February 2, 2026 – Select Board – Video & Transcript

February 2, 2026 - Select Board

Autoscroll:

Good evening, Carol Martin, Ms. Chair of the Select Board. I'm calling the February 2, the 2026 meeting of the Select Board. It's a hybrid meeting where we are in person and not available online and via remote access via a meeting in town. We are meeting post-pricel. Research Chapter 2 of the Act of 2025. This meeting will be conducted in person and via remote access according to the Act of the Law. When they want to or participate, we won't be with the meeting with the committee on our calendar or also on the agenda. It's also supposed to be recommended. If required by the law or around the chamber, persons wishing to provide public comment or otherwise participate in the meeting, may do so via in person or provide remote access. Public comment should be limited to two minutes per person. We will leave the agenda. Please note the agenda of the Times that I'll approximate which may not be discussed in the order of the Times. On all topics, please send to these moderators to public comment along with the bio. I will post a discussion on the 26th annual time meeting of some articles. We will go to public comment work, one sponsored by the funding director, one sponsored by any committee. Maybe we will talk about this and we will talk about this. We will talk about 640, hopefully. Updating in the steps that we recommend in FY27, Capital Budget and Plan and really one of my family lab and share the capital improvement plan for that update. Which will be followed by a discussion on the next steps of the mechanical assessment. Which we are looking at, which we are looking at, which we are looking at. We are looking at, which we are looking at the community in the report, which we will look at. We will talk about this and take the We are also joined by the town manager, Mr. Carlin, and our assistant town manager. The answer is from the board. I'm Andrew Carpenter from 8th Orchard Lane in Weyland, commenting about article DD 25 Holiday Road, submitted as a town warrant article. First of all, I want to thank Colonel Martin, Bill Whitney, and the other board members for allowing public comment period and also being very responsive to emails and discussion about this issue. I have three process related questions this evening and one request regarding article DD's $200,000 for study and concept work at 25 Holiday Road. First is authority and sequencing. Since the school committee has care in custody, can it be stated on the record that no developmental study or concept work will proceed until the school committee acts and votes on transfer and any required two-thirds town meeting transfer vote occurs? That's one. Secondly, in relation to the aquifer protection district in which the parcel sits in, can you commit that any town funded work that starts with APD compliance as a hard constraint, impervious limits, stormwater recharge, and density constraints of the non-compliant concepts that outcome from this engineering study would be excluded from the outset? Third, related to scope and scale of the study, if scope is undecided, then can you commit that this will not be a yield study with no maximum build-out and no multi-family market feasibility, and that it won't advance a multi-unit concept inconsistent with the single-family residential character of the neighborhood, including concepts that require major road widening, new signals, expanded street lighting, or a big intensive infrastructure. So, just in summary, my request is to amend article DD so that funds cannot be spent until one, transfer authority is settled, two constraints are the first gating, the APD constraints of aquifer protection district constraints are the first gating deliverable, and that scope excludes max build-out not keeping with the existing neighborhood character, and that any scope changes return to the select board in a public session before approval. So, if the answer is no to those, then I just ask that it be stated on the record. We're done? Okay. Who has final authority to define and approve the study scope and change orders? That's all. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. No, I totally, you don't explain. I get it. Thank you. Thank you, though. Hi, Carol. Carol. Are you talking to me? Are you saying it's mine? Because you're, I'm not hearing you at all. Your mic is gone. You have your piece. Would you like to make- Yes, I would. Thank you very much. I do. We're on the air. We're back. Two minutes are starting now. Hi, my name is Hope Podell. I live at 7 Janison Road. Short and sweet is the gentleman who just spoke sounds like terrific, beautiful. Carol, I cannot hear you. I'm assuming it was just reading about what the agenda is. But the point I wanted to make quickly is I want to say early on that I am thrilled and delighted about KK on the warrant and I hope, I look forward to hearing Steve. I think that it's an unbelievably wonderful opportunity to recognize people who have lived in the town over 20 years or 65 years plus and own property and had two children go through the school system. Steve will explain more, but I want on the record that I am completely in favor of it and will work hard to see that it comes to pass. Thank you. Thank you all. I want to say hello to anybody else in public public. I want to say hello to anybody else in public. When you're speaking out of your chair and you're holding that paper right over the mic. I'm glad it changed you today. I thought it would be something really improved. Alright. Next item is going to be 2026 annual time-leading discussion, potential votes on articles. We want to recognize the preview meeting of the federal court, who has four articles. They are in the packet. None about it. Please come out of hand. Oh, I'm sorry. Mr. Chairman. Yes. I recognize Richard Turner. I can't see that. Hello. I recognize... This is Richard Turner speaking. Carol, I cannot hear you. You need to adjust your microphone. Okay. Can you hear me now? A little better. I just called Seth up in IT and let him know about it. He was going to try to see if he could fix it. Okay. Thank you, Richard. Yep. Bye-bye. Bye. Am I all set now? Yes. There's no further public comment. There's no further public comment. All right. I'd like to recognize Trudy Reed, our town clerk, to walk us through the four items, which year is submitted. The annual... Okay. Do you have the one from Trudy? And by the way, the articles are in the packet, starting on page 11. Thank you, Trudy Reed, town clerk. I'm going to start with Article II, peddlers, hawkers, and solicitors. So, working with the former police chief and the current acting police chief, we took a look at this one, and we've made some draft edits to it. The first one, changing the name from sales to peddling, hawkers, or solicitors. I think it makes a better... It gives better... It gives the residents a clearer sense of where to find the article in the code. It provides clear definitions. It defines operational limits for these solicitors, such as it prohibits locations that they cannot solicit in areas such as the church, schools, public ways such as traffic, islands. It provides resident protection through a do not solicit registry, which is the ID of the police department. They were receiving a lot of calls about people showing up on their doorstep, and they can register their property to prohibit solicitors, and that list would be given to the solicitors when they register with the police department. We did some adjusting to the licensing requirement, which involves the moves, fingerprinting of the applicant, and a zoning authorization letter from the building commissioner. It sets a six-month license with a fixed fee. It regulates signage, noise, traffic interference, and public way obstruction, and it clarifies the fines and establishes a formal appeal process to the select board. So that's a good question, but a comment. I mean, these are excellent to have in town. We did receive a complaint late Friday afternoon last week from some residents about somebody selling unauthorized NFL merchandise right on Route 20. So we were able to point to the bylaws and have this person stop, and they have to go through the application process. So there's a lot to have on the books. The application process has always been there. I think it's just hard for people to find in the bylaws where it's titled sales. But we do, it's already in process that people follow the rules on that one. So solicitors are a lot of standing. I have a question on 14.9. These are the signs and comments, right? I don't know if this also applies, but I see an awful lot of signs from companies offering their services that are going to window cleaning or they just book up on how should that be also in here? No, that actually is addressed within the select board. It's from the Senate. And then in states, in states that I'll get the details of it. I think there's also, I think there's also a section under the zoning bylaws for signs. That's right. Okay. It does. Okay. Anybody else have any other questions on this? So moving on to QQ, which is chapter 91, dogs. This article would replace the current 91, which is called animals. Some of the major changes would be it eliminates the dog control appeals board. It shifts the responsibility of hearing public hearing to the police department and the select board. It moves the penalties out of this section into one of the first sections of the bylaws that has all the penalties and violations for other boards and committees. It just keeps them all in one place. And it streamlines the responsibilities of the animal control officer. What else this will incorporate are some new changes from the state regarding OLLI's law, which is the legal name is an act to increase kennel safety. And it would include mandatory inspections of the kennels, injury reporting, licensing changes. The definitions are clearer. And the enforcement allows the municipality to do a little bit more enforcement with the state to assist when necessary. A few other changes. The current bylaw allows for dogs to be under voice control in public areas. The draft would eliminate this option. And instead of a six foot lease, draft has a four foot leash. And this change is intended to keep dogs close enough to prevent sudden conflict of people, children and other dogs. It also includes language that was that would impose new obligations of dog owners deemed dangerous. The dogs, not the owners. Such as mandatory muzzle when they're off property, warning signage on their property. And chances are most dogs will never be subject to these provisions. But it's better safe than sorry to have them in our bylaws to give us some leverage to stand on. It also just makes the neighborhood safer, responsible pet ownership, and fair enforcement. So the goal is to strike the right balance with this one. Question for you, Judy. On 91.6, where it says prohibited conduct of animals, should that be amended to read dogs? And then later in that section A2, it talks about an animal keeper. Should that be a focus on dogs? Are we trying to have this be confined to dogs here? Because I'm seeing some animal keeper and some dog references there. Are you looking at the draft bylaw or the current bylaw? Because I tried to eliminate anything that referenced anything other than dogs. And it could be something that we had missed when we were proposing this, writing it up. But the goal is to have this be very dog-specific, right? Yes. I think any other animals might fall under the Board of Health, if it's pigs or chickens. So instead of reinventing the wheel, I actually took a lot of North Andover's, but theirs has also animals, so I may have missed one or two. Okay. But North Andover's had already been approved by the AG's office when I started this process, so I felt there was a safe one to try to mirror. I think I have a question. So on the same section, Title 91-6, running at large, as you indicated, this bylaw would require that any dog not on private property of its keeper or owner, on private property with written permission of the dog's owner, must be restrained by keeping owner. You know, being kept on leash, not sitting four feet in my eye. Many would like to name leopard dogs, off-booch, conservation areas. Yes. And I think those areas are posted. I'm not sure what, because I had worked with conservation, recreation, um... Desperate Valley trustees, I think, yes. Yes. Yes. So Linda was, at conservation, was telling me that a lot of those properties are posted, and they have their own rules and regulations. Right. So if those rules and regulations conflict with this section of the bylaw, they have a problem. Well, that's what I'm counting on for Town Council, to make sure that this is all legal. And I'm assuming Town Council will review all of the warrant. It's certainly something we can go back and look, double check. Yeah. I think it's kind of a policy question. I think it's bitten by a dog that attacked our dog in one of these conservation areas. The dog wanted to not keep the dog under verbal control, which I think was the standard. If this bylaw were enforced, question the ability to become this section of the model. I think that's going to be the hardest part of the enforcements. And if you have it, it starts. Right. Okay. Yeah. Do you have any questions on this article? QQ. No, I completely understand it. Okay. So I was just going to ask, so if, is there time for me to go back and make edits to this and then? Okay. All right. Good. Okay. Yes. Perfect. Thank you. So I, I, I, I'm reading through saying, but it also says, it's helpful to a point in the normal control officer state, you know, inspectors. Do we already do this or is this a new position? If you've been doing it. That's what I thought. 24 or five years ago. Okay. Then we talked about being able on a job. Do we have a farm somewhere in place? Yeah. Is that something you want to look at? I don't know. What else I thought? Let's see. Let's see what we're going to do. I, I don't know, but I can look into it. So I'm just, I'm just going to, I'm just going to, I'm just going to, I'm just going to come back. Um, because I was concerned, opposed to changes, but I do want to ensure that some of our labels are going to control one person on it. Definitely. So, um, have you had a conversation with that person? I have not. It's my understanding that, um, I think any board members on that board were required to have a dog and she no longer has a dog. So I don't know if that makes her avoid from being on the board or, I mean, I'm certainly willing to talk to her. Um, I've only received feedback from one resident. I'm assuming since this went online, it's the, um, dog control appeals board. Um, it may be in the, um, the one that I'll be talking about on the penalties moving that. I'm not sure if that's, um, yeah, there's also, there's already some fines established. So. Yes. Okay. Okay. All right. So this one is the one that are talks about the fines and violations. It's simply moving up from the dog, uh, bylaw into, I think it's called. Oh, general provisions, article two violations and penalties. Just moves it into the chapter one where other penalties and violations are listed for other boards and committees. Do we have any questions on this slide? And then the visible house numbers, SS. Um, this one is, is mandated by mass general law of chapter 148 section 59. But in talking with the assistant fire chief who brought this to my attention, it was felt that this would give better guidance to the residents as their responsibility of having visible house numbers. Um, and it will also assist any neighboring towns, emergency personnel that may be assisting with mutual aid. So this draft bylaw is about public safety and new response time. It defines the size placement in color, which will make it quicker for first responders to see. And it also includes enforcement and penalties. Um, most residents already comply with this. So they should probably not see a change, but it will help with the enhanced 9-1-1 and GPS. And, um, it also will help with recent developments and renovations. I think what happens when the inspector and somebody from the fire department goes out and inspects renovations or new developments, this is one of the things that they look for. And they just have to be in compliance. And also need to get it. Even text that people still can not hear. Oh. I'd like to make a suggestion. I'd like to make a suggestion. Yes. Through Alaba. I'd like to suggest that you move down here. I'll stay here. Because this is just an ongoing issue. And it shouldn't be frustrating. But people do need to hear. I think they can hear. You know, that might, you know, maybe they can hear me. And I'm just thinking, unless that might, I'm not sure what that might about. Ask the person if it's just a volume issue because it might end up being microphone issue. The thing I would say is that we never have issues hearing the person who's doing public comment or the person sitting in Trudy's seat, so that's definitely the best place to sit. It's got to be that speaker right, so I'm assuming it's nothing more than moving that speaker for the next meeting if you want to sit back in the other seat. So I'd like you to just kind of, there was a lot of material in the pack, there was a little bit more than I anticipated. I wanted to just kind of go over the article, which is W, which should be the next one in our packet, and talk a little bit about the actual copy in the text of the article. So does anybody have any questions, or do you want me to pose the questions that I have? Did you want to start, Bill? Did you have something in particular on this? Yes, I'd like