February 9, 2026 – Select Board – Video & Transcript
February 9, 2026 - Select Board
thank you good evening carol martin as chair of the select board i will call
the february 9 2026 meeting of the select board to order
6 15 pm this is a hybrid meeting we are in person and remote the meeting may be recorded and if it's recorded it will be made available to the public on lake ham as soon as possible after the meeting pursuant to chapter 2 of the acts of 2025 this meeting will be conducted in person and via remote access in accordance with the ethical law this meeting has remote access and one may watch or participate remotely with the meeting link that can be found on the agenda and on the wayland calendar when required by law or allowed by the chair persons wishing to provide public comment or otherwise participate in the meeting may do so um here in the town building at 41 constituent road or through the remote access public comment should be limited to two minutes per person so our agenda for this evening is going to be announcing some public comment followed by a fairly lengthy discussion of the 2026 annual town meeting articles we'll do a few of those approximately 7 30 we will have a joint meeting with the planning board have a number of discussion topics including their zoning articles on the article we're putting for that would be followed by a discussion review of the proposed community for mural project we have a reappointment on the permanent municipal building committee town managers report i don't believe the minutes were available for the packet so those will be tabled review correspondence select boards members reports and concerns i don't have any topics not reasonably anticipated 48 hours in advance and hopefully by 9 30 we will adjourn so joining me this evening um in the select board meeting room here is mr faye and mr whitney um i'm is there in are there any members online robbie no i don't see any other okay uh we we anticipate that mr levine will join us shortly and we will check regularly to see if miss friendsley joins us remotely we are joined tonight and will be assisted by uh town manager mr mccall who will be with us until seven and he will have to excuse himself come back about approximately eight ish um and we are also joined by our assistant town manager miss um helsey house burlett who will um assist us in michael's absence and obviously through all of this in tell me the article discussion so all right i also want to say please note the agenda items times are approximate and the items may or may not be discussed in the order and all topics are subject to liberation and both so having said all that are there any announcements on the board
so i have one for those who watch our meetings um select board has called uncle on this fan situation and the audio and we uh will be moving back or to our old space in the former coa area effective our meeting on february 23rd so yeah nice to look up after a recent internal poll we are now calling that area the wailing commons in the comments all right will we seriously yes somebody smirks it sounds nicer than the former coa meeting room all right and we felt it was time since they've been gone for more than half a year and then you should start referring it to something okay so that's where we're going going to the other side of the building and um and i do want to ask if once we move we could remove this sign up here because one of the concerns that bothered me was we had twice someone was coming to a select board meeting came to this meeting and there was someone else here and they never got to our meeting all right no more answers do we have any public comment yes mr carpenter first of all everybody can hear me tonight it's that y'all can hear me back there mr property you can hear me back there i can hear you i'm sorry your turn uh hello mr faye you're gonna have to be the timer tonight is my time is my carpenter is exhibited extreme appreciation the two-minute rule all right thank you and i plan to keep to that tonight so uh thank you chair and members uh for allowing me to speak and having public comment uh i want to acknowledge firstly the school committee's discussion with you last with uh carol and bill uh present to discuss article dd last week uh they raised substantive questions about alternatives to the parcel in question and about whether they will transfer custody and about the sequencing authority related to it i think it's important that the town meeting get a clear picture of how those questions are being handled within the article so my request is as you finalize article dd my request is about clear wording so voters understand what they're funding uh specifically if the intent is a joint engineering study i ask that it please be stated and that it will be jointly scoped in the article and that both boards will agree to the scope and any major changes before work begins um secondly um it would also help to state plainly that the study does not assume a transfer a development plan or any future town meeting vote that will keep it informational uh or thirdly uh the town meeting should be able to read the article and understand is this a joint study with the school committee or is the select board moving forward on its own so my ask is simple uh write the article so it clearly states whether this is a joint or an independent uh for the select board and then how the scope will be approved and that the study doesn't presume an outcome thank you that's all thank you very much is there any other public comment in the room um robbie do i have any public comment questions online okay great and i'm going to move on to um you see mr holder there yes he's there yeah would you like to bring him over um we're going to talk about a number of articles tonight uh article hh is actually in the supplemental packet i had thought we might end up having a uh revised draft but i think super bowl got in the way i mean what's and so that we uh the original has been put into the supplemental good evening tom how are you i'm doing well i hope the same with all of you thank you um so what what we're doing is we're having um all the sponsors of the various articles come before us and so that we can ask any questions that we have you know about the article we have seen you and the board of public works together and separately many times so i'm not sure if we have too many questions but um does anybody have any questions about this article for mr holder tom we've had a previous discussion uh with ryan keveney i'm not sure if you were part of that discussion excuse me with respect to sort of the flow of the dollars the warrant article seeks to appropriate 38.6 million and to authorize borrowing at the same the warrant article notes that with respect to the two elements there is a 10 contingency for each so the question i guess i have is whether once the borrowing takes place does the mwra or the lender provide the entire amount to the town which would enable us to earn some interest on it or is it more a typical construction draw where there's authorization to borrow the funds are drawn down pursuant to a periodic maybe monthly draw request
yeah so i would unfortunately like to defer to brian keveney on this uh because for me to offer an answer to that i wouldn't be confident that it was the correct one i have a sense of how things will proceed but i would i would prefer to have him be able to give you the precise answer to that i do know that um relative to timing of it you know this is going to be a zero interest loan um typically the term is in the next 20 years we do have the ability to extend that 30 years um but if we make that decision it would no longer be zero percent it would be a higher percentage just to uh be able to enable the clean water trust to absorb some of that risk with a with a small interest rate we will be making payments beginning after the construction is complete so that's scheduled for the summer of 2029 so it would be that uh next fiscal year which in as in essence would be fiscal year 31 is when the town would begin making payments on that stood and again this may be a brian question but to the extent that the 10 contingency for both elements is not required what happens to those proceeds so the two contingencies that you're referring to will be included in the loan application which will actually occur we'll make that application later this summer uh into the fall into october we will not have an exact bid price until a little bit after that when the design is complete and we actually go out to bid and receive construction figures we'll at that point know what the bid price is but then with any sizable construction project uh there's always the risk of unanticipated conditions that are confronted whereby change orders would be submitted and approved so we will likely not know how much of that contingency is actually used until later on perhaps nearly um when the project is nearly completed right but to the extent that let's say hypothetically five percent remains that the change orders aggregate to five percent rather than ten percent do you have a sense of what happens to the remaining five percent follow it yeah i i do not again i can speculate but i would prefer to have brian weigh in on that sorry sorry no that's fine thank you i believe that becomes issued but authorized but unissued debt and that's why we have that article periodically to rescind authorized but unissued debt however this is a little bit different because it's coming from the state third party yeah so we would probably have the brian or final rules but under ordinary borrowing that we do that's what happens there all right uh excuse me i'd like to have note that mr levine has joined us at 625 thank you how are you good and we are on article age age as you can see mr uh holder is with us we does anyone have any last questions for him on this article i did mention doug that i had thought i was going to have a revised write-up this morning but uh super bowl got in the way and uh didn't receive anything until very late today so this our this write-up will be streamlined you know in accordance with um you know our new streamlining
recommendations particularly the pros and the cons and i and uh you know if we can use 400 words instead of five that's what we're going to do here so but in the meantime does anyone have any last questions for tom before we move on with this article um i had a question though for mr mccall we voted this article to co-sponsor it which should be added by the way to the top of the um the article on the proposed thanks guessing um but we should probably still take another vote to support it you know although we've already supported it that's my question you know how we vote to support articles yes yeah i mean i i never see any harm in reaffirming your part of position so i think you all think your rights to do so kind of chair um so if you want to make a motion um
in this article you want to wait and do them all at once okay happy to move that this board vote to co-sponsor article hh with the board of public works already co-sponsored now we're supporting it to put it in the warrant we vote in favor of it but we say um article each year i was inserted on january 20th i moved a motion might read something like i move that the select board through uh really long-term water supply gas construction funding and then that's the article that we're supporting that it's in the supplemental yeah first one in my supplemental yeah i could uh i've lost the packet of mine mine see this there's mine right so so move
