because it's, we changed that by town code last year. So, it's up here on February? Yeah, it's February 5th. 17th? Well, deadline for any changes that an article sponsor petition requests to make to the article text for town code. That was last year. We voted that in. That has a specific number of days. It's 20-something? I think we gave them three weeks. It's there. It's there. It's there. Answer my question. It's there. It is. And then there's an additional further down where they can put in a sponsor's report to address concerns. So, there's two. But they can't submit the 21 submissions and redo it after the three weeks. Because they'll have already had an opportunity to meet with job officers. Anyone else have anything on that? And then we're going to go to 645. So, you want to switch that, Kelsey? Yep. Okay. Perfect. Okay. So, then the next thing is that I had talked, we talked about the subjective of streamlining the warrant. I did bring copies here. Anybody who wants to have a look, we have to return them though, because they belong to the others. And I think the board had said, why don't you go off and come up with some suggestions and some revisions to the warrant. Okay. So, this is the sheet. And what I did was I did them in order and we see items appear like in the court. And because you're going to ask me, Tom, I had worked with the finance committee chair. I had worked, obviously, with Kelsey and other staff members. I had worked with the moderator and somebody else on CPC before I had made my original comments. And then I've gone back and revisited with them now that we've come up with this list. So, the real goal here is we would like to keep the quality here and reduce the quantity. And then I gave a few suggestions where I thought we would get some reductions. The finance committee is more than happy to have a shorter report. They also feel that it's a lot. Maybe people aren't really reading it. Maybe a little less would be more. So, they're going to work on that. On our standard articles, we often find that when the applications come in, they'll have four or five or six closing cards. Because they just get cut and pasted. And we don't necessarily need them for a standard article. If it's new business, we do. So, we're going to try to cut that back down. New business articles, I think, need a little bit more information sometimes. Because, say, it's a zoning article or something changing in town. That makes more sense. And the finance committee plans to make greater use of this no financial impact articles. This is when there's no big finance committee report. There's no pros. There's no cons. It's just that 150 words that we put out, which we did on several articles. But they're planning on doing even more of those, which I think will help us reduce some of this. Do you have a question? Okay. And then, I have talked to the, on the budget article, if you look at it, and I know I didn't have to solve that. Chelsea will tell you, it is a huge, a huge, huge formatting issue. But in the budget itself, if you'll notice, it's really, really large point, as opposed to the rest of the book. It probably could be, if we can do it, we'll reduce that, you know, probably reduce a page. It makes it unreadable. It makes it unreadable. It makes it unreadable. That's the reason it's so big. But it's a good idea while it lasted. So, yeah. Thank you. And then on the community preservation, they're going to reduce it to two articles. I think we need to look at this if we want to have this in consent or not. But I think that was where all the questions came last year on consent. So maybe we do two articles, one for the transfers and the appropriations, and then we use a chart by funding. So like the one really long article, like three or four pages, but we'll eliminate a lot of the repetition of the boilerplate language. And then the moderator's rule, am I going too fast? I'm going fast because it's late, but I'm hoping that you have questions or changes. The moderator's rules, we think we're going to suggest that we print a few copies for use at town meeting by the select board, the town manager, the assistant town manager, town council, finance director, and then have a few upfront for residents and replace those with just a short explanation. They have where to find the moderator's rules. And then the same thing for the slides, rules for the slides. And we think that'll probably save us about seven or eight pages as well. There'll be a link there for them to find them. I think not too many people use them, but you do. We did. We didn't use them last year. And then on the reports, maybe we can try to standardize some of the spacing. Some of the ones that come in have a lot of spacing on them. And the best, here's the best part right here. We're going on a word diet. When we see the write ups, when they come into us, you know, they're going on and on and on and on. We just need to say to them, send them to us. Can we make this a little short? Can we make this? Do we really need all these points so that they don't get voted and then get sent into the town manager's office? And then what's everybody think? Good. Good. Everybody's willing to tell them. Yep. Everybody's willing to push back on the diet. Okay. The other thing is, I wanted to sort of think ahead is that over the last six, eight months, we've identified about 10 or 11 items that we might do for warrant articles. I wanted to go back to the list, make sure there are still items we want to do. And then I'm going to tell you that I spoke to the chair of the finance committee, and most of the ones that are on this list are going to be no financial impacts. Which rather than us and staff spend time to put the whole article write-up in, we're going to start with the 150-word submission. And that will be our submission. So this is good. Everyone's good on this so far. I think we'll save some time here. Yeah. Let's go through this list. You know, I need Michael and Kelsey to just time in if we're going to be able to do these or if we've had changes and, you know, this is not the right timing on these so that we can have these go forward or not. So we've said quite a few home rule ones. One is for green burials. That's so good. Yep. Okay. I don't have this number here. This chapter, what is it? 55. Section 18B that allows the select board to provide residents info and balance. Mailing up. Yeah. What's the? Chapter 53. 