to know, Brian, if this state permitted the town to issue pension obligations once today, would you recommend it for yourself? My honest opinion, Bill, it would, it would, it would be difficult, very difficult for me to recommend this for the town, given the inherent risk that is involved in this. If you did read the literature, if you did read the literature, I did send a couple of articles out, on paper, it seems to all work fine, but you're hoping that your return on investment will always be greater than your debt expense. And you can't guarantee anything financially like that. The reason why this came forward, it came out of the budget group we had this summer. This is something that town can entertain doing down the road. We have a structural deficit in our budgets with overrides. This is just a one of the remedies that would have a long term effect on our budget by doing this kind of endeavor. As you can see in the literature I sent out, there's a lot to this. We need to get special legislation. We have to go through a lot of administration work with the state. If you read the reports from Siegel and another one from Odyssey, they give the pros and cons of doing this. And if you do read each one of these, they all see, pretty much say, proceed with caution. This isn't simply taking your mortgage that's at 7% and refinancing it at 5%. There's a guarantee that you're going to pay 5% for the life of your mortgage. There's no guarantees with this. Again, the reason why we brought this forward is to give the town at least the opportunity to do it if they wanted to do it. You can't simply issue pension obligation bonds without the special legislation. It's highly probable that many of the municipalities in the state who have issued the legislation have been resistant to issue the pension obligation bond because of the inherent risk. In reading different information on this, I know, for example, and I hope I get this right, Quincy issued a pension obligation bond. They may do their own retirement. And what happened was the cost of benefits that the retirees earned in the future created another expense. In other words, not only did they issue a pension obligation bond thinking that they would not have to make any more payments to the pension system, things like longevity, wage changes. It created a need for the city to continue making pension payments. That is what you don't want to have happen. So the way this would work, in summary, is if we went forward with this, the town would issue a pension obligation bond. The present value of the unfunded liability is around $60 million. So we would issue a taxable municipal bond for $60 million. The duration of the bond is debatable. Some literature wants it to be as no greater than the amortization of Iran-funded liability. Some have it at 20 years. So that kind of is an open item. We would then receive the $60 million from issuing the bonds and turn that over to middle-sex retirement. Weyland would not be in control of the investments. Now, granted, middle-sex retirement, 90% of their money is with print. It's in a very sound investment. So there's not a lot of risk there. But as I've said and has spoken and written in the literature, there's a lot of investment risk. There's an interest rate risk. There's a risk that, you know, your cost of borrowing will end up being greater than your returns. So to answer your question, Bill, it would be very difficult for me to come to the selectmen if the stars were right and recommend this because I would expect the selectmen to be very cautious in this kind of thing. And I'm not trying to downplay the importance of doing this. I'm trying to give you folks the facts on this. It came forward to your committee because it is a tool in the toolbox, as Carol said, I believe, last week. So the budget group wanted to at least make the select board aware of this. And that's why it's in front of you tonight. So hang on a second, Brian. Thank you. Should that answer your question, Bill? It does, but it gives rise to another question. Given your advice, Brian, does it really make sense for the town to seek to submit a homeowner's petition to seek the authority for a future select board or town manager or town meeting to do this, recognizing the risk that you cite? I would say the best course of action, in my opinion, would be to prepare the fiscal 27 budget, as we're doing right now, and then reconvene the budget group and then come up with a list of long term remedies that we can address in the overrides. And maybe at that point a year from now, if this one still rises as an opportunity, along with other strategies to attack our override. This is a standalone strategy right now. We don't have other ones, but to me, it would be responsible to get past the 27 budget, convene the group again, and come up with a real plan of all the different things we could possibly do. And this may be one of them that will fit that bill. If we wait a year, I don't see the downside. Right now, if we issue bonds, we'd be paying 3%, although the market rate is fine. It is volatile. It is up and down, as we see in the stock market almost weekly now. So that would be my recommendation. Maybe consider waiting a year, putting together a real financial plan, maybe a 10-year financial plan to address the overrides and come up with various strategies, structural improvements like this one is. Thank you. Thank you, Brian. Okay, Mr. Ferd. A couple of questions, Brian. Do you know how many cities and towns, you mentioned Quincy, have adopted the policy? And do you know how many cities and towns have actually participated in a bond program, an aid bond program? I did have a list of who issued the legislation. Tom, there's probably about 10 towns that have issued the legislation. The ones that I'm aware that actually issued the pension obligation bonds are the town of Andover, city of Worcester, and city of Quincy. Outside of Massachusetts, you see a lot of activity in California, but I only am aware of three municipalities in the state that have actually issued the pension obligation bond. There's probably 10 to 12 that have seeked legislation. And just like we just spoke about, they probably issued it in the event that the stars were right and they could do it. But it would take a lot of analysis to actually go forward with this. That's why I think so many of these municipalities have not issued the pension obligation bond. And GFOA, which is the leading governmental financial organization in the country, also says move with caution. They do not encourage pension obligation bonds. They don't tell municipalities not to do it. They simply say proceed with caution. These things can work against you. I wouldn't say they can backfire, but there's a lot of inherent risk and you need to listen to that inherent risk in doing something like this. So my recommendation to the board would probably be, let's get past 27, come up with a solid financial plan to address the long-term structural deficits. This can wait a year if you choose. I don't see any downside in doing that. Thank you. Doug, Ann, do you have a question? So based on Brian's current recommendation, do you think we want to pursue this or do you think we want to take Brian's advice and just, we have only submitted, we have not inserted, which means we would take no further action on this article this year?
Can I ask you one follow? Sure. Brian, can you help me understand what the main downside is? Is it because this is such a riskier instrument that the town, if they went down this road or we ended up issuing pension obligation bonds, the risk is the risk of return, but we can get hammered on that? Yeah, well, the risk is, they use the word arbitrage, so the risk is one side of the equation is fixed. You issue, say, $60 million ex-taxable municipal bonds, and let's say you're paying, you know, 4%. You know that's the fixed number of the equation. The variable number is your investment return. You cannot guarantee over the life of the loan that you're going to bring in an investment return greater than 4%. Now, Doug, you may go four years in a row with gaining a 5% return and then have a 2008 correction where you lose a substantial amount of value in your fund, and it may take you a bunch of years to get it back. So really, you've got an equation that has a fixed amount, and the other side is a variable. The variable amount is the investment return. Now, I would assume a municipality would issue this if they could sell a taxable bond, and I will say when you issue taxable bonds, the interest rate is greater than non-taxable bonds, so automatically you're paying a greater interest rate, so you've got risk right there. The second point is that they're probably paying an interest rate of 2%, and maybe you've got a bull market and it's at 7%. So I did talk to Odyssey, who is our OPEB advisor. He's the one that provided one of these articles that you folks read in your thing. But to answer your question, Doug, the risk is that equation, the fixed amount, which is your interest on the loan versus the uncertainty of your interest investment returns over the life of the loan. However, for me, first sentence in Section 1 says, everybody can hear me? The town of Whelan may issue at one time or from time to time. So you actually could, you know, reduce your liability or control it somewhat if you issued a five-year bond at a time versus 10, because you can usually get a four- or five-year outlook. Why do you think so few towns are using this? It's complicated to get it set up. And what I wanted to, Brian, to talk about, but it doesn't look like we're going to get really delving into it, is there's this setting up of a reserve fund, and you can do your own reserve fund, which is better for us, or you can have the state hold it. And that's why when I really read all this language, I had all these questions about this reserve and how it would work. But clearly, it would make more sense. I mean, you're banking against the interest rates rising as well in future years, but rather than fund the whole, I should talk to Kelly, tell the boy behind me, she knows all this stuff. Rather than fund the whole, you know, 58, 60 million in one chunk, and then like Brian says, you're here with the second call or whatever of the market, if you do them in five, four, five-year increments at a time, I think you control it more. But nonetheless, it doesn't sound, go ahead. The article that Carol references speaks about Tucson, Arizona. No, no, I'm in here. I'm in the actual togue for the language. Yeah, sorry. In our packet, there's an article. Yeah. And they talk about Tucson, Arizona, and how they're able to snag an interest rate of 1.6%. So I think what you're saying, Brian, is if it's in the toolbox, and the stars align, it's an option, right? Correct. Absolutely correct. I think 10 years from now, but. Absolutely. Yeah. All right. Got you.
Mr. McCall. And that's it. It's a tool in the toolbox. And we discussed it. I was familiar with the case of Brockton, because I knew the finance, I worked with them on the JNMC. They took advantage five years ago, and the interest rates were low, and they were paying 2.6%, and they were able to go out and get a higher rate for them being paid back on the box. So they were making significant interest to help them pay this off. And it's just timing. I would be leery we're interested to relatively high now. Before they were lower, it might have been a better time, but in hindsight, it's 20-20. I think the idea from the working group is position ourselves, and if you say the moon and stars align, we have it there, we can utilize it, but as Mr. Kennedy said, it doesn't have to be this year. It could be next year to advance a home loan petition.
The point, though, about the stars aligning is that they may align at the time we sell the bonds, but we're going to be paying that interest rate whatever it is for 20 years, and there are inevitably going to be marketable. Which raises another question to me. Back to my point, time to time versus the whole lump sum. But the life of the bond, and Carol mentioned 5, 10 years, but how much flexibility do we as a municipality have to dictate the life of the bond? Well, some literature says they want the term of the bond to be about the same as the amortization of the unfunded liability. Currently right now, ours is 10. However, you know, we could have two down markets in the market, and Middlesex could extend out another five years. So it's not set in stone. I got to get more information on the term of that. I did talk to Hilltop. They were around 20 years. They did assist the town of Andover in issuing their pension obligation bond. I'm almost positive theirs was 20. But if you do read the literature, it does allude to the fact that they would prefer or require, I'm not sure which one it is, that the term of the bond is the same as the amortization on the unfunded liability, which is 10 years right now. I want to clarify some numbers that I think are being thrown around, see if it helps. We owe, over the course of 10 years, an unfunded liability of approximately $58 million. If we float a bond, we can float it for 15 years or 20 years. But because the money is there, we're going to be able to pay our obligation in the 10 years. We're just going to pay it back, carry that debt longer. So what I'm referring to here is it says, section one, the town of Weyland may issue at one time or from time to time bonds or notes. In other words, we don't have to issue the whole $58 million the first time if we're going to issue bonds, plural. So let's say we owe $20 million over the next five years. We issue a 20-year bond. And then you try to make sure that you're in that range where the return is greater than the limit, the note. I think there's more control within a five-year limit than there is in 20. That was what was intriguing to me. And I think actually that might have been mentioned that you could borrow one lump sum or multiple times at the task force. But when I was reading this, then there's this whole thing about this reserve fund where the secretary of the state may require you to have a reserve fund. And I would hope the heck we would because I remember Brian also saying that one of the risks is that if the state requires us to give them the lump sum that we borrowed into a reserve fund, how do we know that gets credited to our account? So there's a lot of interesting things here. Maybe this is like to Brian's point. This is a good thing to be rolling out this year to have us start wrapping our heads around it, and then we look at it next year. However, it is home rule. It is we're going to hopefully pass. We present it. Hopefully we pass it at town meeting, and then we would apply, and then we would see if the state said, yes, you may, in fact, issue, give us the permission to do this. How long would that take? I don't know. What do you think? How long would that take the town meeting? Six months?
Six months to. From the, from them to issue us from the home rule, like we submit, say, hey, we voted this at our meeting, and now when can we actually issue a bond? I would vote. Six months. So if we were thinking we wanted to do this for FY28, we need to do it, or FY28, we need to do it at this town meeting. If we think we're not going to need it for a couple of years, we have time to really think about it. Brian maybe has some other ideas, so to crack this nut, maybe we should wait until the task was comes back to us. What are you thinking, Mr. Levine?
I always love to have it at my disposal. I'm just trying to think how you make the argument, telling me, you know, this is obviously risky enough that three out of 351 municipalities are using this at all, and the article that I read, obviously, can be bureaucratic, or asking for permission in this case, but, you know, Brian doesn't seem to be particularly jazzed in bringing it this year, and would rather come with a whole array of items instead of having this be a one-off. So are we, Anne, are we going to continue the discussion, or another week, or tonight? The only thing I'd say is that I did a nice amount of research on this, and I'm going to take Brian's feedback very seriously, but I didn't find it to be as alarming as I think, you know, it seems to be. So I don't know if I would want to just take the option off the table if timing could be an issue with all this. I think I'd rather just kind of look more into it, because I didn't find it to be, like, even being told there's only three, I don't know if it's that it's only been three towns that utilized it, or whether I thought I read that there was 71 communities that had done this past something very similar to this. So I guess I don't understand the disconnect a little bit in the research I did, and it's probably because Brian has a better understanding of some of the components than I do, but I just didn't get research I didn't find it to be. I have to say that we have a really hefty agenda tonight, so I am going to ask us to decide. Do we want to continue to discuss this the next week or a couple weeks? I'm skeptical. If more communities signed on, we're more impressed. I also think that not sign upward would help the marketplace in a very minor way. In other words, products are driven by likely success, right? If no municipalities sign up for these products, then the finance companies will come up with a different product and make it more vital. So I think it's highly unlikely that we would use this tool anytime soon, even though I recognize it's driven by the interest rates, but interest rates are very unpredictable. And so I just think it's, it's too risky to even try to sell town meetings. All right. Does everyone sort of feel that way?