okay is there any further discussion all right all those in favor say aye aye all right motion passes four zero may i have my track deck we're not going to level that's right just getting used to it oh yeah no no no no getting used to it um mr holder thank you very much for your time unless you have anything else to add you're you're free to leave us all right well as always i do appreciate the consideration thank you all right by the way before before tom leaves um i do want to add in that there is going to be a forum about this article and all it entails so april 7th that's correct april 7th at the coa community center yes right and the time 7 p.m 7 p.m and that's is that on the town calendar already do we know um i do not know whether it's on the town calendar i've secured the room and coordinated the audio visual needs uh with the coa staff so it we are good but i'll ensure that it makes the town calendar so everybody is apprised of it because we would like to have a strong attendance we'd like to be able to do a fair amount of outreach and and let people know what this project is about and what this article entails so should we also put it like in the newsletter and do we have a press release going out about it does anybody know we do okay we're good i think we're good so far all right very good thank you sir all right good night all so if you look in our regular packet there are a number of articles which are determined the no financial impact articles and these are the ones that the finance committee will write this little blurb down here um it's not on this one but exactly they're not on here um one they're not on any of these hang on i've seen one oh come on careful where on this one cc is one i know it's on cc because i did that last night it's not there what are you looking for well the finance committee will write on all of these non-financial articles this group that adds in the next agenda item have been all deemed by the finance committee is what they call no financial impact and they have a little phrase that says after discussion with the finance director has been deemed that there was little or no financial impact in the town this article and therefore under code 19 i think it's four um they will not provide a full report with pros and cons and so then what stands on the article is just what we see here here is our 150 words background information and then the select board recommends and then that little phrase from the finance committee and then their vote is to not um this is not a financial impact article so let's these articles that are coming in next starting with p right through cc are all in that group and i thought we could look at those tonight and then possibly vote them uh the ones that are in the packet are missing that vote and the phrase from the finance committee but really what we need to focus on is the wording that's on these to make sure this is what we want and then i think we could take a vote on these so everybody following me we do okay that's great so um the first one of course is p and that's a little bit different because this is one we've done before and it has an awful lot of material in it because it's got pros and cons it was done under the old system we actually could yeah we're going to revise that we could get a lot out of this um yeah so also by the way on this one um tom this is your article right that's correct can you read the first thing under the finance committee comments so we're going to look at this and talk about what's missing or what needs to be added in or taken out on these and then we that's that's our plan um so on the first paragraph it talks about this article is identical to article 19 and 22 were adopted at the 23 24 and 25 annual town meetings but if we had three town meetings shouldn't we have the articles right so yeah so i wrote missing one and um i don't know if we need this paragraph about expedite legislative review but why don't you work on that you'll work on that okay and really reduce all these arguments pros and cons really we need like one or two right does everybody agree you agree okay so how do we want to handle this so we're making these edits do we want just tom or the liaison to make an edit and then maybe show them to someone else and we're done with them or do we want to see them come back in the revised form before they go on the warrant i think if it's going to change substantially even if it's going to be constricted i think we can see it one more time yeah i'd like to do that all right so why don't we talk about them and vote on these and then if you can get them if they're yours and you're here next week maybe you can get them we can get them cleaned up and then just have them for quick review on the 23rd but i'd like to vote and so we'll tell the finance committee we've moved on here okay so that's the first one we're all set we're going to do one vote for all of them would you like to do that you want to do them all separate ah because we may have different i'm not sure we're going to vote on pf you want to vote on p without uh that's what's p or what we have for the remote participation yeah we have one tonight yeah let me give us support to support the audience right then i'll move that that this board vote to support article t entitled reaffirm the old dissipation of time meeting opposed the more time in article 2026. okay well i'm going to also make a suggestion there if you don't mind it's easier for the minute taker when you do these because there's so many we have the same person make the motion the same uh second all right is there any further discussion that's my only question is whether we wanted to prefer this action until we have five members just thinking about that too come on guys we've got a lot we've got 50 some articles to do we've got five weeks you don't want to be in here a lot of extra meetings we've got to move some of these just saying i would feel more concerned about that if they were articles that were that were more controversial the ones we're dealing with tonight are fairly non-contro that's awesome and i'm not sure that miss brensley will be able to join us next week she may be but she may not be are you allowed to take someone else yeah why don't we just do it and then if she's here we'll take that vote again and it would reflect five zero if it's going to be five zero only then the point is why do it right if i'm going to do another vote because if she if she doesn't attend then this is our safety bill and that second one we could potentially do a whole list follow a single vote we're going to do that then just wait for the 23rd right but let's go over them all and see what edits we need to make so that when we're looking at them on the 23rd they're really good to go and perhaps then you can reach out to the finance committee liaison if you're a liaison get that paragraph in there that belongs in there with their vote all right all right so that's what we're going to do so we have to withdraw your motion then i think what should we draw okay we're out all right anybody have any more comments uh no now we're on our right acceptance of mgl chapter 53 section 18b provide information regarding valid questions right um um anybody have any comments i think this is a fantastic article and i'm glad we're going to think are we the ones
my question is i don't know that historically we've put the whole and the whole have we put this is a question for you all of this language this is the entirety of the law yes yeah because in another one we don't you'll see later i see you saying in other words this isn't but the description that we're going to take that stadium well i think this is kind of unique it'd be one thing if it was a statute that was maybe i i think this is kind of unique i think it's good to have the language in this one you are right carol sometimes we don't but i think this one is you know it has some value in having statutory language okay whose article is this who has our i mean levine pay attention please um you know what i lay it up tonight because i think it'll be oh okay i want to make sure you just double check that the text totally mirrors the law because i noticed on a couple of these they'll say something and then maybe something's not exactly that way it might say see we might be voting to have the select board do something we're down here it might say the town clerk so just could you just make sure when you go through this that they we have a match set so we don't end up and there'll be no finance committee comments and and finance committee comments will be that phrase i just stated that speaking with the finance director consultation with the finance director this is deemed a no financial impact article and then there'll be no a favor so will that will those lines be gone you'll get that from them who's your who's your no i mean will this be deleted yes okay who's finally is on yeah all right okay so you want to talk to him about that and um you know um i just want to hop in real quick here kelsey and i were talking about this today we are moving in a direction where there are more the finance committee is uh voting that more articles have no financial impact and so then really they become we're the ones that really finalizing the write-up into it so it has it switches back and um because and i sent in i spoke with kelsey today i sent an email to uh the chair of the finance committee did they want us to be the ones that submit these once we get their verbiage and their vote or do they want to submit them all so i will advise on this all right anything else on this one all right let's go to article s acceptance of mgl chapter 30 138 section 12d conversion on the wine slash malt licenses i think this one's bill yeah yep okay have any comments here i've had something here this article and authorize the term solutions um this one i think in the background information needs to say authorize the select board to convert um because that's what the text says so the text says let's allow the select board as the local license to approve requests to convert and so i think we need that same language in the bottom versus otherwise the town so is that duplicative is that duplicative if if the article description includes that information and we're trying to pare down these foreign articles well i think we just need that to match them because someone can go out at the town meeting and say well is it the town or is it the select board that can do make the change you could use some synonyms for the verbs maybe germs i don't know and the other question i have here is it's it talks about that people can just apply and you know send in their request to convert uh but shouldn't they be applying i mean is it an automatic conversion if i have a beer and wine license do i automatically get to convert or you'll have to apply to the select board so those were a couple points i thought we should have in um that's got to be an apply right yeah and they have to apply they it's not an automatic thing because it um right it go if they ever give up their wine and malt transfer license it automatically converts back to them so it's almost like a special permission for each specific wine and malt person who already holds that license so they wouldn't have to apply for this description says uh uh this white board is licensing authority would approve a request from it but it doesn't say in the background in the background that says it allows the holders to convert their licenses for an on-premise alcohol license so i'm saying i think they have to match so i i can edit it all right we're okay with that and you want to have that going to jalen for the contact person yeah okay article t is this you home rule allow additional liquor licenses all right so again we have the language here anyone have any comments on this i have no idea what this means in the article description the last sentence it says provided however that the general court may reasonably vary the form and substance of the requested legislation within the scope does that mean they may or may not give us the 10. well that means they can revise it they can edit it revise it should we say in the text that we're looking for 10. so i it was recommended to me by members of our delegation to aim high right but we don't say anything here we just say that the authorizes for special edges oh 10 oh it is in here may grant 10. all right um let's get rid of that one all right again can you just read those bill to make sure they match um and in the background information uh if we have enough wording i was wondering if we would say um one of the reasons we're doing this is for economic growth you know so the proposed specialist provide the town the option to grant additional liquor licenses prospective response um we feel our economic reach the limit on the current quote so i think when terrain came in they took the last all alcohol restaurant license it's going to add a sentence at the end carol talking about social licenses important to attract additional restaurants we have none and we have none available right now but also be careful now you have to stay within 150 words you just said it's the code all right are we good on that great how about you that's me home go ahead you know what i would like to be able to wait a minute let me read it that so people are listening home rule allow print free digital legal notices go ahead i wonder if we're very behind the curve on this one and there are a whole lot of towns that have already adopted this would be okay i would put in there but i think this largely speaks for itself and i do think we need to put in all of the law in there the act yeah so on this one in the description it says the select board will uh what will we do authorize and request the select board a petition the general court no at the top it's no i know what is in the background info i think it talks about the select board only uh selects two means of legal notice but if you look in b the school committee so you've got to add in the select board in the school committee as appropriate we'll select and again that's going to be 150 words you might have been chopping up some ands and bs and those see what i mean are you talking about here yeah so here the legislation says the school the select board can do it and then the school committee also selects two publications yeah but down here in the background information we only said a select board i see so this is what this is what the residents read they are not reading usually yeah so this we want to match them up i think any more questions or comments on this one okay