53. Okay. Anybody okay with that one? Okay. Next one I have is, these are two good ones. We have additional liquor licenses and also authorized select board to convert the wine beers to all alcohol. Is that on those? And I've talked to our delegation and town council. I've done the additional liquor licenses in previous communities, so I have template that we can use. But with the terrain coming into town, they took our last all alcohol restaurant license. And as select board member Faye alluded, the new owners of town center would like to develop some of the vacant properties they have. And I'm sure with all of this new attention, there may be other folks as well. So we would like to, uh, up our quota. Um, and I think also this might have been one you had suggested was this a bait tax up to 20 bucks, the housekeeping item. It's the treasure collector who suggested it, but yes. I'm sorry. It was the treasure collector who suggested it because it would help her. Right. They're not allowed to waive anything, so it would help them. Great. Um, at least, um, um, this might be one we don't have the time to do, uh, chapter 21 board of assessors. Take another stab at it. Sorry? We could take another stab at it. Good. Or we could maybe put that in for next year. Mm-hmm. Home rule. I think this was allow for print free digital legal mode. Dirty road. Dirty road. Beautiful. Um, miscellaneous properties. Michael, I think you mentioned it. And then you, I think you're unmentioning it. Is this you? I have, I think one. At first we thought we may have more, but as they alluded, the, uh, the town engineers said we're going to do an assessment of a lot of these miscellaneous properties, especially around Dudley Pond. Right. To ensure they don't have future needs for them. So. That's a sale. Um, yes, we took a lot of properties in the fifties and sixties, condemn them because they were rundown camps essentially. And we've had people that want to buy them so that they can say, put on an addition or a garage, but we also have to be mindful that if we ever put sewerage or we have to widen those roads, we might need some of that property. So, uh, uh, engineers said they would do an assessment for me, whether they have any interest in the ones before we put them on for general sale. So that one, we still have one. I think I still have one that we can put on there. Um, I know you haven't given us this one last week street acceptances that usually comes from border. But it's the same thing. I'm asking them to check their roles to see if they have anything that's, but so completed the bonds and satisfied. And then the next one is, is new this time. We've not heard this before. So Michael will explain to you what this is. The band Bitcoin ATMs. Um, I know other people have been asking for that. That was just something that was forwarded to, uh, families in communities. A lot of families are doing it because of, um, yes, I was going to say that I was going to try and say it both very easily, but yes, to prevent scams of our citizen group. And then the last one we have is this actually is one. We actually get a recommendation from Brian on. So we'll ask him. Um, I can, I can ask them. I'll kill zero. I can ask them, but there was a push from the finance committee last year. Cause I believe there was a consultation with town council that we need to process the enterprise capital, uh, budgets different, then separately from the operating where we kind of had them commingled, I think before. So we had like two or three options. One was to include it in the enterprise article with just a couple more accept motions. Second was to put it as a separate article. And then the third was to include it into the operating budget, omnibus budget article. And I think that's where it was motion number four. I believe that was Brian's preference last year, but we were asked. We were asked to look at this again. And I think I'll just get a recommendation from Brian on that. Uh, we're going to have a lot of quite a few new ones. Maybe, maybe we just keep in the omnibus budget again for another year. Then we make another one. So, um, okay. Does everybody have any more things they think we should not pursue on this list? No. Yeah. One of the things we previously, you know, excuse me, was, uh, to try to advance, you know, but I don't suggest that which is holiday road, housing on holiday road. So, you know, it involves school committee. So land belongs to the school committee already, currently? We both. Does it? Yes. So they have to, the first step is, they have to declare the land surplus. And then it goes to . No? Agree to, uh, agree to support. And for . Oh, I don't. Yeah. Well, I think it's a lawsuit that came out about it. Um, the original. Way back. Yeah. Cause you have