I think you already said that. Okay. So let's move on. Thank you, Brian. I do have a couple of quick questions for you on the articles while you're here, if you don't mind. On the topic. So on the enterprise capital, last year, there was a discussion of where we would have the motion for enterprise capital. And I believe your recommendation was that it would be a motion in the omnibus budget. And is that where you're planning on having it this year, as opposed to a separate motion in the enterprise article or a separate article? Well, we can certainly do that. If it's the, the enterprise capital historically has been in the omnibus budget, but we can certainly bring it into the select boards enterprise fund budget. I did not submit it that way to FinCon, but we can, we can certainly do that, Carol. Which we want to do the way you would like it. I just, there was controversy over it last year and I just wanted to be clear up front what your others were. Maybe I can circle back with, with Michael McCall and Phil from FinCon just to get their feedback on it. Okay. You'll let me know. Are there, are there any articles that you have deemed standard articles that are not going to be going forward? And I asked because I saw two articles crossed off the FinCon list and I wasn't sure that we had been advised. Yeah. So right now there'd be one that rescind debt. We're not going to have that. Okay. And there's three articles that, um, allude to moving money, um, in the budget related to the COLA to the articles related to the fire department. The, I don't have the number in front of me, um, see much Kelsey, if you can see that, but it's the article that appropriates the fiscal 27 COLA to the general stabilization fund. That specific article can be pulled. Okay. Great. So Z and whatever we send was, was, and I think, all right. And also when we will need numbers, uh, and Brinsley's the, uh, the liaison for a lot of the standard articles, you know, coming to your transfers, paper, current bills, past bills, a spread fund, all those, we need the numbers for those. So we can process those. Do you know when we'll have those? I will send them to you in tomorrow. I pretty much have all of them done. And then I've sent them all that FinCom. I will send them to Ian, uh, tomorrow as well. That'd be great because, um, I want to put those on the agenda for next Monday. So thank you, Brian. Okay. Appreciate it. Okay. Uh, Robbie's not here. Oh, which would be so kind to bring over Susan, um, and somebody needs to help me on the page here, folks. I'm already here. Everybody in there. Hello. How are you? I'm well, thank you. How are you doing? Good. Thank you for joining us. Can you hear me? It's very nice to be able to hear you. Thank you for moving. Yes. Okay. So we would like you to speak to the two articles that you have, um, being put forth to town meeting, article FF and article GG, and the floor is yours. Thank you. Thank you ever so much. Uh, just for the record, Susan Weinstein, chair of the community preservation committee. Um, I don't think that anybody around the table is new to town government. Um, so I'm not going to go into great detail, but the community preservation, um, committee puts forth at least two articles every year. Um, we were able to consolidate into two articles. So for FF, it's the standard, um, 10% of annual revenue that goes to each of the three purpose funds, community housing, open space, and historic resources. The remaining 70% goes to what we call the uncommitted fund. Um, we have, uh, $374,000 and well, 32, um, for the debt service on the, um, mainstone farm borrowing, uh, for the conservation restriction there. Uh, we're going to put aside, uh, $20,000 for administrative expenses. We do have some money there, but it's for, you know, in the event that something like, um, uh, an appraisal or, um, we're able to fund some planning things out of, uh, out of that kind of money. And then, um, the money, the 10% that goes to the community housing fund is in part four transferred over to the, uh, Wayland municipal affordable housing trust fund. Anybody have any questions on that? That's a very, very standard article. All right, Susan, how about GG? GG. Uh, this year we were able to, uh, consolidate all of the projects into one article. Um, we were, I mean, I guess fortunate is the word for me. Um, but there's nothing that's really staggering. Like we've had some, um, in the past, uh, the projects, uh, involve, um, some, uh, habitat creation kinds of things at, uh, conservation properties, uh, some, uh, construction of boardwalks and bog bridges in at least two, uh, conservation areas. Um, kind of the big one is that, uh, the Department of Public Works has requested funds, uh, as they do their study around Dudley Pond, and we were able to do ones that have to do with, uh, recreation, um, passive and active recreation, I guess, passive. Um, uh, so that's 123,000. Um, there are situations where there is work being done through the community preservation funding, um, where it calls for archeological monitoring, and so we put in some money for that, uh, and then we said we would, uh, use uncommitted funds for the, uh, um, housing production plan, uh, at the request of the town planner, and the, um, Wayland Historical Society requested funds to support rehabilitation of the Grout Herd House and Museum, and then the other clause is just that we put in the three-year limitation for getting the work done, uh, it's not final, you know, if there's, like, really compelling circumstances, you know, we would consider extending it, but we've had problems with money just hanging out there, um, when it could be back in the fund and being applied to, uh, other projects. Are there any, um, questions from the board? I'm Tom, you're the liaison. Did you want to start? No, you're good. I'm still reading. Um, I have Susan, a quick question for you. How many, uh, were submitted for consideration to the CBC overall? Was it a typical number that didn't receive approval? Um, there was one that was excluded because it didn't qualify, uh, under the, uh, uh, um, limitations. Um, there was one that, um, having to do with playground that we deferred, um, we, we chose not to fund it this year, um, because it was not time sensitive, that even if we approved the funds, they would not be expended for at least two years. And so it didn't make sense to tie up that money. And I don't, and, and, and we, um, excluded, um, parts of the, uh, uh, DPW request for the, uh, Dudley Pond. I can't remember that there was anything else. Was there anything related to Kachituit Field?
Yes. That's the one where I referred to it as playground. Oh, but, but, um, in talking with, uh, the recreation director, it would not be coming up in the next fiscal year as a possibility under the, um, schedule for, uh, playground rehabilitation. And so, uh, we just figured we would wait another year, but it did receive a much more favorable reception than last year. Thank you. Anybody else have any other questions? So, um, and you're all set. Just pick up. Okay. Cause now I'm looking at things backwards. You see, so I find you. All right. I think on this one, um, we're good. Thank you very much, Susan. We also, again, I want to say thank you very much for the committee's effort to streamline, you know, your requests. I mean, this is really so many fewer articles and it's going to be really easy. Um, so we, so we would appreciate that tremendously. Thank you. Doesn't that, if it doesn't pass because of form it's on you. Thank you. I appreciate that. And I'm sure you'll come over and tell me at the table when it happens. Thank you everybody. All right. So the next article here on the list is, um, article DD, the 25 holiday will be, um, there's nobody invited to speak here except me because of the last meeting, um, or me to start, sorry. Uh, I had volunteered to go, uh, before the capital improvement plan committee, which is now right behind me. I better get this correct, um, to make sure that this wasn't a bonafide capital project. And they did, they looked, they looked at it. They had a lot of questions. They were very kind about it. And they said, basically they weren't going to vote yay or nay at their meeting, um, that I attended. They may have had not any sense, and I don't know if they've taken a vote, but that the sense of it was that provided we weren't coming back when we go forward with this article, uh, that we weren't coming back with a specific item to construct. In other words, if the intent was to evaluate the land with the intent to sell, for example, then there's no capital. We don't have to be, we're not in the capital plan. I think that was kind of your point, Tom. Um, but if we were to come back and say, put in the field or the school or conservation, uh, walking paths or something, those would be capital requests that would then have to be submitted to the capital process. So, um, so I think we're okay on that. There was a question about the word pre-permitting because again, as was mentioned in a couple of times, both at our discussions and at their meeting is that we don't, we don't have custody of the land and therefore we would be, uh, trying to permit something that we didn't have the ability probably to do. And then finally, they asked that when we do the write-up that we, it's a language here that, um, that this was reviewed with the, uh, capital planning and improvement committee and based on our intent, um, that it would not be considered a capital, full capital project. However, again, if we have any intent of going back with part B here, then that is capital. And then we have to go back into the plan. So I, I've done that. Um, the other thing that has occurred is that we had not, um, I think I reported last time, and then I'll open it up to Bill. I think we may want to speak to this, but I'm just reporting what's off went off to do that. Michael and I had had a conversation with, um, the business manager and the superintendent about, you know, the fact that we were submitting this and, you know, the interest of the ability to transfer the land at some point. Um, and then I know that Doug spoke with, um, as the liaison spoke with the, uh, the chair of the school committee and I believe at the moment we, and the next step we think we should do is have a conversation, obviously with the school committee. This was our intent from the beginning. And, um, as of today, I believe that Mr. Lee as the liaison for the article and myself chair are being invited, uh, possibly to Wednesday school committee meeting to talk to them about our intent, you know, to evaluate this property, to see what options, if any, are liable. So having said that, I'm going to give that report. Did you want to add anything, Doug? Yes. Thank you. Um, in my prior life working with a non-profit, we had this discussion with a lot of people all the time about what was capital, what was not, who was planning this, it's not, it's basically an operating cost. Um, as I, I discussed with, uh, Mr. Carver, he was kind enough to, uh, take a phone call from me and he asked a number of questions, which are, is, uh, completely understandable for he and his neighbors. And then I told him that our board had really not had a chance to, uh, have a fulsome discussion about the specific content of this article. So I would appreciate, uh, the board's indulgence, uh, and advice on basically, uh, three things. One is a discussion of, uh, the conceptual alternatives that could be investigated. A second is, uh, this question, if the School of Connects Care and Custody to a living to care. And, uh, third is, uh, the possible scope of a review, should Article 3 be approved? So if people are amenable, uh, first I'd like to talk about some of the conceptual alternatives that I have thought about. The Warren article talks about active and passive recreation, talks about town use, and talks about affordable and lock a great house. And with respect to the housing, I would suggest that there are at least two options that could be considered. One is to look at the effect of creating conforming lots, meaning it's just in our field zone, uh, that would have a 40,000 square foot pin of lot size and 180 foot frontage. So that's something that I think could be, uh, established fairly easily, uh, role would have to be there. An alternative, uh, that could also be studied would be to take, uh, to, to look at an approach convolutivity that, uh, the conservation cluster bylaw in which, uh, something like townhouses of the sort that, uh, one sees in the name stone, uh, could be aggregated such that the balance of the site or, you know, the percentage of the site could be devoted to open space. So I think that's another alternate that we could consider. Uh, with respect to the density that might be studied, I personally do not think of the density that approaches that of the multi-box polar river's edge. But I don't foresee the benefit, frankly, of looking at four-story buildings on this site. And what that is, uh, the surrounding area. So those are some of our suggestions as to things that could. Open it up to the board. Anne, did you want to, uh? Yeah, I would just, um, say that, you know, I think one of the items that were brought up, that was brought up in this was, um, our ranking when it comes to new growth. And so if the idea here is to invest money into developing the site, I would propose it be used to develop the site or look into what we could do to help, um, make the, make a future developer interested in the site for, uh, financial benefit. So an ongoing tax benefit of sorts, um, because that's what I think we need. And, uh, that's, that's what we need. Mr. Levine, Mr. Frey? Well, I agree with Anna. I think our budget situation was a big driver in taking a close look at all the town houses. And this is the largest. And I think it's a great opportunity to improve the amount of money that comes into the town annually. And the Economic Development Committee did do a review of this property, I believe. And they did mention the town houses. And I appreciate Phil's, uh, mentioning of that. That is an option. I was thinking of the organization that this town is using to look at 13 acres at the Old South, uh, South Lansing. And that report is coming to the Select Board by late February or early March. But it's likely that the committee will recommend, um, among other things, playing field there.
And we looked at housing at that site, but we, but because it's a landfill, the whole 13 acres, the majority of the 13 acres was all used for landfill. So EEP will not permit you to build the structure. And what we are doing as a vision committee is kind of similar to what this article seeks. If we're not setting up the vision committee, what we're doing is we're exploring land to appreciate what might happen. So, you know, whether the school committee has jurisdiction or not, I think it's, uh, I think most residents would want us, before we come to them and say, hey,
we'd like to, we need to do our own homework to appreciate based on topography and other limitations. What can, what can go there? And so I think it's the responsible thing to do. I think we're following a couple of steps. And, um, you know, I think it's a, I think it's important for us to keep in touch with the neighbors who no doubt have particular interest in what we do and what we're thinking. I personally agree with Whitney's comments about any development there should be consistent with, with the neighbors. So Lance. Mr. Libby? Yeah, I would just add briefly, um, just to detail on one point that Tom made is we're obviously in financial straits over the coming years. We've had an inspired discussion about, uh, potentially risky pension obligation bond avenue that we're exploring. And it doesn't seem like things are going to improve in the near future. And so I think it is incumbent upon us to explore other options and base development. And I am empathetic to neighbors. Um, if I was living, uh, on a property that backed up to a beautiful acreage of woods, I would be frustrated as well. And that said, the role of our board is to think about public policy that impacts our residents townwide. So we have three right now current, you'll remember projects that aren't going to yield any meaningful, uh, revenue for the town, unless we hopefully get some type of start on our pilot program. But, but absent that, we have to look at the other limited properties that we have and, and think, at least explore, which is we're just an exploratory phase now, figuring out how we can create some type of, of development there in order to resolve some of these difficult financial questions that we're going to continue to stare down for at least a decade ago.