article v amend general bylaw prohibition of cryptocurrency machines uh who's is this is this one okay yeah go ahead again my one thought on this one is xx-3a says the bylaw shall be enforced by the town away on select board or its designee um and you probably should put that in the background and there's plenty of wrong there and are there any fines are there any fines if if um i guess what kind of fine would you have but you put one in and we didn't know it and be the enforcing and who would be in the enforcer like who would who would go into businesses and check and see if they have a bit my view is if it's an issue we can start finding people but i'm not sure there's going to be an issue right yeah i don't know ma'am what was the when it comes to this matter share our if there's a concern we would send our code enforcement officer their building commissioner and then you can report that to me and possibly the chief of police and then we would take the appropriate next steps informing them to cease and desist in the move some desist sounds good any other comments i'll take that as no article q um mine that's you too acceptance of mgl chapter 60 section two a bait up to 25 dollars on fast food tax bills right so brief trade forward i uh hope to get religions to you this week anybody have any questions of course i do so it says up here if the collecting of the town is satisfied that an unpaid tax on land on land that also included there you have the building on your land i'm going to defer to miss i think she probably knows this i can check on because it's my understanding it's all tax bills and i just that paragraph is how it reads in mgl chapter 60 section two paragraph two is i just copied that directly from general law so um i can have that clarified i think it's an interpretation carol as to how the assessment the basis of assessments generally right on the possible right part of the land land is enhanced by the structure right i think i think it's a legal thing that's why you do it land if we've copied and pasted this from the it's on the state website we're probably good i just i hate to put something in and then the next year we have to go back and sort it out because that's that's not fun as town council looked at this you know person yeah i don't send you know i'm supposed to town council to there in the final form as like i don't check but the statute yeah that's verbatim in the statute exactly so yeah okay yeah right yeah i just pulled up chapter 60 section one definition saying it doesn't define land they're probably defined more generally elsewhere that's general i'll ask the discussion so what will happen is once we finalize you know we vote on the 23rd and then you get the final puppies in in the next few days because it would be free to send those off the town council you know all right all right article bb is um home rule authorization of being barrels in the town of wayland and yes mr living i'm excited about this article me too we've been hoping for this for a while do you think it needs to be beefed up in the background section do you want more anybody have any comments on this uh the text or you know and um michael kelsey speak up still if you want yeah okay i believe jamon was working on some proposer's comments for that so i don't know we're all set can forward that over to beef up it's all set in your last sentence you'll maybe be fascinated if you only have a new town meeting and just the fact that you have to go to town being for it this just doesn't seem right i just have a question kelsey will the background information term be changed to proposes proposes information proposes comments yeah that's what it says in the war yeah so um that's so when doug puts it together and finalize it he should exchange background information put in the post yes when we finalize the warrant that's the finance committee is not not going to opine so this is a good point so if we end up being the group that sends in the finals we'll change those before we send them in um mr mccollins is going to leave us thank you we'll see you within the next five minutes right on the next to last sentence the summer position would allow the select word to insert the word to brand permission i also want to add in the very last full sentence to work annual they say aims to avoid delays with families who press green barrels at annual town meeting so here sorry where is that your last background deprivation
um you're distinguishing it from special county meeting just sounds funny because annual is once a year so you're saying once a year once a year yeah oh i would say green barrels at annual town meeting and then just have a period maybe that's a better because that's where we go no and we'll request green burial oh and they request requested the special town meetings they can yeah i wouldn't say the main argument to me is the fact that you should that they don't need to come before a town meeting right present this right so we're defining it to the select board not necessarily the frequency although that's something to be said without getting into the weeds even special i think the town has 45 days there's there's a i mean jesus yeah 45 to call and the reason people need this immediate approval is oftentimes for religious reasons or other so is there anything you want to add to this that this looks at that last sentence um you want to say at town meeting which typically occurs once a year which typically occurs once a year and sometimes time meeting is spicy without saying annual just say town meeting but i think you already agree i agreed on time meeting by itself that's fine get rid of the once a year then okay green bells at time meeting period that's right at time meeting period i should say not else yeah at time meeting period all right i was coming in this way what else is coming in that way we're right where we should be
is there anything we want to add to this one so mr levine can point that in i'm going to make a couple of tweaks okay and then you'll have it ready for the 23rd yeah okay um just go back so here's a good example of last year um let's see what it goes into one article 24 was here reports is the text proposes comments because the select board because it's a lot of um um she said by politicians but this is us and then it's finance committee but we'll that's it all right but it does say that um we're good on that one so the next the next one is um me cc um chair carol soon as a most of that look uh amend town code chapter 31 36 dash one parentheses town meeting and election right um what's interesting here is 36 dash one refers to us as the selectment and uh slice do we want to change that or we're not allowed to change it go ahead sure we change it select board right yeah yeah so we'll have to um do the strike out there and put the one word in voice yeah twice and uh are we still comfortable with march 15 through june 1 i am right anybody else finance committee expressed a little bit of concern about that early what did they want it to be what year by year year by year because it's all about flexibility right we're all set yeah right um this one i do have somewhere um maybe all done from the uh the finance committee i'll just make those two at edits for that so for example this one do we need to see this one again we yeah we'll put them all back in so we can vote them all right that takes care of that now i think in this anybody have any comments final comments on the ones you looked at that's really good so all right uh i'd like us to go into a supplemental packet and look at article ee please which is the beginning no page page five of the the supplemental packet thank you just because i don't have the page on this right so they edits to the language itself of the the article reflect what we discussed last time so hang on just one second actually on page seven is the revised cc there it is i knew i had this in here and if you scroll down you'll see this is the finance committee comments that all appear on all of these non-financials following consultation with the finance director the finance committee has deemed this article the negligible financial impact on the town sure to town code check on 19-3 detailed comments together with a summary of arguments and they were out in an opposition to the article and not reply that's the phrase that they're going once they take the vote it's going to be in every one of these non-financials so everybody's got that yes i knew i had one done okay so let's go back up now to page five article ee amend town code um is it chapter 198 planning board appeals and um this is doug's article and then we had some edits last week and do you want to walk us through any filled out the background info so let's i wanted us to um look at this be comfortable this is the language we want and then we're going to vote tonight to refer to the planning board and then when they come in we'll talk about it and then um the town manager's office hopefully um can send it out tomorrow to them right maybe the planning board first before make him referral no we're going to do it tonight i think what you want to do it after you mean don't vote right there don't vote we're voting we're voting to refer it do we want to hear from the planning board if they have concerns about this yeah article we could vote after they leave all right
in the meantime let's look at this you want to walk us through well we talked about this last time and two of the items that we discussed um were actually requiring a meeting with the select board versus scheduling meeting with the select board and instead of having that be required to be 60 days prior to submitting any application for site plan approval it would be within 60 days after submitting such application what i still don't know is where the threshold is how we can draw the line because we obviously don't want it to be for the vast majority of projects in town this is for the larger projects in town and bill do you have any suggestions on that for square footage or parking we know that the mbta zoning has a minimum water area but five acres we have lots of home lots that are 60 000 square feet which is an acre and a quarter or something so um because this says construction of a structure greater than x square feet or alteration of more than x square feet of a site because there could be a number of small structures we want to be able to cap i think that second part captures that the alteration of more than x square feet of a site this is a unique article we'll put another way of other communities adopted yeah this was suggested to us by time council most communities might provide some guidance on square footage lot size i can ask miss murray what's your what's your general sense
bigger than a bread box but how much bigger bigger than what a bread box like if we said 10 to 15 000 square feet but for a structure is that an unreasonable demarcation a typical office floor in downtown boston would be 20 000 feet net um stop and shop is about 20 000 square feet but if you think about the three dover amendment projects that are currently happening i don't know that any single structure would be anywhere near that size potentially but there's a minimum acreage in all those three fun right maybe that's the key figure minimum acreage mean the part of alteration of more than x square feet of a site what might look at what might i do it right because that's not just building that's altering the site you could say construction of a project greater than x square feet
or you'd want to make sure refers to structures and not park areas like that's just any sense on parking function the size of the building right yeah yeah and to bill's point maybe you take the language out regarding parking spaces that's much of this that's necessary okay all right i'll consult with town council you have to work for michael okay thank you well kelsey i'll remember he's in charge of delegating that today i think it would be interesting maybe the assessor has this information about how many structures or how many projects as we're thinking about it exceed 20 000 square feet 25 000 square feet 50 000 square feet yeah your sense of order of bankruptcy this course doesn't get into things like site disturbance and what's like it doesn't get into things like site disturbance or taking down trees which you don't think that the term alteration of more than x is site disturbance you're altering the site but it starts with the first line construction of a structure right what do you just want to take down it's construction or alteration so they're trying to capture both okay okay gotcha and i agree i'll take out parking spaces well we have a bylaw that refers to uh site disturbance or excavation or isn't there something within our zoning bylaws i think so memory serves from years and years ago