to, I think that's what hinged on it was whether the school committee gave up or the vote at town meeting was a correct authorization of giving up the land. Like the school committee transferring the land. So there was a, there was a lawsuit about the specific property in the late 80s, early 90s. One, I don't know off the top of my head, but I believe that the crux argument of that lawsuit was that the land wasn't properly transferred at town meeting. That's just my, that's what I will. From the school committee to, I think the school committee rec department and the select board were involved. I'm not thinking of the same. That happened over on DPW. Yeah. That happened then. Well, that was. It happened back in the 80s. I was not aware of that. Yeah. Let me try to. But maybe we could have someone look at the first section. And then maybe that's. Yeah. I'm going to put this on my list here because I think that that still circles. Okay. Right. So I think for the moment we're rolling here on town meeting. We're going to pass over the number eight, the non-unicipal policy. Oh, I passed. I did that already. Now we're on the session and maybe potential additional revenue ideas. We are going to pass over on the draft pilot program until next meeting or the one after. But I personally am recommending now that I have done on behalf of the board about 20 hearings this year. We pay $100. The town pays about $100 for each one of these legal notices. I don't think that should be our cost. So they've done a little bit of research. I think the staff would have liked to done a little more research, but I would like to ask the board to review and vote on instituting $125 public hearing fee, which would be the fee for the ad and then the labor to do it. Subject to, if we determine that it should be some other figure, we can change it at another time. But I don't think I can make some motion, can I? And it would be effective January 1st, because I've got a couple more coming in January 1st. I mean, Madam Chair, one of the things I think we also talked about, or at least I know staff talked about it, that would be the initial hearing fee. And if and if they ask to continue, there should be a continuance fee that covers illegal posting the second time so that the town is not eating the cost. How about her hearing? What is this for utilities and licences? Upper Towns is charging. We've done about 20 of these. We've spent $2,000 of our budget. Is that for all the boards, too, or just the select board? Oh, good question. And I want to think that affects other boards. That it might be baked into certain fees that they already charge. I haven't done. I haven't. Sorry to speak out of turn, but yeah. I don't like that, though. Let me put it on my note here to do a little research. Yeah. Yeah, right. Well, that's right. Because we decide. I don't want to make it for all the topics, as long as we understand. Yeah. So I'd like a motion, if possible, to institute an hearing fee for select board hearings, and per fee $125 affected January 1, 26. Did I say it wrong? I think it's something that would be appropriate for other boards. But some of them might already have to be in place. If we can, if we can. If our board came, institute free for all the other boards. I think we should try this on that, too. I don't want to make this into a long delay here. I think, Kelsey, did you just say you think some of the boards might already be doing it? I say might because I haven't done any search to tell you either way. We can put it on my note. Definitely. I'd rather know before we. Yeah, but I've got to do it 30 days. I'd like to have the motion so we get it in, and then we can adjust it if we have to. So I move that the select board vote to institute a $125 public hearing fee, which would apply to any public hearings before our board, such as those seeking a liquor license. And that we would also apply for any continuance requests on behalf of the petition. But not only. Yeah. Thank you for the discussion. All right. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Thank you. Okay. On the town managers report. Thank you, Madam Chair. I will try and be brief here. What we have listed, as many of you know, we had what initially was supposed to be a community conversation with the Middlesex County District Attorney, Mary Ann Ryan. And in light of the unfortunate incident that happened at Wayland High School, it turned into a broader discussion about race and discrimination in the community. It was well attended. It was sponsored by the HR DEI committees of both Sudbury and Wayland, as well as the two respective police departments. Our town moderator, Miranda Jones, was there to moderate. And DA Ryan, as well as Dr. Fleischman, answered a lot of questions. I answered a few on behalf of the town. There's still more work to do. I had some follow-up communications with some of the other attendees. Also from the rally that happened in school the other day, I received an invitation from the Wayland Interfaith Association. So I'll be attending a meeting with Rabbi Danny and some of the other leaders in town next month to continue this discussion. So I know it's something that I'm working collaboratively with the schools, as well as Chief Berman and the DA's office. And I can't really comment anymore. But it was a productive event that night, I think, to allow a lot of people to voice their concerns and provide feedback to the town and something that we can build upon. Similarly, we had Veterans Day last week. It was a well-attended event. Select Board Member Brensley was one of the speakers. Lieutenant