Yeah. So I think that's, that's very true. That is, is the genesis of why we put this article in. And I had several conversations over the weekend with, um, neighbors of the, of the property. And I explained, you know, and when I'm not answering a group email, I'm not restrained so much by the open meeting law, by possible violations, which is probably not a great idea to do as a chair of the committee. But I didn't have several neighbors of that area reach out to me and I explained to them. The genesis of this was a couple of meetings we had in November and December, saying to us, look, we don't have any new growth. This is, this is constraining our ability. The taxes we're going to be facing overrides. And so this really is part of our job. Well, it's a due diligence that we need to do to see if there's a piece of property or properties that might make sense. Um, so there is a lot of, I did hear a lot of, I think some of you mentioned on a lot of misconceptions that we were planning on building a very dense, um, community in that land. And I, I wanted to wait tonight to hear what everybody said, because I didn't, I hadn't heard us say that we were planning to do that, that, and so that's it. Um, one comment that was made that I think was really, um, appropriate that I heard today was that, um, in the background information, we do talk about what I, we've just said that we're doing this for a due diligence reason to see if we can generate some ongoing tax revenue. Um, we certainly will be doing a very strong financial analysis on this to make sure that we are going to have a net gain every year. And, um, but it was pointed out that in the description, which we can edit, uh, that it does say that we, we would be evaluating the property for potential of uses, including active or passive recreation, hotel use, none, which would of course generate any revenue. But that is kind of standard language that we use. And it might be when we do our evaluation, it might in fact say, gee, that's the only thing that fits there. And we come back and that's our report. It doesn't mean we're going to actually then go and do that. So I hope that, um, that's a little bit clearer to everybody here. So Mr. McCauley, um, this, um, power spill it, would you like to add something there? No? Okay. And that, then I think we, you're all set in. Oh, no, go ahead. Thank you. I'm sorry. I thought you were telling me. Go over there. Thank you. You could have a quick tell. We're trying to get up back on schedule. All right, that's right. Uh, my question about the school committee having care and custody put into that. I've also spoken, as you know, there is a, uh, K through 8 facility management planning that the committee is engaged in now. With respect to the potential scope of review, should article on DDD be approved, would suggest to the board that it's in site planning to test options for reuse alternatives to the site. We have the sitings, structures, provision of open space. I think, uh, first things we'd want to do is, uh, get a site survey, just preliminary site engineering to inform the availability and sufficiency of utilities to the site, as well as, uh, kind of distribution, hopefully paid for by a developer in the town. Uh, some preliminary geotechnical engineering could, uh, detect the presence of ledge or the term and the bearing capacity of the soil that can turn into forms of our foundation systems. Phase one environmental assessment could be commissioned, which is essentially a study of the available information that perhaps indicate whether further environmental study is needed. You could also imagine doing preliminary set design and engineering, uh, to determine what would be required to the potential field level of property, specifically as per, uh, traffic analysis to the potential traffic impacts, uh, as well as legal fees that would be associated with the regulatory reviews, the dealer request for film proposals, um, only preparation documents with the eventual conveyance of the property, and so forth, which would download. As you indicated, we want to assess the potential lands or revenue of expense to the town with various options, and there would obviously be consultation with other boards and committees, police and fire, planning, perhaps, uh, conservation and other, uh, departments, boards and committees having work in jurisdiction. That sounds reasonable to the members of the board. I would draft comments in that fashion. Thank you. That sounds wonderful. Thank you. Great. All right. So the next article is actually a select board article, and I know it's near and dear to Mr. Levine's heart, but I am going to table that temporarily. Are you can't hear me again? I'm going to table that temporarily because I'm going to close to those and courtesy to those who are here have come to visit with us. So the next item is going to be KK, which is, uh, Mr. Clifford from the Senior Property Tax Relief Committee wants to come and speak to his article. Would you like to join me or you want to go down the other end and not be heard? Probably. That article is on page 70 of the, uh, department and the floor is yours, sir. Okay. Uh, Steve Clifford, 274 Concord Road, uh, speaking on behalf of the Senior Tax Relief Committee. And the committee has, uh, proposed a, an article which would establish a senior property assessment credit, the actual wording could be, uh, senior property, uh, well, tax credit as opposed to assessment credit. We're proposing that this is something that is in recognition of the substantial contribution that senior citizens who own homes in the town of Weyland and, and actually fund 40% of our budget. And in many cases have been doing this for well over 20 years is, uh, uh, even though the cost I'm listing is at a million dollars, what we're really talking about is shifting a million dollars worth of the expense, reducing it from seniors and, uh, returning it to everybody else so that there would be actually no actual change in the cost of the town. It would be just shifting a little bit of, uh, the money going from seniors to, uh, other residents. In terms of the actual mechanism of doing that, uh, we're open for suggestions if someone thought there's a better way. But, uh, the way we proposed is we would actually reduce the assessed value for, uh, any senior who's over 65 and has been in town for 20 years or more. And as a town resident, we're trying to establish to avoid people who maybe just own property, but they rent it out and things like that. Also trying to make sure a way to define people who've been here a long time. The, uh, $30,000 credit would translate effectively into somewhere around 300, uh, $500 for it, for a senior, but everybody else would have to pay it because we're not talking about increasing the net costs for the town and therefore everyone else would probably have their taxes go up by maybe $200, something like that. Uh, I'm open to working with someone to streamline it, some of the suggestions that are on here in terms of... Hang on one second. So, yes. Steve and I have had this conversation a couple times and I've said to him we have to talk about the article as written first before we start multiplying and dividing and complicating things. So thank you. You're welcome. Does anyone have any questions for, um, the split floor of what is being proposed? Bill? I guess I, my only question is, uh, in article KK, it's estimated cost of a million dollars. Yes, it doesn't cost it. So, yeah. I assume there's no cost to the town, there's some reallocation based on much. Yes, a shifting. So on my, excuse me one second. So on my notes, I have circled that as well. And on the bottom where it says it impacts the town budgets, actually it impacts residential taxes. So, I see Tom Shekin has said yes. This is very similar to, um, when we talk, uh, when we set the tax rates in November, when we have the tax classification discussion, and one of the options is a residential exemption. And that's essentially what this is. One class is going to pay a little less, more class, one group. I don't want that word class, although that's the class, that's what you use in assessing language, would pay a little more. Um, I think that, um, so I, I agree with you. Well, that has to come off out of there. So, yes. Did you? I have three questions. Uh, do you have any other towns that have passed similar, um, by-law? Um, there's similar ones. Uh, Rob, uh, talked about how concrete is something like it. Very small. And it's unclear whether theirs is like this, or it's more like the, uh, circuit breaker, which is a state funded program that we as a town match, if, you know, if you apply for that. Uh, he did mention that the, uh, the state is considering a law that who knows it'll be passed, which actually would make this for every town an option to provide to, and how the implementations go, I'm not sure, but affect effectively, uh, for a class of individuals to basically reduce their assessed value. Second question is, you would agree that person's income, owners of the property, their income is not a factor? It is specifically was not a factor. Third question is, you envision that some sellers might be hurt by this in a small way if their assessed value is less than the fair market value, and fair market value might be evaluated based on the assessed value. Follow me? Yes, I do. Was there any discussion about the committee on that? One of the suggestions was, instead of reducing the assessed value by $30,000, just to effectively, when we're doing the, uh, the assessment rate, to increase it enough so you generate an additional, let's say, million dollars, million dollars, if it's that, if that's the right amount of money, and then provide a tax credit to these individuals equal to that million dollars. The difference would be something that, uh, we didn't think we were available to assess the difference, but I do believe proposition two and a half, meaning, are you spending money or you're just reallocating money? And we were worried that someone might say, technically, you're spending money if you do it one way, or just reassessing it with the other way. And we're worried that because of the proposition two and a half, we didn't want to do something that was going to fall astray of that. The flip side of it, just in terms of $30,000, I doubt that that would make any significant change, but, uh, yeah, it is a factor, yes. Any other questions for Mr. McCord? Um, I just did, I, when I did your math on it, so I'm assuming, um, there's about 4,900 homes in Weyland, right, based on your math, where it says that everybody else would increase by 350. So, uh, the senior homes end up being close to half of that, is that 40, it's about 40%. But how do we know when, when we're talking about senior homes, how do we know who's living in those homes? So sometimes it's, it's family members and other people besides just a specific senior. And I think when we designated a senior home, we're only stating that somebody who's a senior is in that home. Um, actually, what we're planning on would be, you have to be registered as the owner or co-owner of the house. So you can't just, you know, be living in there. They have to be a co-owner of the house. Somebody else in the house could be like, my wife is, uh, younger than me. She's not 65, but she's a co-owner. So as long as one person is a co-owner, is a resident, owns a house, 65 plus. Number two, it is that individual's, uh, res, official residence. This avoids someone where they don't actually live there, maybe for tax purposes. Right. So we're, we're trying to think of a way to make it, um, the real, the real issue is going to come down to most of the people that are seniors in the town of Wayland have probably been here well over 20 years. Just, if you just think through it, I'm not trying to be specific about it. If you, if you don't live in a condominium, very few people who are over 65 actually buy a house when they're over 65. They don't tend to come in town. Um, looking at the condominium, that's probably around, uh, oh, 12% of the population of the, of the seniors. Uh, I was looking at that and many of them have actually been in that condo for well in approaching 20 years also. So the vast majority of seniors, 65 plus, who own the house has got to be registered on the deed and we have that from the assessor's department, uh, would be living there. Okay. The only thing that I'd point out is from a math standpoint. So, so for one thing, I appreciate the overall sentiment because I think taxes are going up and up and up and then, you know, seniors somehow are just expected to handle a lot of those increases. But when I did do some research just on it, it was about 20% of Wayland are seniors, but this ends up being, um, twice that much as far as the household goes. So there's, there's other factors. And I just, I'm thinking about a different way to try to accomplish what I think you're trying to accomplish that wouldn't require, you know, nobody wants to enforce anything. Right. So nobody's going to be like, Hey, wait a minute. You know, maybe you have the deed, but maybe you got transferred. Maybe it's an S you know, it's in probate. Maybe it's nobody. I don't, I don't think anybody is going to want to kind of track it down that way. Um, so I'm just, I, I love the sentiment and the thought, because I think it's needed to, um, let people in Wayland who are aging, who've been here for years, get to stay here, which I think is really important to make sure that the costs don't get so out of control that it becomes difficult and they can't stay. And so I love the sentiment. I'm just trying to work through the numbers here. Sure. Well, the, the actual numbers, there are approximately 5,000 homeowners in homes in Wayland of those 5,000, 2,081 are seniors, meaning a senior person is registered as owning that property, even though there may be other people on it. And of that, that represents 38% of the, in the assessed value that is being paid for out of our, let's say a hundred million dollar budget. That's about $40 million that's coming in from those, uh, two, I call 2,000. Okay. Go ahead. I feel like the main pushback that I hear from people, because I also am somewhat supportive of this idea. I really like the concept and I, I would hope if we could do some more digging, even if it's not in Massachusetts, if we could find other towns somewhere that have successfully done for three years, that's always helpful to be able to cite that. Yep. And just, and I know that it's not means tested, but I'm thinking about the family who isn't seniors who have a happy tax bill that, that they need to pay. And some of the money is being transferred to some seniors who are well off. And, and I'm, I'm always mindful about getting populations against each other, because I feel like I've been in the middle of that a lot, serving on boards over the last 13 years. Those who have school-age children, those that don't, some that haven't had kids, some that, that had kids that went through the schools, but they haven't been there for years. I feel like I've been in the middle of those battles too often. And so I'm just trying to foresee some of the pushback that may evolve. And I feel like that, that, that could definitely be one of them. Because I feel even though Whalen is considered an affluent town, we do have a wealth spectrum in this town. And, and I do believe we have a blue collar population. And I think we fall along different aspects of the middle and the upper class. And if there are seniors who are benefiting from this, who really don't need this, I feel like that, that's going to be raised. And we have to think about how to address it. So real quick, of course, Steve has to go back to the committee if they want to make any edits. But I did say that after he presented the article as written, and then we could kind of look at some thoughts. I personally feel that this would be a great idea to introduce, but perhaps at a little bit of a lower, more of an entry-level concept. The resolution? I'm sorry? No, I see. Well, not a resolution. The numbers. Can't go to resolution now because we've already submitted its articles to go to town meeting. And so we can't change it to resolution. I'm not sure about that. Okay. Well, I personally think this goes in articles. And I'm the least on this article. I should probably recuse myself. But nonetheless, having started on Senior Tax Review Committee. So Stephen said, you know, maybe they might do something or make it simplifying for you have to apply for it, kind of like residential exempts around an automatic. Perhaps we could look at the numbers, and maybe they'd be a little less
generous, and then therefore also a little less generous from the rest of the population. Just kind of a... You could have put a cap on it, because this is based on the value of your own, so you can say over the board. You could do that. You could do that. You could do that. So if we have some suggestions, we need to kind of throw them out, because Steve's got to have that committee come up together and meet, and then, so maybe a cap on... Yeah, I'd like the applicant idea, because what it does is, it gives the individual, they may feel like, you know what, I don't need this, so I'm going to come up. And as far as a cap, I would say that you want a cap.