and then tom you had made a suggestion about the appeal language that that wasn't clear so i made that edit toward the bottom of the page okay like an appeal isn't mandatory obviously but if you file appeal then it must be filed within 20 days so kept that may but added the shall language no and you guys tell me what you think i just wrote up a little explanation to arguments in favor and to oppose but let me know if you think i missed the boat on any or should include certain arguments or other points yes i asked doug to fill that in because now we have a complete article submission should we vote to go forward argument opposed that last one doug i'm not sure worded properly but i think you want to say establishes another potential hurdle for a developer because if i actually use the word hurdle obstacle step it's not a requirement of the developer right it's it's a it's a challenge to the developer if certain residents we're making it a requirement though right they have to come present that's our bylaw but it doesn't not only if
it could impose an added cost and delay it could add cost and delay just by virtue of having to come present yeah i would say added cost and delay for development okay may establish may it cause added costs and dollars okay i'm going to ask one question yeah here when i'm reading that based on what we put you know match what we have on the top it says um the by first line it's the bylaw amendment permit residence to file blah blah blah to termination by the planning button and prior to the issuance of the building perfect early time the earlier timing requirement would allow for any appeal to occur well before construction the project begins but up at the top we have construction in the top language with construction alteration so that we want to you know all have at both oh i see you're saying construction or alteration or alteration so we want to come down here and say that in property alteration yeah say that again property alteration yeah i mean this is this isn't the code but we're explaining what's in the legal language yeah you have it's two things here so yeah all right um i'm sure i'm not gonna i think of the word construction as an umbrella term you know like what's happening at veritas they're clearing the site and you see construction vehicles there you know but because we say that specifically i can add that i think most people that should be the word construction to uh building modification or new new building a raising a raising of other
you don't think when they clear a site construction is beginning before they've laid any issues i i do but what if there's no plan to put anything on just take down your cut you want to put in a cornfield baseball baseball gotta construct the field yeah okay i'll make that change anything else so then mike i'm going to go with the the process here is that in order for us to to i guess a recommendation for planning we have to look forward the articles to them so they can then have a hearing close to hearing right which is why i have it on here that we would vote because
they need time you know to receive it to advertise the hearing schedule the hearing and then they have someone will help me out here how many days after so they have to write the report 45 45 up to 45 just about town meeting so this article if it goes forward and we haven't gotten it out like today which doesn't seem like we're going to then um most likely this will have no recommendation or anything on it until town meeting you want to make a vote now to that's why i was um keeping my eye on the calendar to advising you i have no problem with what we're doing but i think i just that's my job to advise you that what i this is why i pushed it in here and said vote but i understand we're not ready are we ready no right well it's only going to be window dressing changes yeah i'm happy to vote
again we said we wait till that we discussed it with the i think they have questions yeah well i mean i think it's good because they're going to want to ask us questions about our article yeah i mean rather not shifting rather than not prefer something and then have them say oh so you've got all those changes in your mind that we have yeah um this just went in our supplemental packet today so i don't think they have copies of this so should we get some hard copy for them for when they come into it and we can review that so you think we should do yeah would you mind making hard copies of that article for now for the joint meeting it's one of the supplemental i mean we've made some edits to it but i think it's you can kind of walk through the additional edits right yeah i just think we should have five or six copies for them and then doug will take care of us okay everybody's good with that idea all right um okay so i do want to um next items i want to talk about here is that we did hear this in the uh the public comment that after last week's meeting i think bill um the board asked us to go you know and connect with the school committee which we've been trying to do they were very gracious they fit us in you know right even at the beginning of the meeting very nice um last wednesday so bill and i went and uh we want to give you an update of what of what they said so would you like to start surely um describe the intent of the article uh there were a few questions pertaining to the article and a few questions about route 20 and it was a broad range discussion um at the conclusion the chair suggested uh that the board consider adding school as one of the uses to be examined i i should say parenthetically it's time we described the the uses not only as set forth in the draft article but also looking with respect to housing at extending the current r40 zone to create single-family lots as well as something akin to the conservation cluster concept pursuant to which a portion of the site would be devoted to ownership uh really you know townhouse kinds of uh uses with a balance the remainder indeed the majority of the site being open space um there is we've gotten some public comment and some letters that's expressed concern that the board is considering looking at densities that could approach something on the order of alta oxbow and i thought that we had made that clear at a prior meeting on the second and at the school committee on the fourth that we are not looking at a density approaching that and we so i think the school committee is aware of that with respect to the question of of adding the school use i had a conversation with first the superintendent and then the consultant at hmfh that is working for the school committee on a k-8 facilities master plan and inquired of them as to their process in their timetable it was indicated that they will be coming back to the advisory committee on the 25th of this month the school committee on the 26th of this month with a menu of options and there would be a public meeting held i believe on march the 5th to describe those i don't think at the time there will be a specific recommendation by the consultant but rather describing various approaches i also inquired of them as to what the deliverables would be as a result of their study specifically would it be duplicative of the kinds of deliverables that we're anticipating under this article the consultant indicated that their process would be to file once a direction was determined that they would file a request with this um the building the massachusetts state building authority
setting forth the proposed project to the extent that the msba was supportive of that it would the funding matching funding could be available to do things like site surveys site engineering conceptual design whereas the product of this study i think will be a series of what are called test fits just essentially looking at blocks that might represent the footprint of a school and parking so i think that and the so i'm clearest of the timing of that vis-a-vis the printing of the warrant and vis-a-vis the the actual town meeting but the deliverables that we envision are those that could be financed with msba funding and town funding if a project were to advance to that point so i'm not sure that it makes sense for us to include school and get to that level of development absent some better direction recognizing the fact that the figure state funding that we help defray those costs so i haven't had a chance to go back to the school committee to discuss all this and they're probably aware of and i'm sure the staff was aware of it but that's that's the current state of play so
there is some willingness you know to discuss there is some comprehension that we are doing our due diligence um this has been brought to our attention that we have low new growth and that if we could increase our growth that would help us with our budget um our two and a half formula and help us to um avoid some operating overrides i do believe that we were clear about that don't you think then and um but um and actually it's probably really good timing because they are in the middle of this came through aid you know evaluation and study and so then they are looking i believe i heard them say that those gentlemen the consultants were looking at all town properties not i i took from that to believe you know any property in town that might be available for them to build on so but because bill is on this there's some committee representing us you'll have more info as they go yeah the committee has not had any discussion about sites who are and the consultant has not come back with any recommendations or options as deciding so so we are getting a lot of um comments asking us to um you know explain exactly what our what we're going to do and i think as i said at the spoken meeting when i said to someone follow me this morning um it's kind of a chicken and egg situation as we discussed if we just went to town meeting and asked for the land to be transferred we would have been asked what we're going to do so now we have some funds to evaluate the land we're being asked what's the plan and so it's a it's one of the beauties if you will or the challenges of uh public public uh use well i suppose if the uh list of potential uses were for school the work of an engineer still would be a value to the town uh bill your point well that could be a cost borne by the state i'm not sure all of it will be borne by the state maybe it would but it would be um possibly at least a portion but from what i've seen um i haven't seen much relative to preliminary thoughts on uh future school construction um um that acreage holly road wasn't at the forefront of discussion at all in part because clay pit um seems to be a solid location with a fair amount of land um why you would build a school holly road and and often be shut down clay pit is is unclear to me but um maybe that's what the consultant will will recommend who knows uh but um you know i personally think that um the consultant is coming back to the committee on the 25th and school committee on the 26th and bill will be at that i probably will probably listen in on the other i would think maybe on our march second meeting we'd probably i'll put this obviously for a discussion we can have a discussion and see what what we think for direction on this um that helps i think you raise a good question we're trying to remember when we did the local roof if we had to pay for the design and then um the msba paid for we'll see if i can find that article or they paid for the design so that that's a good point but if they were going to trade for the evaluating and the engineering you know it's about for us because we're an afro community at the time the last few projects we did we came in somewhere around 30 you won't have to talk my head you know 35 percent you know return to um so for example the local roof was a four plus one million dollar project like this but four million plus and our cost ended up being somewhere around about 20 29 but we had already paid paid for um design work i'm going to look that up now because you've got my mind working on this anyone else have anything on it we just want to give you an update where we are on that so okay um the last thing before we go off on this topic so perfectly on time i want to give the floor to kelsey because kelsey and jalen are the staff engines of getting this warming together and the select board are going to hire the team and then for the finance you know there are two members that are the team trying to put this together and uh you know we want to make sure we have but every year we try to make the process a little smoother for the staff so would you like to add anything before we go off to this topic um no just that if we've kind of had some internal discussions about it but i think for us and i don't mind it i don't i don't want to speak for jalen but i think jalen wouldn't mind it either um that any edits if you could just keep us both from the loop because we're both working on instead of me alone this year thank you um so nice to have you nice to have help um just to keep us and if you forget one of us is fine but you know uh just so that we're the people we're catching all of the correspondence because there will be there have been times where you know edits have gotten missed in different um iterations flying around so you know we can always go back we're the we've got all the records and go back we don't necessarily