Colonel Reuben Joseph from the Natick Personnel Center came over and spoke, as well as Mr. Turner. And we had Representative Linsky. It was rather cold, so we moved the ceremony indoors. But it was well-attended. And we owe a debt of gratitude to all those who have served. In your supplemental packet, you would have received a copy of the frequently asked questions regarding the upcoming special election on December 11th. Staff and I had worked on that last week, and we had sent it off to town council just to review it to ensure that we weren't going to be in violation of any of the campaign or ethics laws. We had hoped to have it out today. We will more likely have it tomorrow. If the Board has any feedback, please feel free to share it with us. It was done in a professional, straightforward manner so that it was just trying to answer basic questions about why we're doing this, what Proposition 2.5 is, et cetera. Also on here is pension obligation bonds. You should have a memorandum from Mr. Kemeny looking at what some towns have done are pension obligation bonds, which you look at the entire amount of the monies that are being assessed by the Middlesex County Retirement Board and the rate you would be paying and the interest that you might receive on your income and how you'd be paying that off. And you take calculated risk at borrowing that money and hopefully paying it off at a lower rate, especially when the rates are a little bit lower now. It's in his wheelhouse, and I encourage you to read his memorandum, and we can have him back at another time to ask some questions. In terms of recap, a couple things. It was in the consent, but we did go back based on Select Board Member Whitney's question. And I did get town council to get me an updated contract for the pair corporation. He would have some concerns, so we will use that contract going forward. And also today, there was an email exchange. Select Board Member Whitney is a liaison with the Energy and Climate Committee. There is a bill that is before the House at Beacon Hill, which would essentially limit some of the goals and standards that have been established in the state to reduce greenhouse gases and become more energy efficient. And both the Energy and Climate Commission, as well as our new sustainability manager, have asked that I sign on on the letter. And I indicated I would mention it here this evening. I guess there's a draft that other town managers have used just writing to ask that the legislature oppose this because it's inconsistent with the goals the town adopted in our own climate action mobilization plan. Unless the board had any concerns or opposition, I am going to work on the draft tomorrow with our sustainability manager and send it to our delegation, asking them to to to to oppose this this bill, which would got many of the climate initiatives that have already been taken in the Commonwealth. Thank you, Michael. Anybody have any questions? Thank you, Michael. Does anyone have any questions for Mr. Paul? No. I have some feedback on the. I'm sorry. Go ahead. Oh, OK. So everybody said no on that. OK. I have some comments on the on the FAQs, but I have to phrase them as questions or I can say them in my reports, one or the other. They're very, very technical, which I understand we have to be. And it refers to a one point eight million dollar shortfall. But and that refers to being the for being asked to, you know, look at reclassifying the debt. But it doesn't also say that the board was also asked to support bands versus bonds, which helped reduce the one point eight shortfall and also doesn't say in here. So I don't know why we didn't include that, because that would explain we're looking at a million dollar shortfall or less. And also there was a that the cost, the savings or whatever, the change here, the seven hundred thousand is not mentioned in here anywhere. So it just needs to get that question needs to connect the dots. That first question is to say, well, it doesn't answer the why. Right. It explains all the pieces, but it doesn't connect the dots. Thank you. So when you read that long paragraph, you still don't really understand why. Right. And I put that right up front. And then and then that person can connect the dots. And then and when it says if I vote yes, I think we have to say we're not just creating additional level. We're saying we are conditioning, creating an additional seven hundred thousand dollars a levy that can be utilized for the town to utilize as needed. Otherwise, if I'm reading this and I'm a resident, which obviously I am, I have no idea what I'm voting on still. So I like that. I like Doug's phrase better. I don't think we've connected the dots. And that's the most important question. Do you mind just read them? I think it took me a second. The seven hundred thousand is the anticipated savings in that point. Seven and that number will go down a little by little. Yeah. You don't take that away. Right. But if you wouldn't mind just sharing some of your thoughts in a quick email and we'll work on it tomorrow. Would the board be comfortable if Doug and I kind of worked on these thoughts, integrated our suggestions into these? And hopefully that'd be gleeful. Right. Right. Gleeful. I thought you said, how are we going to see these notes? Oh, we'll send them out to you. But OK. Would that work for everybody? Because I think we've kind of got some news. Just give us some ideas. It would be better. OK. All right. Are we good with that? No other questions? But really OK? I just reserve the right to . Thank you. Doug will take over your