We don't have that information. Versus the home value capital. Yeah. But it's based on the home value. So you're saying that it's income at max you can get. Max you can get. Max credit. Max credit. That's what you need. Good job. I don't... I'm a little concerned about this, the added language in there about the other residents kind of now seeing an increase. I think you were doing that just maybe as a wording to show us, hey, this would increase other people's taxes a little bit. I would suggest removing that completely and not have this be an independent program. Or am I missing something? But it's got to come from somewhere. Yeah. Yeah, but you have young families who have houses that are a lot less valuable than some of the more expensive houses, and you're essentially giving a credit to people who probably are fighting... You've got two sides, right? You've got the young families who are fighting to get into town and be able to afford it, and then you have the families who are fighting to stay in town because... Yeah, that's my point. That's why they're going to put a max credit on, on the max credit. But you can't say that it's not going to raise some people's taxes, because it is going to raise some people's taxes. You got your homework. I wouldn't go that way. All right. You can just raise people's taxes in general by 300 and some dollars or whatever, or are you just saying that it will because our budget will go up and therefore we're going to need to see an increase in overall taxes? It's not going up. We're just moving money from non-senior taxpayers to senior taxpayers. It's an internal shift. Yeah. It's an internal shift. The other way. Right. And in fact, in fact, the way, the way it's actually worded, it's $300 net for a senior. And, and yeah, it will be $200 for everybody else. All right. So go ahead, Bill. I have to tell you, we're running late here and I want to just move on. So if we can, sorry. Give me the look.
Please. I'm sympathetic to Doug's argument about means testing. And I think you're proposing some kind of a cap on the value of the assessed value.
I really want to make it means-tested. You could impose a gap of a million. I don't know what the number is, but it would, you know, diminish the impact on the young family getting a lot of taxes and it would maybe be more equitable in terms of the, the proxy for means testing. I would say that as a proxy for means testing. Guys, I've never heard of something like this. And I think we might want to talk to the assessor's office for, for this.
Steve is an assessor. He's on the board of assessors. And he did talk to Rob. So this is a good point. Yeah. This is not, I've never, ever heard of this before. Sorry. I didn't realize that Rob, but. I think Steve has some. Everyone has spoken out. Okay. I think he has some good feedback. Yeah. I'm with you, Tom. And who should I talk with? Yeah. Me? You. I'm Middle Eastern. All right. Thank you very much for coming in. Novel idea. We appreciate it. So, all right. Thank you very much. Ms. Lappin. We're now going to have an update from the chair of the capital improvement and planning committee. And how are you? You can sit down there and not be heard. Or you can sit next to me. I guess I'll sit where I can be heard. All right. How are you? Thank you. So I'm going to just tee this up a little bit. You all know this is a brand new committee that we established this year. And we had established it at Talmeaning. And then by the time it was approved by the AG's office and we got the staff, I think they didn't start until September 9th. And according to code, they have to do a report for us by October 15th. So this year, they didn't quite make it. But I have to tell you I went to several of the meetings and they really worked really, really hard. And so I thought it would be appropriate since we appointed the committee to invite the chair to come and speak to us a little bit. I had thought timing was going to work out. It would have gone already to the finance committee to talk about the proposed recommended capital budget, but it didn't work out that way. So we're actually hearing it before they are. That was not our intent, but the timing has worked out that way. So the floor shows you know everybody, right? Yes. Okay. In fairness, the charge of the committee is to issue a report to the town manager. Well, that's true. It's not to the select board and it's not to the finance committee. So is also available on the town's website under the committee's section of the website. And as Carol said, the committee was formed, as you know, as a result of the Angletown meeting vote adding chapter 20. It took a while to get things up and running. By the time the committee members were appointed and we first met, it was September 9th. By law says that we'll issue a report by October 15th. That was deemed not feasible from the get-go. I would say even if we'd started earlier, it would have been difficult to do it as a first year of a committee. So getting everybody up to speed on what's going on, what capital is, what all the various nomenclature is took a little while. And then getting the actual information that feeds what we're doing took a little bit. So we first met September 9th. It was a combination of five voting members that were appointed by this committee. So you should be familiar with input from school committee for one member and finance committee for another member. That would be me. As well as ex-officio members. So town manager, finance director, DPW director, public buildings director, and the school finance director as well.
I would like to thank all the members, the ex-officio and voting members, as well as the department managers who were not members of the committee who fed information. They did so based on guidelines provided to them by the town manager and the finance director. They started giving us information in late October. The most recent information we got was at the tail end of December, December 23rd, I think. So we've been working through that the entire time. We issued our report on January 20th. If you haven't read it, I know it looks long, it's 36 pages. There's really only nine pages of report. And if you read the first two, you probably have got the general gist of the problem, which is a larger request than you have resources for.
Because we were limited on time and because we knew we needed to get something to the town manager, particularly for the budget, for budget reasons, we did issue a report with FY27's recommendation in more detail and a very high level ranking of FY28 to FY31. We continue to meet weekly and work on flushing out the FY28 to FY31 plan. So that is not done. We anticipate issuing an amended report. So getting to the meat of what's here, we ultimately recommended a capital budget of $8.3 million for FY27 to support 26 projects. That is separate from the MWRA Happy Hollow Well project, which we felt skewed everything if we we included it. And because it is going to be a separate article, we wanted to keep that off to the side. Obviously, because we say it in the report, we understand the importance and recommend the project, but wanted to keep it separate.
Those projects were based on a ranking. We ranked everything from high, medium, low, went back and tried to fit a few more in, and we ranked them medium, high, moved them. So we ultimately ended up recommending things that we ranked as either high or medium, high priority. The report includes the criteria that we looked at. I'll give you a quick rundown of what those are. But public safety and health, regulatory compliance, urgency of need, financial benefit, and total life cycle cost, resources and readiness, and community fit. I will admit we were largely focused on public safety and health. The money doesn't go much further than that. But we did also try to take into consideration where there might be grant funding that we could lose out on. So trying to maximize the use of the dollars as best as possible. It was a rather simple rating system. One of our goals in the future is to get a little more detailed on that rating system, a little bit more quantitative, so that we can really fully work in all of those criteria. So what I will say about the 8.3 million is to give context, that 8.3 million was really a request from department managers for FY27 for 14.8 million of projects. And that's pretty representative of what most years look like. There's about upwards of 50% more requested than there's probably room to do in a given year. So to give a sense of how much has to be deferred or cut in a given year. And I will say the committee felt it was important to convey, we didn't cut anything. We push, right? Push to the right. And so that's why once FY27 is in place, right, then comes a re-ranking. Whatever got deferred needs to be re-ranked against FY28 priorities. So just to give broader context on that, total requests that were made across the five years of FY27 to FY31 were 99.1 million originally when they were sent to us. There were revisions, and that landed at about 96.5 million. Not a huge difference in the net number, but if you actually look at the absolute value of things that moved, about $22 million worth of stuff moved. It could have changed years. It could have come out. Other things came in. So there was a significant amount of shifting from October to December. And as you guys are probably familiar, that continues to happen and will probably continue to happen up through town meeting. As far as the committee is concerned, we've issued FY27 to the town manager. We'll continue to work on FY28 through FY31. But to the extent there are changes in requests, we're putting that to the town manager at this point for FY27.
So I would want to just point out a few kind of high notes of things that I think the select board should be aware of. And that's if you're comparing to the prior year's plan, you may look and say, well, the prior year plan for FY27 had $14.7 million worth of stuff planned. And Kelly, you're telling me that you're only going to recommend upwards of 8 million. And I think the context that's important there is that there were two pieces to that 14.7 million. There was 8.8 million of omnibus and enterprise fund article budget items and 5.8 million of article requests, which were largely related to projects at the town building. Those projects are still in the plan. They've increased a little bit and they've been pushed out across the five years. But we didn't feel it was appropriate to spend nearly $15 million if the town building was being pushed out. And the other factor that came into play was there is a section in the report pretty extensively goes through current outstanding capital. So capital projects that have been previously approved in their status. And I will say the town's done an admirable job in recent years trying to close a lot of those balances, but there's still over $20 million of approved projects in the hopper. And so that was another factor in the committee's feeling that we should be have a little bit of restraint until we've cleared some of those balances, particularly some of the older balances. So it's kind of the high level. I would say one thing the committee asked me also to point out again on the town building and it's in bold somewhere in here. If you've read the report, um, we do think it's very important that the town have a direction, whether that's stay or go relative to the town building, because although there's currently north of $6 million of requests for work to be done in the town building, it largely appears to be repair work, not rehabilitation work. And if we've asked the facilities director to give a more robust understanding of what it would take to rehab the building, we anticipate that significantly more. We think it's really important that there's a decision made before we're defaulted into spending millions of dollars to only potentially make a decision down the road on what to do. Thank you very thorough, of course. So I open it to the floor here for questions and comments. I mean, like Kelly said, it is, they make a recommendation to the town manager. This is, I mean, I've said it about 20 times. I couldn't be happier with this committee because they're now able to really focus on the capital and look at the, look at the overview, the high level detail we're getting here, which is what we need. You know, and I think it's also going to help the town manager and finance staff, because as they have pointed out in many years, you know, they don't have that many, they only have three or four months a year where they're really focusing on this. This allows the committee to work around on this. So any questions and comments from the board? I have one quick question. Sure. Kelly, thank you for all this. Very thorough, I agree. My one question revolves around grants, which I thought of as our sustainability folks walked into the room. So one item is the page number for $300,000. And I know that we're moving forward to becoming a private leader designated community. And another item that jumped out at me is body-worn cameras for the police. And I know that there are body-worn camera grants that are given out of each year by state government. I'm not sure if the police will apply for those, but do you guys take grant money from the state into account? We will if we're told what it is. I think one of the improvements that needs to happen in the process is that often we're given the net request versus the total, and it depends if there's already funding received to be available versus if there's not, but it's been inconsistent. I know that the former police chief mentioned there was an opportunity for a grant, but unless it's secured, he would present the full amount. In the case of the schools, there was a capital request where they've already received a grant, but in order to act on it, they need the funding to contribute in order to receive it. So that was a factor. That was not a project that was in the previous capital budget. And the committee felt that losing the grant funding, right, and losing the ability to do that project would be detrimental. So we do take it into account. I won't say that the information is consistent or robust, but one of the items, if you did read through, we noted that on our future project list is further developing the form and the way that we receive information from the department managers. I think a lot of the back and forth that ends up happening in meetings and via emails could be solved with some modifications to the request form and also allow for more comprehensive information on the projects ahead of time. Bill? Yes, Tom? So my one takeaway, Kelly, is that your committee would not be against this board putting together an advisory committee to explore this bill, ideas... Yes, without going back to them and asking, I will give my opinion. I would not be against that because I it's a significant amount of money whether we act or don't act. And so I would prefer that we act preemptively and know what we're getting into one way or the other. Thank you. Very lucid report. Concise. Thank you. And you all set? No, that's what I was going to say too. It was complicated stuff that was made very simple. It was. Mr. McCaw. You know, first I want to thank Ms. Lappin and her committee for the work that they've done. And she knows we were trying to find a date to get together with the Finance Committee to go over their recommendations and try and reconcile what was in the plan before. My staff and I have been looking at it as we've been going along. And we're going to meet this week to evaluate the recommendations, see, you know, where we can be in the middle on what was previously put into the budget and the five-year plan. And I think it is important to leverage this committee going forward. To select board member Faytie's comment, me and I formally discussed this, but based on some of the questions from the CITC and the assessments we've done of our capital within the staff, finance director of facilities, DDW, we felt it's probably best to look to the board to develop a visioning committee to look at do we lease, build to own, look for other town land or rehab this, and have somebody do a thorough evaluation. The facilities director did say that there are some repairs that you can probably do just to carry us along rather than some of the major ones to get us through while we make a determination of which way we want to go. But I think it would be a prudent exercise for us to really decide where we want to be in terms of the town building in the next five to ten years. And then that would play fairly heavily into the next couple of years. Thank you. So I had that down on my notes as part of the discussion. So I'm wondering if our first step might be to ask Mr. Faytie to come in and kind of give us an overview of the projects that need to be done or we just want to have a board deliberation and a couple meetings from now. I think it'd be great to have Mr. Faytie and get his thoughts and that here of a committee of some sort. Yeah. So probably doing a couple meetings because we've got a vacation we're coming up and stuff so anyways. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Thank you. Thank you. I've lost my agenda and this is great too. It's okay. Can you put their slides up here? All right. Thank you so much. I'm not running that far behind. So we're going to have a follow-up discussion and part of our next step discussion of our equity assessment program that we've had. And we're going to invite Whalen residents Dr. Heidi Ellis and Dr. Jeff Winner to join us. They are at Children's Hospital. I'm going to move back down there. My mic doesn't work so I got relocated. I'm going back and forth here. Kelsey's going to follow up the slides. Yes, would you like to see if you don't mind me leaving some of my stuff here.
So first of all, I'm going to ask do you know everybody on the board? If not, maybe we could do some introductions while I'm relocating. I don't know everybody. So hi, I'm Heidi Ellis. Don't tell me who they are. Tom Fay. We met. Yes, we did. And I have friends who's on remote. Okay. This flash behind me. Okay. Carol Martin. Yes, everybody. Thanks. All right.