save everything but the emails are just such a great uh way to go back and find things if we're missing things the second thing i did want to point out is because jalen and i had a lot of discussions about town meeting today um we did reaffirm that march 27th is going to be the drop dead date for all edits everything march 27th march 16th we're in what's that on the camera says we have to have stuff in on march 16 final for us to be able to edit and get it to the printer in time for it to be delivered to everyone that's not our date that's not our date to give in edits that day sending in articles because you've got to do the format great that's why i'm just reiterating which has built in some time for us as well that the 27th is it's obviously we want it as soon as possible but i just want to reiterate that that is the last day right great so that sounds good and of course to all of us those were documents as we've been working on the articles and also um the streamlining cheat sheet that we had created back in november just to refresh everyone's memory our goal is to have a warrant that's about a hundred pages but then our friends in the in the planning board have got some really lengthy articles so i don't know if we're going to make that 100 page cut this shit but we're going to try um i'm going to that was a joke and then thank you larry and that i wrote for laughing all right i'm gonna get copies yeah okay oh thank you so much um so the next item on our agenda is to um have a joint meeting with the planning board i assume have you called to order already have you called to order yes yeah yeah okay so there's three a couple seats here but can you just kind of pull chairs up so we're all together here we want everyone to do you have to stop putting my ipad in front of that microphone because i'm going to make a lot of phone calls again tomorrow so at least some of the calls while saving me he's coming back yeah i like that we've got his own name tag good for you so enough room for everybody or should we squish up a little bit okay
now maybe kelsey could move down maybe you could move in i don't want to touch her first but where do you want yeah do we need more room um robert needs to get in here next to seat over here right okay all right everybody in okay so welcome thank you for coming um we thought we would have a joint meeting and we haven't met together for a while and we have a few topics of interest that we kind of wanted to share ideas and have discussion and see if we can develop some strategy on what we're going to do and how we're going to do it it's a good plan um but at first i thought i would open the floor to you to talk about your articles that are going to time meeting if there was anything in particular you wanted us to know uh sorry the timeline or when we'll get the reports or not or whatever you'd like to tell us the floor is yours you want to do until march the 17th that's my recollection your schedule yeah um and we will leave that um on the articles that we that were proposed right so did you want to just start with an article ll in our packet is on page somebody help me in i don't know i mean housekeeping we each have taken an article yeah okay do you mind if i just do them anywhere no okay so i thought we would do those first and you can tell us what you want us to know what we need to know and after each one pause the board asking any questions and then go through them so that sounds good everybody knows everybody we're good all right how about ll housekeeping zoning i guess i have that um these were changes that were submitted by our e-coder to um you know i'm just a little uh oh sorry i can't just ever submitted by the e-coder to um the town clerk um basically are emulating what they suggested in a few additional articles but i i have i apologize i haven't summarized these the paraphrase the recommendations but i am going to do that obviously i'm not going to read through this whole thing but i think it's pretty obvious what if they're you know recommendations to change uh zoning or it's just clarifying definitions and language that are in the sections that they're talking about i think what that we were sent was about this thick um and over the summer robert and i went through it um we were going to try and do the whole thing at one time but it was just much too long so um we chose things that were obvious like the name of um it becomes an agency change that we're changing that um and there are other things like that in there is nothing i don't believe that's really substantive um but next year we'll be back again and probably the year after again so that we don't and we take the whole code that we discussed i really like to continue to have us um refer these to you in december so that you had time to get them that was a really good idea yeah way ahead of time yeah but because yeah you have to do it before the articles does anyone um um select would have any questions about this article no okay thank you um i think the next one is going to be at the page 31 i'm going to read them for those who are listening page 31 in the packet article mm amend floodplain and federal flood protection district all right um so this is uh really straightforward kind of changes to align our um the flood plain district and the federal flood plain uh protection district um like i said mostly housekeeping um it will incorporate the latest fema flood uh insurance rate map and preserves our uh national flood insurance program for anyone and we did do a change last year where we adopted the new uh what was new at the time the flood plain maps um and we did that at the request of the conservation commission uh subsequently the conservation commission was informed by the state that what we have wasn't good enough we needed to have much more i'd say boil and plate kind of stuff and we had we have two different flood districts in wayland one is a local one and one is a federal one and we needed to keep those separated as well i think there are comments in the background are on page 43 right i am the right one no i'm on the wrong page all right um anybody on the board have any questions about this article this is this mr fair so this really isn't changing the lines as they exist it's just a recognition yes of the role um the maps we announced last year um we had an approval date on them but i it's it appears that maybe one or two of them wound up having different approval dates on their issue but they're the same okay well there's a there's going to be a map here did you say there's going to be a map for the warrant um yeah you're pretty
i set off my list
fine you're all set okay um oh nm that's me yeah to find it so that is the yep page of my own document okay 38 thank you article n n accessory dwelling unit zoning amendments yes so last year we had to rush through changes to the accessory dwelling unit provisions we already had in order to comply with the new statute and we had to be incredibly conservative so that the attorney general's office would accept them and we would get them passed with a 50 vote for the things that were urgent and it was always our intention to come back because the the law was for 900 square foot adus and many people in whalen want larger adus but we had to stick with the 900 to comply with the statute and not sort of overreach um and so this year we're coming back to allow larger adus by special permit we also we required the affordable adus to be by special permit because they have to have deed restrictions and all kinds of crazy things but we have rolled those back and made the ones that are under 900 square feet by right and the paperwork goes to robert to be checked um instead of having to come before the board for a special permit and then just like everybody else if there is going to be more than one unit or a larger unit it will come for a special permit we played with different ways of increasing the by right footprint but because we have such variance in zoning you know down in south whalen you can have a small house on a small lot and in whalen you've got huge houses on huge lots there was no one size fits all way to to say if it's this big then we'll allow it so we just stuck with the special permit for a larger multiple units because it allows the town to have more control and to allow what people need and as long as it's reasonable so i have any questions on this um i remember when i went to the league review of articles and that spoke to this that you know you would be coming back and looking at and when some i think we had some resident questions but they also asked if you could build more than one and if there was a builder wanted to build more than one adu on an existing law and i'm assuming that they met with a house or something so i wanted to know if that is addressed here so it is addressed here but the interesting thing is that if you build more than one you very quickly hit the multi-family definition and so we're a little wedged in between trying to allow more than one but not venturing into the where we're all of a sudden granting what is a multi-family you know unit in a single family it was owned so there's a little bit of a balancing act to be had there but uh it is our intention to try to allow multiple if people want to and the property can handle it you know in south whalen where someone's got a much smaller lot and they want to build some big structure with multiple units in it it's going to be more of a stretch where someone with eight acres up in the north part of whale and maybe they can hide one in the woods and you'd never know how many units are in it so i can't recall exactly how we do it one of the things to think about is if you were to allow more than one extra multi-family one extra adu um in a separate building the taxing would be different and um because where our tax structure is it's a house the dwelling and the land around it that is taxed so if you have one lot and a house and an accessory dwelling unit that is large you're essentially creating a second house but you're losing the property value for the assessment because you won't have two lots we have a minimum of in a sixty thousand square foot stone you've got a minimum lot size of sixty thousand square feet if you add an accessory unit and that's okay you still have one sixty thousand square foot lot and only the one sixty thousand square foot lot is let's pass and the building would be as well but they've been using different kinds of criteria on accessory dwelling units versus um principal dwelling units so it it becomes an issue also you wind up with
if you've got say a five acre lot you wind up with as robin says multiple houses on one lot and you're in better shape for us as a town to be dividing that lot into the right size for that district wouldn't the assessor the assessor established separate values for land and buildings right so wouldn't the assessor recognize the fact that there are two buildings having a certain value you would lose you would lose you would lose the extra value of if you want more housing in wayland these accessory dwelling units are going to count as housing units right um so if you want i mean it's it's a policy decision it's not a policy decision no i understand um but you get it for the building but you would not get an extra fit for an additional lot right and the one thing we could nail the assessor down on the only thing we could really nail him down on was that adding an adu to a property does increase the the the assessment the value of the of the home because you add rental income the improvements potential for rental income it's not even a matter of improvements it's the potential for rental income plus you're getting more households that you need to provide services for so the incremental cost is less at the internet think what you're saying is the incremental tax revenue that's i think is is is yeah smaller yes so well can you expand on your comment is it an assumption by the assessor that any adu is equivalent to rental income even though maybe you have a family member going it is the potential for rental income that creates the increase in the assessment whether you rent it out or not it is the potential for rental income that he said increases and he said it didn't matter whether it was affordable or not it increases because it is the potential for rental income um have you had um have you had um have you had many applications or um or formats for adus have you about five six five six i think there are people who are waiting for this to pass because they definitely want something larger than 900 square feet tell us yeah we did last year with the legislative discussion of the articles because i remember that
fielding those questions all right that sounds pretty good so then the next article um that you have submitted is going to be on page what 43 am i in the right one 44 44 and this is oh oh multiple family housing route 20 west sub-district and this is to amend the maximum dimensions