situation for you. All right. Where are we? Consent we did. We'll get rid of all Oxford commas. I don't know. There's multiple authors on that. I'm going to do that. We're running behind. I'm going to table the minutes until the next meeting. Does anybody have any comments on the correspondence? If you do, I'm tabling that. No? OK. Siteboards reports and concerns. Does anybody have any reports and concerns? No. I think we do. Right. Yeah. So do you want to go first? Sure. Several of us from the board attended. What became a community conversation hosted by the district attorney. It was a difficult conversation. I think there was a lot of vulnerability by different members of both the Sudbury and Wayland public. I thought for some very difficult issues, obviously, involving race. I was proud of Michael and Dr. Fleischman, obviously, the D.A. for standing up there and answering a whole host of what are not easy topics to discuss. But I think it was a productive discussion. And I'm very glad that that happened to have been scheduled several months ago. For me, I think the timing worked out well because I think that provided a much needed outlet. So I'm going to leave it there. Did you want? So I'm going to say I was grateful that Doug and Bill joined me. I want to know if you wanted to comment first from this. OK. So Mr. Attorney Ryan spoke about first what that was the original intent of the program was. What the state's doing, you know, on and it also had all sorts of graphs when having above crimes and what happened is occurring everywhere and do. And then she talked a lot. And then there was a couple of things and a couple of legislations needs a couple of tweaks. So they were putting those bills through the process to tweak that up. But she really talked a lot about restorative justice. And it was really terrific when a gentleman in the back, when we were all finished, said, I don't know what to keep talking about this. I don't know what to keep talking about. But really what it was to me, like Michael said, this was a wonderful community conversation. But to me, it was the crux of the situation is that not only does justice occur, but the two parties involved, if they're willing to sit down and explain how they feel about why this item happened to them. And I think that really is terrific. So I'm really mulling on it. It was a really heavy, thought provoking meeting. It was the town did themselves proud. When you looked around, it wasn't all the staff sitting together. It wasn't all, with the exception of us, we were all free together. But everybody else was all intermingled, just like we are in this community. It was lovely. People spoke politely. People spoke honestly. There were those who spoke in favor of things and saying, you know, the town does things and we all need to take, this is our problem together. It was really, really terrific. And yesterday in the Globe, which Doug will laugh as I'm always sending articles in the Globe. There was a big editorial about no matter what these issues are, we all need to have what they call dialogue and real dialogue where we are sharing things and not trying to convince someone of our thought or our position. So one of the things I thought it was terrific, a couple of things I thought we might want to consider as a town, not necessarily a board, but as a town, is I think we need to have regular community conversations. You know, we just set it up with the COA and say we're having one. There were questions about how, not only the kinds of issues in interacting and working and being, living together, but there were also questions about what's going on in our town, like even our finances. You know, how do we understand what's going on here? There were those kinds of questions were raised. I'm sure Michael remembered more of them than I did. And then I think it was just really, really, really great. And I was hoping we could do some of those maybe community conversations. And then the final thing that I heard, which I think in my own little thoughts here, I think I have a suggestion. There's frustration in town because we engage in investigations and other things. And we tell them we're doing an investigation and then yet they don't ever hear anything. I think everybody understands that we are limited in what we can say. But I think that we should probably talk to the Institute of Practice. When we complete something, we say the investigation has been completed and that's it. So we announce that it's done. We announce it starting. I think when we finish, we should say the investigation is completed. And then perhaps whatever we can legally say, which is probably not much. But it's just that closure. People always say we never we never hear what happens afterwards. Just my thoughts on that. But I really was so grateful that I went. I really was. And I was so thankful you guys went with me. The last thing I want to add is I've spoken with Michael about this briefly, but I think it would be the town for us to explore options for communications slash PR firms, as we've been working with one firm particularly for the last few years. And I'd like to see what else is out there that perhaps may be a better fit for me. Did you want me to put that on my list? Mm-hmm. Is everybody looking at this one? I think on the front page. And this is the front page. Yeah, he knows there's two pages. All right. So now that we have done that, I think I would like to take a motion to adjourn at 938. So moved. Whoops. Thank you. Thank you. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Thank you, everybody. Thank you, everybody.