When Doug and I and Bill attended the presentation put on by the DA over the COA, I had the opportunity to meet Heidi, who had spoken after during the general comments. And she discussed some of the work that they do that sound very similar to some of the things that we need to accomplish or might accomplish here in town in terms of our equity assessment. So we've had a couple conversations. And then last week when we met, I think Tommy weren't here for this, but we kind of started talking about some of the ideas of things that we could bring in and look at to help us develop a roadmap as we look to implement over the next three, five years, our equity assessment. And I know that Doug mentioned one thing and maybe it's going to be a combination of things we put together to create a roadmap, but this is what they're going to do is talk about their idea. And the floor is yours. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Carol. Thanks for the opportunity to share some of our work. So we want to talk about building community resilience to hate-motivated violence. Next slide, please. And what we'll just briefly do today is orient to a research project focused on developing a public health prevention approach to hate-motivated violence. We've been working on this project over the last four years. It was funded out of the National Institute of Justice. Jeff and I are both at Boston Children's Hospital at the Trauma and Community Resilience Center there, where we are largely, or at least historically, grant funded by federal grants as we try to take some ideas around community resilience and move them forward. So we'll talk about a particular research project, provide an overview of community-based approaches to building resilience to hate-motivated violence, and then hopefully with you in conversation, explore how this could potentially be applied in Weyland to foster community resilience and belonging. So this is who we are. We're a small center within Children's Hospital. Jeff and I are both child psychologists by training, and we work with a number of other folks at Boston Children's Hospitals on these initiatives. Next slide, please. So when we think about hate-motivated violence, it's what I call a low base rate but high impact problem. We don't see it very often, but when we do, the effect on the whole community is huge. And I think we're all aware of the importance then of attending to it. If you think about within a community, okay, maybe there's a small number of individuals who would be on that sort of far right of the slide that would be at risk for doing something engaging in hate-motivated violence, and that's really a law enforcement response. What we've been concerned with is how do we think about, you see that line of between community members at large and someone who's crossed over, how do we think about where that line falls in a community, and how do we make sure that we push that line as far to the right as we can, so that very few individuals would ever entertain the idea of engaging in hate-motivated violence. I hold some concern that as a nation, that line is drifting right now, so that the idea of using violence for your group, your people, or against someone else is becoming more normalized. And so we feel that we need to take action as soon as we can and with as much evidence as we can around what as a community can we do not to target individuals or identify who's at risk, but to make the whole community less likely to ever be at risk for engaging in hate-motivated violence so that fewer members would cross over. Next slide, please. So how did we get here? We had a three-part project funded by NIJ. What we did first were very empirically grounded, so we did a large-scale survey across the U.S. looking at risk and protective factors for hate-motivated violence. So what were those modifiable factors that we could identify that seemed to associate with people being more or less likely to endorse these ideas? We then took those risk and protective factors, many of which are going to sound really familiar to people like depression, and we went and did a deep dive in the literature to say, okay, what do we already know about what works in communities for the most important risk and protective factors around hate-motivated violence? And then we had a lot of fun. Jeff and I went to three communities around the United States, Albuquerque, Albany, and Urbana-Champaign, pulled together multidisciplinary stakeholders in those communities and held visioning sessions where we shared these ideas with members of the community and fostered a half-a-day conversation around community values and how some of these ideas might resonate and be implemented in their communities to move forward with a primary prevention approach to hate-motivated violence. Now, in my perfect world, there were going to be like several more boxes to the right when we got the next grant. Unfortunately, federal funding is not sort of heading that direction, but the ideas have all been queued up so that we now have sort of a package of evidence-driven ideas around how communities can implement practical approaches to preventing hate-motivated violence. So that's what I'm sharing today. I don't want to oversell and say we've done this all over the place. What we've done is build the evidence and put together some ideas and talk with communities about what would make this work. Next slide, please. So the risk and protective factors that we drilled down to are really quite familiar, I'm sure, to everyone here. We found there were five core tasks. We need to foster emotional wellness, promote flexible thinking, reduce problematic internet use, advance safety and fairness, and increase belongingness for all. And when we talk about belongingness, Jeff does a lot of thinking about this. We say belongingness without othering. So how can you be a part of something where your sense of being a part of it doesn't depend on someone else not being a part of it? So we took these five core tasks and said, all right, what works to move the needle on these? How do communities address these? What are interventions? And on the left side, what you'll see are what we call active ingredients. So all of these things address one or more of the five core tasks and some of them actually work for a number of them. So you can see something like values aligned activity works for several. Volunteering actually checks every box. So something as simple as that is actually an incredibly powerful intervention around community resilience. Next slide, please. We can go back to this if it's helpful. When you start thinking about it that way, what you can see is that there are examples of primary prevention that already exist here in Weyland. They exist in every town. There's things like running groups or community gardening, there's reading groups, there's religious institutions, town meetings, actually incredible opportunity for civic engagement, the police academy, events like the Weyland Festival. There was a fair recently when we went to school sports. All of these actually engage with those active ingredients that we were talking about. So that's great news. But the question is, how can we optimize these or sort of dial up the potency of what's already happening in Weyland and do things so that they're actually engaging with more of those active interventions? And Jeff, maybe jump in here at any point. And so what I was going to say, as Heidi is saying, just for context, so Heidi and I are both clinical psychologists and often people think about clinical psychology, I think about individual services for individual families. But what we know across empirical literature for the past 20, 30 years is that you need to simultaneously engage in individual families within these systems. And a lot of those active ingredients can work at an individual level, but you can leverage them. Heidi's saying prevention, these are universal programming that you can build for an entire community. And so the challenge is then, as Heidi's saying, is how do you take sort of the volume on some of those tasks, like a community event or a volunteering opportunity or participating in town meeting, to turn up the volume so it engages those active ingredients in a way that provides the task that it's already trying to do, town meeting votes, but also give that sense of community connection, fostering wellness, et cetera, et cetera. So super concrete example, we just made this up. I'm sure there are better ways to imagine here, but if there's a walking group in Wayland, that's a good start. Gathering in person and walking, physical activity. Well, you could also encourage walking groups to engage in a cleanup once a year, and then you could maybe volunteering and you could give them the bags and the gloves. You could give them the town hats and say, you know, go Wayland. And then they have a sense of identity as they're walking around and picking up the trash. Someone from the police department could say, well, it gets dark at four o'clock in the winter. Do you want an escort? I mean, I can walk with you. We can go on the bike path together. So suddenly it opens up the ability to have and build connections within the town across different levels of authority. And you can post on the website in the town in different languages, an invitation once a month. It's an open to everybody walking group. Come and join us. So these are simple ideas, but what you can see is our thought is primary prevention of hate motivated violence doesn't need to be some new package that comes in and has to be implemented with new acronyms and lots of bells and whistles. Like there's a lot happening and it could be done strategically in ways that I think could be even more effective in terms of building community resilience. Is there any more on that? Yeah, I think there's a lot of different groups within Wayland just from being parents and folks in the community. There's a lot of different pockets of people who are very engaged and interested in this. And the more that coming together as a community, finding ways to anchor that together and then connecting these dots, because these are ideas that generally, you know, have broad approval from individuals in terms of, oh, that's something that's important for a community. How do we then bring that together and sort of put those into action in a way that are sustainable? And again, not adding this giant new set of acronyms or complicated programming. We can talk about that too, but for here, it's building from what's already there in a way that's sustainable and helpful to people. Yep.
The spice rack is what we call this one. Yeah. The biggest challenge is a lot of these are related to engaging with others. And so how do you how do you reach the people who are not the joiners, the bloggers, maybe a lot more introverted to bringing them in? Yeah. As I see a lot of the same people coming to, even if they're different types of events. It's a great question. And all three communities talked a lot about that. And I didn't go as deep into the research, but I will say one of the pieces of the research was that those, there's two groups who are most at risk for endorsing hate motivated violent ideas. And one group is super engaged and showing up at a lot of events. And the other is super disengaged. Then there are, you know, folks in the middle and kind of, it's not as meaningful in terms of a risk for them. But how do you reach those folks then that are super disengaged? And so Jeff has done a ton of work around community outreach. I would, I'll share one very specific idea, then maybe you can talk about sort of our more general approach to community engagement. There's a really cool group in the Netherlands that has taken this on kind of pairing with social media. And so what they've done is they've identified folks in their community who are spokespeople who might make little videos or, or in some way, just kind of casually invite folks into these are the activities, these are the services. I believe it was a skateboard Olympian in one community in Netherlands. So that one worked really well. But then you, you geolocate to that community and flood social media with these invitations, essentially. And what they found is they can really, they can really reach, they targeted a youth segment in their town with this geolocated advertising, essentially, but it was targeted advertising to engage people in events. And I think they, they had really high levels of success. So a different idea that we didn't present here really capitalized on that, sort of how do you build a campaign around reaching those people who are disengaged and engage them in values aligned activities within the town. So I'm happy to share more on that specific idea that we can talk more generally. I'll give two, yeah, two comments, great comments. So the one idea is thinking about if you're trying to engage a community or a population, it's thinking on two axes. One is trust from a community and then engagement from the organization or town government or whatnot. And those are two separate axes. And so the key maybe you're alluding to this is that the organization with more relative power, say it's a town government needs to meet the level of trust where the organization is at. And so trust is, is, is only going to respond to that level of engagement from the town. The second piece of that is then, uh, we can't associate engagement necessarily with like, say like extra extraversion temperament. And so what you need to sort of deploy is what does it, what does engagement look like for someone who is more reserved, um, more introverted, um, has a smaller network and you can be, uh, have very high levels of social engagement, um, and subjectible being, and be very, um, sort of like have a very small end connection. And as Heidi's saying, you can be very connected and also be actually quite isolated and quite depressed. And so the key is sort of engaging with folks, right? Where do they find trust? Where do they find meeting? We, we anchor around values a lot because that's sort of the north star about how people live their lives. And if you orient to people around what's important to you, uh, then you can build programming that aligns to it, which doesn't necessitate, oh, come to this large party where you have to shake hands with a bunch of people you don't know. It's a way of engaging people in a way that feels safe and affirming. If I can add one more idea that came out of our work in the communities was, um, kind of a hub and hub and spoke model almost. Like you need to find folks who, um, reach into different segments of the community and you build your team of kind of champions or, or folks who are, who can bring other folks in. Yeah. He just spoke, um, here in Sudbury within the last couple of weeks. I can't believe I missed it. And he put on phenomenal PowerPoint. Wow. And I took a picture of each of the PowerPoint slides and you talked about that America today has reached historic levels of political polarization, economic inequality, social isolation, and cultural self-centeredness. And he was, his theory was we were in this position 110, 120 years ago, and then things greatly improved where we reached a high watermark of social cohesion in the 1950s and 60s. And one of the, uh, the rationale raisings behind that was that people became more joiners. Yeah. More volunteering, like you're talking about, and following more. And that has fallen off greatly over the last 70 years since then. Yeah. Yeah. Should mention Robert Putnam, it's the author of Hole in the Lones. It's a book that talks about this just because he mentioned the name. That's great. And one, I want to add one thing. And so Robert Putnam also had this amazing line where one of his ideas around current, the current moment now, around why there's a lot of social disconnection is because it is much easier, particularly for online relationships is it's much easier to remove a relationship or say you're on the Wayland community forum. You can, you can cut someone out very quickly when it's a way, when you can remove them like that. But when, if you live next to someone, you're motivated to engage and build a relationship. And so that is much harder to do, but it also requires and has this collective engagement. And so I saw him talk about that recently, which I think is compelling. Great. For me, thank you both. I've got two questions, the answers to which are probably self-evident. First, how do you define violence? Where I'm a continuum of micro-regression, medical, physical violence, and civil violence? Secondly, why is a children's hospital sponsoring your work? When a lot of the kind of engagements are described for someone who is beyond the ability of children to effectuate? Oh, well, maybe I'll take that question first.