we got a request from proper unit we want to do the development there um but in order for the financing to work out numbers of construction to work out um we wanted to increase the maximum number of units from 20 to 32 which is equivalent to what rivers edge already have and they wanted to increase the maximum building height from 35 to 58 um the next highest uh sub-district height is 45 for rivers edge and it's set back from the road here we um we would have if we knew it before we would have offered these higher numbers cut down moving but we didn't know um the 58 feet doesn't look like 58 feet from the roadway most of the property is below grade like about 20 feet below route 20 so when you're driving along it would not look higher than river's edge in fact it would look lower than represent and we think it's wonderful to have a a new development of housing uh because you get um affordable housing as well any questions um one of my concerns with this 58 foot figure is it really um it potentially sets a precedent although i know that it's this figure is only contained within the mvta communities act but still 58 foot building is very very tall and um that's one of my concerns um you mentioned a property owner approach is the property owner what's the property owner's name that's appropriate to be discussing from a full disclosure perspective i think it's appropriate let me ask you this is the property owner um on the left side of the driveway or the right side of the driveway of that site uh currently i can read this on the right side and i think we've been looking at purchasing okay so whoever owns the property we're talking possibly two two buildings 58 feet high i don't think that's what would happen well but you don't know it couldn't right i mean under the if this passes of potential right because i guess the question is i hear what you're saying um the question becomes if we want to have money to own health and we want to allow it and one has to be able to do it in a financially viable way and i don't think that the other portion would be developed because i think
well that was the argument put forth by the potential developer at the whole food site that they couldn't make enough money if they didn't have a five-story building which was a real problem for our board because of the height of very various reasons one of the concerns i have is public safety so i reached out to the fire chief he didn't tell me that now i'll read his email
i believe that the current height restriction is 35 feet an exception was made for river's edge at 45 feet if they are proposing 58 feet that does that does make a big difference and it would be a real concern the larger structures 373 commonwealth 490 492 and 494 boston road assisted living communities etc i have created some channel have created some challenges for us we've had a number of kitchen fires in these large buildings and simple things like removing smoke caused by current food can require mutual aid assistance so i just think that's another factor that that um we need to consider my next question is affordable housing because of uh it's a it's a uh mhea communities act uh donning we're only entitled to a maximum of 10 percent there's no way around that not unless they have performance will and we have be able to uh we have been able to study for it to increase it and instead of just say we do not so a maximum it's that kind of set but don't keep our number exactly the same we wouldn't lose any units so if i may um if two buildings went up there based on these zoning numbers you're proposing how many maximum units can you see that well what's the number of units i think around 100 i think that's what they propose about 100 units don't call me that but so it'd be 100 per building or 50 per building 100 per we don't want to develop it one building i developed one building one multi-family housing building potentially selling on any potential means of retail let's say they so and they sold or developed the property across the street if they if this if this property owner bought that and how many units could be built there i would go back to see how many groups i mean overall it's no more like five acres i think that's correct um and it also depends on um actually the whole area is two acres right the whole area is um and um it's not that's that's that's where you can build it too five acres you have five acres to do in the zone okay i think well it's like 5.5 acres like that well they remember movies don't have at least five acres overall i can't remember um tom we did reach out to the police chief twice by fire chief rather twice and we're told no problem i mean our equipment will go up there and that's i mean we have memos so i'm kind of disturbed to hear that that is not the case
maybe he understood that it would be similar height to um all the rocks no he knew exactly what it was that's all i have thank you i think you want to say this would be a great opportunity to actually see multi-family housing actually be built under this bylaw and right now we're not seeing anything with the hurdles of town center that was something that that we in the town thought that was gonna happen next few years and and that has slowed down so to see something actually be managed to be built under the zoning is incredible and it would be a great opportunity to be a champion of that in this area i couldn't agree more my concern is the height and i'm not convinced that uh even 45 feet wouldn't be profitable it's popular i mean i can't speak on the plans that's i didn't hear what the explanation was about why it couldn't be a town-friendly 40b to have the 25 percent affordable and then we would count all the units what was the reason you need a market study we have studied presented to the state showing why this is why it's it's feasible we did not submit once the state we did the original plan so we had 10 and we didn't do it because we couldn't make the limits we couldn't show that we would be able to accommodate that we didn't look at it do you have a sense whether this uh potential project would be rental or ownership okay and if 10 of the units were affordable would they would all the units count just um how how many stories can you fit in 58 feet oh this was proposing let me see before with the garage again we're not doing it necessarily for a project no i know it just but i believe it was four stories above the garage i'd love to respect if i may the background information says a property owner approached the town planner and the planning board concerning a developmental development proposal so that's a project for multi-family houses so that's a project no we don't necessarily in general we don't be selling for projects we try not to sell it for projects the town has done it we did it with the town center project which didn't come out for a lot uh to cover for other projects as well which personality is appropriate this is not being done for a project this is being done because somebody has gone to the effort of showing that one could put something in there and we think that it's a great idea to be able to put something in there you know we can lower the number we can ask it can be lowered it till we need it so we can uh whatever but it is below it is below for the most part below the uh surface of the road 58 feet how is that measured is that to the top of the last occupied floor or the top the top top of the building
it's not a peak it's the top it's the top it's the top if there were a parapet parapet well the river's edge it has parapet and so did the town center you know sound kind of centered because you know if they were due to the development there would have been higher than 35 people right right there's no asterisk asterisks though on this one so presumably 58 feet is the top of the mechanical equipment
that's how if it's a flat roof with a parapet i don't have an application in front of us in our general model and with the way we did the way we did the way we operate the general bylaw everything else separately um and i don't know what the violence one of them right now and i can't recall i almost brought it um exactly what it says but i thought that it said i don't know that we i don't know if we picked up the actual definition the original current bylaw says 45 these difficulties like it's to the booth and then um things on top that are needed for uh hdac and blah blah blah blah they're over right right um kind of know about that but i can't recall yeah okay thank you thank you um so this project is as you stated in the background information is going to be part of um i call it the mbta thing but the multi-family housing overlay district was part of that project so that would basically this is helping us to accomplish that goal of getting closer to the 750 units that we need correct and if we were to put 100 here we probably wouldn't be looking to put 100 somewhere else that was a large parcel or something like that we would say this is a good step am i close i want to say something else okay i i share tom's concern about the height i understand because of the way the elevation is but i do think we will have to check with the we will have to check with the uh the public safety to make sure that that truck did they send it i mean it's been emailed it says i know but i'm just saying we have to check that's how we are we're going to check too how's that um i mean i think it's creative i think it's right where we would like the farm i don't think i am i am going to say um you know i'm a champion for making sure that maintaining 10 plus percent on our subsidized housing index and so i would really hope that if the town went to bad and did this that the there would be consideration for a greater number than 10 percent not just the required i think we all have to roll in the same direction here so hopefully you'll have some input on that
maybe we all have to have input on that i don't know
all right and we all any other questions i see do you have any questions i need this i'm sorry i didn't even ask you all right now we're going to look at article pp which is the ground mounted solar photovoltaic installations who hasn't nice job i can say it better than i can i can try um so the reason we put this in here is in here is because we don't we don't actually have anything to guide people for this um there are a few that have been installed already in town on property but um what we did was we we wrote this in a way that allows small installations less than one acre by right on property and gives some guidelines for height setbacks lot coverage screening storm water management noise glare environmental protection all the things that you feel should be in there um also has some instructions for site restoration and decommissioning at the end of a project flight um and supports renewable energy and development while keeping our character and public safety and natural resources attack um this was borrowed maybe cobbled together from surrounding towns who have a bylaw and also we we checked it against state guidelines to make sure that they were in line with that we have heard that there are some new state guidelines potentially coming um maybe in the middle of this year which could impact uh if we want to push this forward or not um our folks at the energy commission sent some notes on it this week um we did try to include them in this um different levels of engagement there but um we figured we should try to at least draft something and even if we put it on the back burner at least it's there and we can uh we can wait for the state laws as well anybody have any questions on this go ahead let's see oh i'm i'm just reading for it really quickly so battery storage systems that i know are kind of coming in small other towns they will only be permitted as as long as they're photovoltaic things they cannot be as separate you can't just have battery storage the way we worded it was integrated battery systems and associated equipment used to store energy from these installations and discharge it but yeah it would be they're one and the same thing they can't be without the other okay okay thank you mr
i gather uh there were uh some comments uh from the energy uh climate committee and uh i heard from the chair and encourage her to get in touch with the planning board have those discussions occurred only by email okay yeah um we want to fight to a meeting on thursday yeah okay okay
the history of this is we started this three years ago right um i went to the energy committee and all for assistance um and as in particular while i was there what the right sizes were to be regulated and they said whatever you think and i said well i don't really think that i should think i think um and um i said we'll get our two comments back we didn't get anything uh we sat on it then we tried to do it down for a notebook we had um a meeting in uh august where they were invited uh with the uh mr feya um and abigail and um the new person right um and they came and we tried to talk through things uh after that jesse and robert repeatedly contacted them and we got nothing so um and we have had a public hearing on this already um and they asked we don't have time to sit down with them right now um if they want to note that we sent back to them was if they could uh tell us what the changes were that they thought we needed to make you know we would look at them and and make a decision so we weren't quite ready to pull the thing until we knew about the issues and then have you heard from them we got a note today a very long note saying that we should have included some more why didn't we include them more are there any specific language changes that they recommended no they have to me they do not said that they have to meet as a board to discuss it and then we need them on thursday and if any of us wanted to come we can remember what we did but we have um to release this we've already
i think what i might do is just ask them if they have if they can comment you know you know copy of it let me see what we can incorporate in the limited time that we have you know yeah as liaison both to the committee and the board i'd love to see you we can work something now yeah sure sure i'm i know you would
it was like you're using my gavel there thank you no worries so my only question was i said no i was going to say this but have you had any input from the ecc so i'm going to move to mr bay are you also i'm good thank you i think i'd like to say that with regard to these kinds of things we are not having an effective land use we need to have land use meetings and all these things need to be discussed as they come up because clearly people don't look at what the announcements are and they need to be spoon fed so we need to spoon feed them so that everybody's on the same page and we work together and walk forward together my two states yes i'll just have another clarifying question if i may um on the regulation so you say that you say small scale residential installations but when you talk about medium and large scales you take away the residential part and i'm sorry i don't know they're zoning very well would this potentially allow for commercial uses or only residential for both small i mean medium and large commercial too so so small scale is just considered small scale residential but medium and large is presupposed to be commercial okay i was just curious thank you i mean if you look at the sizes there right yeah very large right and we know there's you know limited lots and towns where you can even do that okay we've well read about uh cranberry bogs on the cave being converted to that's kind of why i'm talking because i know about this yeah so do you anticipate any concern expressed by either in a butter or generally people who have significant tracks that could be converted it's always a possibility i suppose we have to see the state law i think it's allowed
it makes sense to think about screening requirements or that's it um the fact of the matter is right now we have no way to regulate that right no i appreciate that yes some some guidelines no i appreciate that see yeah one of our biggest concerns has been the battery storage stuff right now we have nothing yeah we really want to have something in place so that we have some kind of control with the fire protection sure and all that um that's important and there has been there have been incidents uh i'm sure it's right around the country so thank you so much so i'm going to say this out loud i'm pretty sure i do the timeline and how this all fits the process but in case people are listening so i think we're really good on our questions and and what have you on these on these planning articles which is great um that's we're doing a lot of discoveries first couple weeks and then we're going to move forward with taking positions but i don't think we're allowed to take a position until we have a report from the planning board right i'm looking at tom i'll see somebody i believe we have he says we have to have a report from the planning board in order to take a position and then i'm going to go um look at that you don't do now i can look into that but i'm not planning board report is required by state statute and it has nothing to do with you yeah okay so but i would imagine we are pretty ready to vote um we're not ready to vote not today though i'm just saying in general we don't need any more information okay we're not voting on these today but anyway but i think find out whether we can when we can pass it so the select board by the way um the next topic will be well look Doug's looking that up we like to keep moving here so um we also have an article that we are submitting and it is in our supplemental packet um it's in there because um it wasn't quite complete and the page of mine on here somebody for those who are but Kelsey who made hard copy for you because page five and this is called article 10. do you have enough copies perfect thank you um okay so this is article ee amend talent code uh section 198 dash planning board appeals we have made a few edits additional edits to it tonight doug is the liaison excuse me all right i put it down within the supplemental packet i'm sorry right whatever um and this is different in the supplemental packet if it's what do you have in your hand whether it's one today yeah let me just finish can i i'm just going to come here to some i had it i don't know right yeah it's it's not further than friday being friday you know gotta walk out again excuse me for one second just want to finish because we have a lot of people listening so what's in the supplemental packet is some revisions that doug made and he submitted it this morning at 11 30 so it's in today's supplemental packet um and i'm going to let him walk you through not only that changes that we made from what you may have seen forever previously but also edits we made tonight and then also the logic of why we're estimating this um this particular article so if floors yours please um did you find it in it no the one you have in your hand is to be the most recent
okay so i discovered um this uh was an issue that presented itself um as we've been working our way through the three dover amendment projects and so there was a question about appeal timing on one of those dover amendment projects involving baritas and so we consulted town council and she indicated to us that as a result of the way the whale and bylaw is drafted uh a resident aggrieved by a site plan approval could not file the appeal after the site plan approval was determined but had to wait until a building permit issued so in the in the instance of this case i believe site plan approval issued sometime in spring early summer of 2025 and the building permit issued from the building department on the on october 30th once that building permit issued then the appeals clock started and the appeal was filed but before the zba could hold a hearing construction had started um and so now the zba has had a couple of hearings and they're going to deliberate um on a determination on that appeal tomorrow but all the while and construction has been happening uh since sometime late november early december so when we consulted with town council she indicated there are other municipalities where an appeal can be filed after site plan approval but prior to the building permit being issued and so we asked her to draft up some language uh which she presented we made some changes to that as reflected in the draft um before you and the the other item that we wanted to include was for purposes of foreseeability for the select board to have some visibility into some of these larger projects impacting a neighborhood or multiple neighborhoods or the town writ large uh she indicated there are other municipalities that have put in a requirement in their bylaws if a project above a certain threshold uh is going to submit their application to the planning board that they also present the concept to the select board so the select board has some visibility into the project um on the earlier side uh when everything is just getting going so um that is the language before you from town council i took a crack at on page two there of summarizing in just a couple of sentences of what it would do we've tweaked some of the arguments in favor and opposed um we're going to talk about under the arguments opposed instead of establishing another requirement for a developer to build in wayland we're going to say language to the effect of that that this may cause added cost and or delay for a developer to have that added step to come before the select board um and then just a couple of other language tweaks that we made throughout just to make it a little clearer uh the part that's unresolved is in the initial paragraph of the language it still says greater than x square feet for construction or alteration of more than x square feet of a site uh i was i'm trying to get some input from the building commissioner i'm going to also speak with town council to see what other municipalities set as a threshold and then it was suggested to me tonight that i could talk with the assessor to to get some information about some larger projects in town historically and i think we also determined tonight that it doesn't make sense to include parking as a threshold so we're going to delete that language that says or requires more than y parking spaces so that is essentially a synopsis of article ee so we talked about a couple times and then we made some edits last week and then we made some edits again tonight our goal here is first of all to have a conversation with you and get some more input and discussion about this um we know we have to vote to refer it you know to you for the process and so i'm trying to keep it forward if it's going so um i'm going to open it up now to anyone you can just have your questions back and forth yeah i have a few things um first of all i question with the first provision that you're adding uh how would that be enforced and would it even be permissible for a dover amendment applications um if they didn't come to you i don't know that dover would support us denying the application because they didn't come to you first i'm only leaning on town council for that who indicated you can't make it specifically tailored to dover amendment but it can be above a certain threshold which could include a dover amendment yeah so i don't know the answer to that specifically but i that is exactly what she was thinking in her mind when we were drafting this yeah um in the section which is amending 607.2.1 you've left a word out so the decision of the planning approving so it should be i'm pretty sure planning board approving where are you 607.2.1 about halfway down the page the planning decision of the planning um and i think to me it sounds like this is going to increase the opportunities for litigation that the town will have to defend against um because if they if somebody appeals prior to the issuance of a building permit then the applicant is going to jump in and and then fight that and the town has to then be fighting on that side and then when they go to court they have to be defending on the other side it's just it creates a bit of a an opportunity for some legal messiness so um because at one point you're in the opportunity is then for the applicant to appeal but then later on when it if it ends up in court we're switching sides basically and having to defend the applicant so so you're saying that potentially