I think the, the way we've started to think about children's mental health is really kind of whole children embedded in whole environments. And the more we can understand about community resilience, the more we're going to be able to kind of create the, um, the places for these kids to grow up, that they are able to sort of actualize their, their best selves. And so health has really moved away from the, come into my medical office and I'll see what you need treating for, and towards this much sort of wider lens of it's about the fabric of a community and the families. And it's about the feeling a kid gets when they walk out of the door and walk down the street. And those are really fundamental. So we're at a children's hospital. Of course, this work is really broadly applicable to everyone in communities. And that's, that's kind of where my interest has, has broadened to include all of that as well. But hopefully that explains that one. And then in terms of violence, it's a great question. Um, cause there are these sort of intersecting fields of there's hate crimes, which are not exactly the same as hate motivated violence. And yes, there's all sorts of violence, um, interpersonal and, uh, gang violence. And so what this research has circled more around is more when people sort of hold beliefs and, and are motivated around those to do something that is harmful and aggressive. And, and so in, in some ways that may or may not even become physical aggression, um, but it's really tied to this sort of, this particular body of work is more around when ideas and beliefs are motivating that as opposed to more, uh, sort of dysregulated bopping someone on the playground kind of aggression, if that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Um, have you seen any methods to engage community members who are, um, impacted by some of these microaggressions and, and acts of violence or threats into the leadership, um, roles, because I think you'll find that in Wayland, we have a lot of people who would love to see a little bit more diversity, but it's actually hard to get people engaged to the point where they, they want to run for things. Um, and I don't know where that comes from sometimes. And so I was just curious if you have experienced anything that could help us, um, get better at doing that, engaging people that way. Yeah. It's, it's a thoughtful question. Um, I should mention a lot of, at our center, we do a number of different types of work and a lot, a large body of our work is focused on refugee and immigrant youth and, and families. And so in part, I'm pulling from what we've learned over the years and engaging with those communities who have, I guess I would say part one was really taking the time to listen and understand where their priorities were and what they cared about and coming into it. Sometimes I think I knew what was important. And then I'd start listening and find out that what, that, that wasn't the most important thing to the community. And so we needed to shift and, and sort of uplift what that, what we were hearing was, was valued. Um, and that went a long way. And so that was, I mean, that's one thought. I don't know. Yeah. And just to that, it's a great, uh, question. And I think part of it is trying to find the helpers in the community that are already there, uh, whether they have letters after their name or have a particular role doing that and engaging in either sort of like informal or formal focus group process to identify what are the types of, uh, leadership that that community is looking for, and then trying to move within that and then build out from that. And then if you were to then build a, a job posting or recruitment process, making sure that the community members, those who are, um, the sort of stakeholders or, or the direct target of the services you're trying to build are directly involved in the, in the hiring process, or at least improvement of that individual.
Okay. Thank you. Thanks for coming this evening. Interesting stuff. How do you measure success?
Um, great question. I think it, part of it goes back to those five core tasks. And, and so I think if you, cause it's hard to measure, are we seeing less hate or hate motivated violence? Cause again, that's such a low base rate, um, outcome. But I think if we were to be able to sort of see change in terms of some of those five core tasks, like emotional wellness, and even one step before that, if we were able to say, oh yeah, we're seeing a lot more turnout for events, we're seeing a lot more diversity in the turnout for events. We're seeing all sectors of the community represented at these various meetings. I think that also is a kind of upstream indicator that you're, that you're making progress. Thank you. Um, so, sure. Okay. Well, I think it'd be worth what kind of brainstorming about the topic. I think we'd reach out, Dr. Martin's suggestion, maybe individuals we know in the community who have been thought about these ideas, dealt with these ideas, and might be some of my helpful suggestions too much. I think, um, that was actually a concern on the youth environment, on that event, since maybe, and some of the thrilling, what are we really able to do? Just one thing before you go, that Carol is mentioning the platforms called the Wellesley Civil Discourse Initiative. If you want to just take a quick look at that, they have some information online about it. Definitely. I'll take a look. I also wanted to mention, in your packet, you have our slides, and the last slide that we didn't put up has a QR code to a larger description of the work that we did, if you're interested in going deeper. Thank you so much. Thank you. See you later. Thanks for all that you do for the town. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Okay. Yeah. Um, so, um, no issues. Fine. It's pretty warm in here. Um, so I want you to talk to facilities about that. We're just trying to make sure our pipes don't freeze. So, um, thank you for your sacrifice. Um, so the Wayland Electricity Choice is the Community Aggregation Electricity Supply purchasing program. Um, we, uh, it began in May 2024. This is the first contract renewal for this particular program. Um, and this would normally be a standard consent item, but we're making a slight change to the program offering, so Bill asked me to come in today, um, and just be a sounding board for questions. I'll give you a basic overview, and then, um, and then we can talk more. Um, so our contract term for the, the first time that we did this back in 2024, um, was for two years and the rates, um, consistently since the program opened have saved Wayland, uh, electricity, Wayland residents and, um, commercial businesses that are on the program 1.32 million dollars in total electricity supply um, charges, uh, which is awesome. That's, that's a great success. Uh, as we go to renew the program, uh, when we looked at the program options, let me, let me back up. When we, we offered it the first time we had Wayland Economy, Wayland Standard Green, and Wayland 100% Green. I'm sorry, can you add Ellen Tone, can we call Ellen Tone up too? She's a chair of the ACC, ECC. She, is she in there? Yeah, she should be in there. Yeah, um, I just wanted to make sure if she, she might be able to answer anything historical.
There's only two, there's only two slides. Okay. Then it would just be the next one, rather. We want to move up. Um, so when we, when we first offered it, we had three, three different price options. The Wayland Economy is, um, your standard electricity supply, um, based on mass DPU guidelines. It has the mix of, uh, renewable energy credits that are standard as part of our portfolio. Um, because, you know, investing in solar and wind energy or electricity generation is an important part of Wayland's, um, goals. We also offered Wayland Standard Green, which has an additional 20% of renewable energy credits as part of the pricing. And Wayland 100% Green is, um, 100% of renewable energy credits as your offset, um, for all energy, uh, used in your electricity, um, bill. This time, because of, um, what's happening, you know, sort of at the federal level when it comes to renewable energy and what's happening at the state level with the way renewable energy credits are banked and utilized, um, the rec market essentially isn't, it isn't investing in the wind and the solar projects as was the case two years ago when we originally signed this contract. I want to say that every community who opened the programs back then was doing some form of these, right? Maybe it was plus 40% instead of plus 20% and somebody, and everyone was offering 100% green. Um, moving forward with this new, uh, renewable energy contract because of the way the current rec market is and because of the, based on the advice of our, um, program manager, Peregrine Consultants, we are, um, proposing to only offer the Wayland economy price moving forward. Um, and that isn't, that is because renewable energy credits as they are, um, essentially go into a bank account. That bank account is then used for solar and wind projects typically where that's what's been done. Um, because there's so much, uh, consumer pressure to reduce electricity and, um, utility, utility bills in general, that current bank account is being used now to reduce our electricity supply bills rather than investing in the solar and wind projects. And so we felt that one, we are one of the first communities to make this decision, but we certainly won't be the last as other communities are beginning to renew their contracts. They're probably going to make making the same decision. The city of Newton was the first, um, to move to a just, well, just a simple economy price. Um, when we go to renew the contract again, we have the ability to go back and offer the three options again, but we felt at this time that, um, it would be prudent to, to be honest about what we're offering, um, and not present something as other than what it is. If that makes sense. Um, does anyone have any questions about it?
Two years. Yeah. Second, I think it's particularly not a chair. This isn't something that we get the contract and come before you when it's sort of gone up, just for the people watching at home. Okay. What happens is the consultants will go up a particular day and they'll evaluate the contracts and they'll, they'll come back and say, this is the best one you need to lock it in now. So I need the authority in advance to participate in that dialogue with the consultants. I was getting it to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to draw clear. The Board going to, uh, the town manager, uh, to approve the education, electric supply contract, to the one grade, internal mailing. Second. second okay now that we have a little couple so again are the levels in favor yes
great thank you everybody
well i think that before we go on to the rest of the meeting i would like to put that up and talk about article ee which is the one that i skipped this is the one that the select board has put in it um this particular article which is the entitled amendment code does that say section now 198 uh planning board appeals um we put it in on the 14th of january to make the deadline with the intent that we would come back and have a look at the language dog was uh instrumental in looking at it but i think he meant wasn't able to attend the 14th and so what we really have to do is not only look to talk about this for a couple reasons but also we want to look at um in the supplemental packet two seconds right it's like i just said that and also there's hard copy on the around the table of the proposed language so before we do that i want to say the reason i brought this forth tonight was because we didn't need to be in agreement of what we're presenting but also talk about it we are meeting with the planning board next week for the joint meeting and one of the items we need to do is we need to refer this article to them for a hearing and a recommendation and so i wanted to make sure we were all in agreement on what we were uh referring so i'm going to hand this over to doug to talk about the revised language and go from there so the genesis about this for me um was a conversation that i had with town council regarding the nuance of the law and the fact that in order for anyone or a site plan approval issued by the planning board they cannot deal that decision until a building department issues so by way of example one of the dover amendment projects site plan approval was granted in the spring of last year in april but the building permit did not issue until the very end of october at that point an appeal was filed um within the next 20 days or so whatever the statutory limit was but then before the cva hearing could transpire construction had to deal it and the only way to have a stop construction order issued was if there was some specific violation of that site plan approval the conditions from the planning board and so to me it would seem to make sense to not have to wait until building permit issues if there are a period of months in between when the site plan approval is determined and before the building permit issues to potentially have that appeal heard by the cva so there is not an issue of ongoing construction because either the ongoing construction agrees the residents are a butters or if there is some stock construction that obviously agrees the developer so that that was that change um that is recommended at the back half of that article the first part of that article is simply a suggestion that i thought made a lot of sense also from town council that um indicated for any project of a certain order of magnitude and we need to determine because it's just a placeholder right now for the x square feet um and y parking spaces that that developer perspective developer come before the select board and present their concept 60 days before filing their application so i thought those two changes just seem to make a lot of sense to give us some foreseeability into some of these larger projects that that may happen down the road or will so we as a board be aware um and also the right of appeal to to have that happen earlier in the process questions and comments from the board tom i have four questions um doug do you have any thoughts as to how the x and y figures will be determined so did our uh building commissioner and he said he would have to do a little research into that he didn't have uh an idea right off the map um but i would like to hear from him before i answer that question unless somewhat outside my view um are you aware of other communities that have done this sort of um this sort of line between the battle uh the answers yes to both though i don't have the specifics because miss murder from kp law suggested both of these because she had worked on that language uh with other communities and i'm told the kp law represents some 100 municipalities but i don't know that he had specifically had this but this is how we came up with this language i'm certainly glad town council looked at this hold i am she wrote i am curious in section 6 10.1 which is any person agreed by decision planning will with respect to site planning approval may appear so within 20 days and my concern is does that limit them to appealing after 20 days because should that be the shell must be within 20 days that should be especially smell um i think that's because they don't have to appeal right the idea was no one has to appeal but you have to file your appeal within 20 days yeah that's all i thought and bill but i'm curious we can maybe say after may appeal to the zoning board appeals and such appeals shall be filed within 20 days of the day the site plan approval is and that field should be filed at the town council but i just i just see if you don't want to say you have to appeal you have you have the right to appeal but you have if you do so choose to appeal you have to have to appeal within 20 days that's why excuse me it says filled not filed yeah okay oh you did okay
sorry mr whitney what is the uh intended effect of having a project that won't come for the sort of reports of those projects the idea would be um from my personal experience um over the last year plus for these three builder vendor projects my sense is that members of this board had varying levels of awareness of the size and scope of those projects and i think it would have be moved all of us to have a full sense of awareness of these especially as questions could come in to our board and i think it would be it would also give us an option to potentially have some of these conversations a little earlier perhaps navigating some of the difficulties between the abutters it was perspective difficulties between the abutters and the developers and that's something perhaps for me to be involved at an earlier stage versus in a very late stage is where we find ourselves now so under this language uh we advise them before the select or two months before finally to present the comments i don't think that's too short to uh no i'm just um just wondering about the rule of planning before
because we should be here at the same time just trying to understand what because some of those projects the those potentially also could go to the cva right my experience i have with that bill is when i sat on the cva there was one project that did um to just give a powerpoint presentation before their substantive hearings to give the cva a sense of what was coming and the size and scope of that project we found helpful not not to have any influence one way or the other but this this was what was coming down the pipe i guess it's sort of a way to uh encourage slash mandate someone to present a concept get some feedback of the slightly more human form of the way and got the actual improvement it's just an awareness method that's the way that i would get also i i had a conversation with the chair with planning so i'll still put it on the agenda though that we would possibly make the referral i still want to have it on the agenda that we want to make the referral but we're going to discuss it with them that's part of my list um i will say this do you know there's a you all will know better than i am but it's a very long lead time in order to get a report so if we refer next week on the 9th and then they have let's say they posted right away they may not have a hearing until sometime in march and then the warrant deadline will come and go and the report won't come out until you go to town meeting on this they can they can schedule it sooner or later just i mean tom is more experienced with this but i'm about right it's it's about a six or eight week week at a time so in other words if we don't refer what i'm saying in directly is if we don't refer next week we won't refer until the 23rd because we're not meeting on this the week of the 16th so i just throw that out to the board recommend that maybe be both and speak with the chair of the planning and order and get input and interested next week yeah i don't know objections putting on the agenda oh okay i'm sorry i thought you were saying not to refer to we're not referring to the next one yeah oh it's not on our agenda to refer today i said we'll be we're meeting with them next week and one of the items will be to work for the article yeah but that i wanted us to have a conversation today to be all on the same page of what we're referring i'm sorry even with the new microphone i'm not doing too well
um so doug the only thing i'd ask is um did you think through what would happen if there was a site plan approval but it was contingent on specific conditions would we have to talk to them again all of the site plan approvals that are reviewed list of conditions so it's basically it's an appeal of whatever that list of conditions that they issue is after you feel i i think and isn't your question that the only requirement here is that there'd be a meeting between the proponent and what she's talking about the appeal but the appeal the help yeah no i'm not okay and you're saying like one of their conditions is you have to have the next screening she said no no it's it's um the conditions part of the the when they communicate with us 60 days but prior to um doing the site plan approval so they come in we talk to them we go through it but then the conditions change the project there's no conditions at that point our their presentation to us is simply this is the idea that we have say let's say give example the baritas project we want to build these two buildings on this property over this period of time and we are presenting this concept the select board has no say on that at all all we're doing is hearing what the concept is so we have a level of awareness awareness for the whole process so even if it changes in the future it's right we're just we're just expected to follow it and then understand that just have a baseline for the project exactly yeah so a couple thoughts one it's really just giving notice to our board of a project of a minimum size the second thing that doug i'm not sure the language is ideal the point of the project i think shall meet with the at least 60 days prior to submit in other words scheduling a meeting what if schedule the main parts yeah right and and we're going to schedule chair the comment so shall shall meet with the yeah yeah good do we want to um um here's a thought do we want to have um as a board agree that two folks will work on this and then present the revised for the packet for next week you can do that and they'll help me do not do that so before you can get into the regular the process here it's not for these characters
instead of saying in the process i've spent my stuff we have so long to uh in the hearing it's predictable
instead of saying hello here we are like this really substantial project but i think that's the point in other words transparency notice you know and is it a further step for developers yes but i don't think the delay is is uh but your point is that let them submit and then come to the cycle because you think the submission itself is not going to be derailed i i actually have a more generalized concern which is you know some would suggest that that might be applied but we're only in the first step for the homes that were all referred and the forward that you said
this will say what is that that's about it launch a launch away anyway so they had a concept of what they wanted to do and they just simply laid out that this is our concept i thought that was tremendously helpful but from crafting for these three projects that we're watching on hold i don't know about you guys i had very little visibility into the size and scope of these projects and i think how they impact our town if when we set the threshold i think we can add that effort because it substantially impacts a portion of our family you know we should be aware of that at the outset so i agree with i think you said this bill i don't want to put words in your mouth but i agree with what you said on i'm a little wondering why we need 60 days notice in advance of the planning board when that they're the ones that make the decisions and there is that hearing process you know they have to apply then the hearing has to be advertised so there's there's that lead time in there i'm wondering if it could be when they apply they also have to provide us with um uh notice right for any project perhaps when they apply to the planning board they also have to advise the select board and then we'll get it we'll get the sense of the scope of the project then does anybody else i think it takes i think it takes at least a month because they put the application in and then the board has to say advertise it and then they advertise a couple weeks and they schedule a hearing so yeah probably too much of it is just 60 days so how is this going to work so if mr whitney reaches out to the the chair of the planning board but you're making the edits how do i otherwise accomplish that so i've got two members working on this and then you just pull with this these are just quick the exact way okay okay all right all right so i think we're we've got that i'm just moving along a couple of items here so a couple of items on the uh that particular agenda item the annual term meeting thing um we went to the finance committee article workshop on wednesday and you know we uh advised them who are liaisons of the different articles and then um they provided us with their liaisons i know the chart's been updated but i do want to make sure before we go any further you know we start working on these articles are there any other uh trades or changes that could be made to this chart everybody's good with uh well i think we talked about yep so it's actually it's okay it's a legal problem everybody's okay with that i'm not sure i'm better qualified i'm happy to take it thank you um now listen mr whitney you can't just offload the article and you get up one back
or maybe you are more than the rest of us what are you what are you happy to give up crypto all right which one is crypto guys which one is it v isn't vector v isn't vector find it okay so um doug can you make those changes on the chart and send them in um and also doug um and i think that probably kelsey's right kelsey's i'm sure we're aware of but we should send in that we're aware that is it n and z are being uh removed but they're not being removed they're just x dollars okay um so next week obviously we will claim what i want to do for no financial articles a bunch of impact out because the crypto would be one we can kind of get those out really short week the packets do like thursday night friday so if you can get some of those into the packet great then we can look at them we could probably vote those next week which then could be worked on and prepared while we're gone right do you want anything because you're downwind from all of this all right all right i think let's go now i think we can move on to the specialist select board meeting location so um we've been asked to look at the coa which i went over and looked at it we've been asked um by a member to consider going back to the original location we had before um
i'm not so sure that the coa is is equipped yet for uh the level of involvement we need because you have to run this room yourself and we have a lot you know a lot of people coming in and out it's the large room that's on the end is room a and room b and if you put the divider i'm a little bit concerned it's going to be a little bit too large for us i'm not sure that there was recording is totally in there so not quite there that we should move but maybe that's something we'll consider uh later i think michael wasn't uh was thinking we might stay in the building and they might try to build an enclosure but i think that this is unbelievable i mean you can't hear me and i feel like i'm yelling and then i'm going to home and my husband was like why were you yelling at everybody all night so i am going to recommend um uh for the board that perhaps we move back to the coa um i'm not sure we can move next week but i will see because other people may have reserved the rooms so is that that's okay with everybody that makes more sense and finally excuse me to make an observation but sitting here and seeing the coa the former coa is unconstitutional i agree with you it constitutes cruel i'm with you
that's why i sit over there so i don't know what we're gonna do i have to tell you it's like the lavish you know i mean the thing is going back and forth this is ridiculous now i mean you know these are my place and she's all right let's move on i think we're up to date and now i think we're on the town manager's update so mr mccall would you like to speak to us yes madam chair yeah got it right so just a couple things that we have here this evening as many of you know staff and i attended the massachusetts municipal association conference this is town manager who's our spirit was there as well as hr and some of our other office staff there there were an awful lot of workshops networking opportunities i know a bunch of us went to relevant hr financial workshops keynote speakers that day were governor healy and lieutenant governor driscoll um one of the other ones who talked on a topic very similar to what we talked about with dr elton whining this evening was timothy shriver the former ceo of special olympics member of the kennedy family he talked about the dignity index which was uh to help political leaders and citizens which they use when they're dealing with people with different things that's an interesting um time a good time for all i think you know the only thing from it um and next on the agenda was state aid uh when the governor speaks usually is the time when she talks about local aid she said that they were increasing state aid to 4.4 percent however concurrent with her speech usually our fy 27 cherry sheet estimates uh that's a colloquial term for our uh local aid estimates came out in digital services when that was coming out everybody was checking their phones despite the fact that they said they've increased the state aid to 4.4 percent a lot of uh towns including wayland got somewhere in the tune uh two percent range we get approximately 2.4 percent increase in our state aid year over year um we were estimating approximately a 250 000 bump we got a 223 000 bump which was almost just a little under 10 percent less than what we had anticipated um but this was the governor's budget and off the commission recreation and at the ect Very steep ahogical 09.4 percent that could uh with the district budget thinking maybe about 16 million bump allных uh 10 1 eight eigene 這些 funds or 10 million elevators inorgies to после 20 keith or 10 years on tampene land at national level between the south 7 1 and southzych and 690 and 690 and 640 even northele change we're going to start early down because we have a select board meeting just because of the vacation schedule and our last snow day we've lost the ability to come in and meet with folks so we're going to try and squeeze it in from 4 30 to 5 30 pm quick recap from our last meeting i have written to several of the boards that i sit on the regional uh originally communications we're trying to get a board meeting there uh west suburban veterans district but most importantly the west suburban health group we're looking to have a board meeting next week so that we can get our numbers for our budget on health care costs health care costs and they were announced um in the maya meeting we're not a my member for health insurance they had uh on average single digit increase high eight percent but that was in large and they had a range you know some people are going to be lower and obviously higher but that was in large part to them eliminating coverage for glp1 drugs so it'll be interesting to see what the recommendation because we do the primary uh insurer with my across blue shields we do offer numbers for our offerings we'll be interested to see what the costs on next week um we had tom holder and i and other members of the staff i think paul totally well we had a productive meeting today with mass dot uh barry lorraine and the others that are working on sherman's bridge uh we gave them a project update and we'll be putting out a project update memo joining the submarine in the next few days they are again supportive we wanted to check in with them to ensure that they're still supportive of the plan that we're doing and the mitigation efforts we're making with the residents um they reminded us that this is a deck replacement not a bridge replacement so the monies are limited to repairing the deck there could be opportunities down the road to do some of these things that we can't do right now but that would be with different funding and more of a bridge refurbishing so for now we're focused on uh replacing the deck and trying to do as much as we can uh while we do that so that's continuing to uh press forward um i wanted to just thank a couple of staff before i go um i did receive some comments and compliments to the dweyland police department if you've noticed some step up in enforcement in the last four weeks and i got some compliments and waste me alone to that and similarly i i wanted to thank our dpw for their effort as you all know we didn't have alcohol open last week we had an unusual snow event which we don't have that or we haven't had a snowstorm like that in many years and we had some people working close to 36 hours driving and plowing i know it took a day or two to get some of the sidewalks but the primary focus was the primary and secondary roads but i just want to thank them they did a nice job and they continue to clean up that's all i have thank you sir i've been moving to send calendar uh that's amended items one two and three as amended as a request as it is in as it is revised second so it would be the uh um doug has seconded and payment at me
it's not within the supplemental packet just correct it's not it's in the original supplemental i was going to say before we do the consent calendar there was an edition that came in late today for one day liquor license and it is on the revised uh consent file in the supplemental first supplemental packet that concerns uh colina ortiz right mr mr michael sorry thank you um i would respectfully request that on the consent calendar we may want to hold item one c for now uh i did work with staff including the treasurer's office the planner going through these these primarily planning board matters and i did receive an email from the planning board chair that had some questions about these we resolved one of the other ones but one c there was a question of um whether that some of the conditions have been met there so i wanted to investigate that a little further i'll mend the motion to uh keep out one c exactly
okay is there any further discussion no there's no discussion on this one uh those in favor so and yes uh doug yes yes yes carol yes motion passes five zero one c will be for another meeting mr mr mr mr mr musical that'll be the next year another meeting got it all right let's move two minutes please so we have the minutes of one five one fourteen and one twenty i think in the practice correct it's should we have a motion first anybody have any edits anybody have any edits a tiny one right at the top page two it had a mascara comment to leave the impossible yes okay anybody else have any edits okay anybody else have any edits
anybody anybody else have any edits i think in um section a when we talk about the annual meeting annual time meeting petitioners workshops i think we need addresses for both uh ms carter and mr scott's that's by the way sherman bridgewood and um also i think uh and it said i lay the father down i think in number 50 that ann was disconnected from the meeting i thought she left meeting at 8 25 and other than that i don't see anything else so are we doing this one at a time okay thank you so let's have a vote all those in favor and yes uh uh yeah um yes and uh yes and carol yes so that's five zero so the minutes of uh january 14th please thank you for the second thank you the edits i don't have this one yeah i'm gonna hop in one real quick here when we were talking about article y i want the fourth paragraph down it mentions katie klein but i think it should also say ap law and from that i don't see anything anyone else all right then all those in favor and yes tom yes bill doug and carol yes that's five zero uh the minutes of january 20 please approval of january 20 26 minutes is dead thank you second thank you any edits on a2 i'm not sure that i condemned my sentence is respectful but i think i agree i was commend it i didn't commend it either i think i addressed it didn't like would you say that i'll ask you you guys were here address the disrespectful behavior a2 announcements i thought i was very very polite okay other than that i don't see anything anyone else have an edit all right then let's take a vote please um bill yes doug yeah and yes carol yes and yes okay five zero all right i think that brings us to correspondence any comments comments respondents no none okay reports and concerns and would you like to start i didn't have any concerns okay wonderful uh uh oh uh uh oh it's the chairs um uh oh it's the chairs i'm pleased that the topic of the tom that we came up today yeah this meeting and uh when it does come up next soon of a agenda soon i hope maybe it might be a hearing but maybe you and the town manager might take a recommendation as to the scope of the committee that you might like to see and who who you might like to see okay thank you doug okay so i have um i want to just go back on the schedule abby was out today otherwise she would have sent everyone the advance notice of the the dates but i like to put them in the packet if you'll know if there's a gap between march 16th and april i wasn't quite sure exactly when we needed to meet or why so i'm leaving it open but certainly we'll sort this out in the next couple weeks we'll take care of that i did have down the town manager review was due on february 4th but now i found out that you can get it in on friday which sounds much better uh please please everybody working on those okay but would it make sense for ev to send around you know
sure let me ask this has anybody has anybody started this besides tom i have started that's it
all right um in the correspondence that was mentioned about the luna celebration and they wanted someone to speak i did volunteer to represent the board um also on sunday tom and i will represent the board at the knox trail um 250th um i'm actually going to call tom this is a warning headstand phone for some input on what i should be saying i made some notes i can tell you that on my night table what is on my night table there's a book i just got others between the mox and the west yeah be careful i might abdicate this speaking right away i've got several of them to do um and what does the last thing i have i did want to also say a big thank you to michael and kelsey and everyone else for putting together this information about these i'm going to say it wrong guaranteed payments or guaranteed deposits deposits when you mentioned these things to me and i put them on the draft list just like you do sometimes i have no idea how much is involved and you know periodically i put it on and it would move and then finally it went up and when i ever saw how much work was involved and what particularly what we're so busy right now with so many things going on and deadlines and everything else so thank you michael it certainly was nice though to get you another thing basically cleaned up and kelsey that goes the same for you about getting those board of health fees resolved and they are effective april 1st which will allow us to have one quarter of experience which will help brian next year's budget when he speaks to the dor about raising up our local receipts uh which is good for all of us so and having said that i'm only seven six minutes later than i predicted at the beginning of the meeting and i'll take our motion to adjourn at 9 36 please thank you i have a second second thank you no you can't second thank you all those in favor and yes uh doug
and i forgot to mention we're going to start earlier next week