well it's if any person agreed by the decision so anybody could appeal if a neighbor appeals before there's a building permit and the applicant will go to court saying no i want my building permit and so then the town is is the the town is not on the side of the applicant but then later on if they get their building permit or they don't they don't get the building permit or it we could be in a position where we're switching sides in the way i hear you because right now it's kind of shifted because the building permit issues construction has begun the zba can issue a stop construction order if they're following the permit to the letter yeah according to the concom order of conditions the board of health and the planning board no stop construction corner so now the abutter or the neighbor is agreed and so it's one or the other at that point so they the town could end up having a switch sides and having some weird conflict of interest with itself i don't know it sounds bizarre so i i had some questions pop up with that with the way this flows i see some issues has this ever happened before this is the first time someone got caught on the appeal between the the timing issues going up yeah exactly for some other projects and i don't think i don't know if they're a special permit or i think they were even special permits i don't know and they didn't know certain things that issues right but i just see it as a real cost and at times the same with the town instead i don't see it as a benefit site plan approval is for something that is an as a great project it's not a special permit it's not asking for anything special when you go through the hearing process as long as the planning board um is adhering to what its requirements are uh then it goes to the building commission if he thinks that the planning board does not comply it's only a site plan he does not have to uh adhere to what the planning board says it's not a great idea but he doesn't have to so in particular in dover in the phases we are so constrained with what we can look at that things that would be appealable in a regular site plan maybe would not be i don't think really repealable in dover for example um we can only apply the aquifer protection district bylaw we can deal with open space and that's how we dealt with it in veritas um the aquifer protection district has a coverage requirement we said okay then that's open space and we dealt with it and you had we asked for the applicant that we weren't going to approve it because it was two different parcels and it needed to be you know our bylaw says you have one parcel and that's how you determine the application so we worked through that um and i know that people aren't happy with it but what is the zoning board going to do if they are familiar with the dover amendment and all of the case law which is extraordinary um how how is the zoning board going to be i agree with you i don't think we're creating an avenue for appeal we're just changing the timing of the appeal if the appeal is going to be filed anyway why do we want the appeal process to be ongoing once construction has started that's the part that makes no sense to me now tensions and emotions are high construction has begun but this could have happened over the last few months between may and october and maybe there would even have been a chance then for some type of negotiated settlement before the construction begins and i think that this would permit that to happen i think okay whatever i think that there was large opportunities for negotiation and that there was negotiation and we've been pushing that in all of the government because there are things that we can't control right well i have a couple thoughts so i definitely share the thinking about this is probably going to lead to additional litigation and cost of the town for sure um and i definitely understand fixing the order of these appeals that that makes sense to me people shouldn't have had to wait for the construction permit that seems backwards um and i also get like the um desire for added visibility for large projects to the select board too but i think this kind of sort of undermines the hearing process that we have in place a little bit i think you're going to get people that just don't like a project and they're going to say i won't participate i'll just wait to appeal it once i have that window so that's that's definitely something that's going to happen i think um but you think they're less likely to do so after they're going to permit it to and they're not going to come and they're not going to argue and then we're not going to get information for what we can put in our conditions i think they'll just say i'll skip that part and they always could appeal right right i could buy more creative in the hearing process though if i know that i can just skip right to the okay but they could do that right now after and try after the building permanent issues which is just which goes back to like yeah the order should should definitely projects and you're going to see it even with the multi-family housing stuff um because we do under the mbta sector doing site plan review um you know with holding up the projects it just it just seems very costly costly for the town and also putting the select board in the middle of it to me seems inappropriate you have an elected party board required to be elected on the state law um and i think you should i i hate to say it but i think you should stay in your own lane i think that the select board should do what the select board does and the planning board should do what the planning board does conservation should do what conservation does we should all work together yeah yeah and you you are you know having a hearing because we have everything's on the website we have it on our agenda when there's something big robert tells um i mean it's not like it's brand new and nobody knows about this stuff just to carry on that table please give it two cents the first first paragraph like what what's the intention of meeting the sub board like what how can you get in the way that you now today now most people will come to the meeting and say hey i'm going to do a build a church and then we will stay to a language meeting with all the boards around so this this information is really happening we we have a time we gather the information we review the projects fire said hey these are my issues i say thank you for that conservation says you know to make sure it's on floodplain check check out the list of the afghan i have my my comments to them we we have this process it's okay but it happens today i think that's exactly the problem is that we were talking to some of the residents about this is there's so much to follow in separate boards through the conservation commission process the board of health process and the health department and then the planning board and it's so much to be aggressive if the select board has some visibility into this earlier i think one of the roles of the select board is to be communicated to the community i think one of the roles of the select board is to make sure that we have an organized land use organization i've been asking for this for years we need to have combined hearings on certain projects i've been able to do it with barry with um let's see
and with the copic church we've been able to do it with the conservation commission and we have a consultant who's working with the board of health so the three of us at least together are doing that we need a better organization in land use so that it is easier for the public to follow i mean even for us it is very difficult to render a decision for example conservation hasn't rendered theirs or we don't know what their concerns are so it's more this is like a step a stop gap that i don't think is helpful i think we need a bigger organizational change um when i was practicing um i had very very very large project it was five years in licensing um and it was for permits through the u.s for canada and for all the new england states it's a high to quebec water project thanks mission line and we did just that and it worked beautifully it was a long process but we all knew what was going on we tried to do it during the uh town center project and the applicant was just impossible they didn't want to do it and they kept fighting us i don't know that these two suggestions are are we can't do both because i agree this is this is much smaller this is a smaller step it just gives us some initial visibility but what you're saying is a more substantive solution but i don't know why they'd be mutually exclusive and you can't do both of these things because i think if you let the land use boards work and do what the land use boards do and you worry about the larger things in the operation of detail and the things that are more within your bailing with i think that for me that works better so i have a question here myself now you ready they're ready they're ready up in the top we talk about in our intent initially when it was proposed was not become an adjunct to the planning board or any other boards because you're right we have enough to do but for these large large projects which is why these parameters are in the top right square feet construction or square feet alteration of the property blah blah blah but the ramen's point in i think jesse's made it down here i owe two i got to find it now on the right line uh the appeals it says any person to grieve by a decision of the planning board it doesn't say bring down the size again so in other words we need to if if we were to propose this further i think we have to have a discussion on the board level here if we also want to bring that size down because that limits the number that are going to be able to projects that are going to be you see what i'm saying this is just an open i mean you're listening to me it's just an open blanket any project could be any project so that's but that wasn't your intent i don't think when you put it forth your intent was the larger ones so um i feel like this is being a bit of rush and helpful to get some feedback on the plan board before this is drafted because i already learned about this unless you can have i've got to find my attention once i've figured it out um so i i don't i hate to rush something and not be what we will be lost let's see so one speaker there's no reason you have to rush to have the task i mean there's no law or mandate by this by the chili milk by this thick don't see how it's like you need to pass this this year right let's take some time think about what you want and how you want to do this and then come back that's that's that's what i would do i think everybody appreciates the fact that the planning board has a terrific workload and you've you've dealt with all these fires of mbta zoning and and these requirements from the state and so forth and i think uh you know with your work on these uh dover projects uh i think people feel that you represented the towns and the residents interests well but the difficulty i think is uh as doug indicated that for whatever reason there isn't great visibility and people who should know should have been paying attention didn't know are waking up and finding the trees are gone where their kids have been playing for 10 years and you know it's it's a legitimate concern um i think um annette to your point i think that you know better integration the administrative uh regulatory processes makes a ton of sense i don't think it addresses the question of someone saying geez louise i can't believe this is being proposed uh what can we do to intervene and if you can't formally intervene until after your building permit issues and all those and show up it's it's a difficult situation
the butters sure but but the people across the street probably don't get that yeah right but it's when we do a butters we do do do you admit for a site plan do we do across the street or not
that will be on a lot of site plan the site plan and state statute does not say you have to notify you of the about us so it's not a way that i chose to go to to match the current criteria information you know usually for all that so it's it's yeah we we do a bad job to notify people um i like like like annette said i make a good job to like how manager make sure that select one knows it isn't coming out of the pipeline so that select one of the comment and knows public church the care of school um i mean and all of these big dover projects that we've done recently there's been no shortage of neighborhood outcry and participation i mean if somebody's didn't have a paper uh that folks read during veritas but that was missing uh yeah certainly on the next uh yeah but it would have been all over it's covered it's right gated we all know so but even on veritas that whole jaeger way neighborhood and the people who are on the back side because they're worried about being a cut through they were all very very active during that and they had attorneys that they'd hired and yeah for me though it can be bigger than whatever the law requires so that you go beyond we hear from people on old connecticut path who are concerned about the traffic at the five paths intersection it's bigger than that and so i think the more visibility you have into these larger projects i think that's just a helpful thing because the more that folks end up being educated and and they learn about what the details of the project are sometimes the sky is falling attitude comes back down to reality yes but it's a lot to follow but to not to burst your bubble doug i don't think there are any more people tuning in and watching select board meetings to learn about this then there would be incumbent upon us to get right so this stuff really fixed that so to me the fix is to have the requirement actually be that they go before the land use board and that the land use board then have to report to you guys on what this project is give you a little summary of what's coming down the pike and then somehow make sure that it goes on the town's website or something that there's some sort of other way of making sure that people who aren't sitting at home watching zoom meetings all week long um hear about this and that i'm not sure what the right avenue is because i'm not sure that the bulk of people are reading the paper either um and there are certain people who do and i think there's a little bit of a cross-section there who's tuning into zoom meetings but i think the people who are being caught unawares are people who are doing neither of those things and so the question is how do you reach them what you're saying in other towns there's actually a land use board comprised of representatives from the various names in the past it was always run by the town planner when joe laden was here and after that it fell apart circus wasn't doing it and then julia um took it over and then we got an earring and then nothing happened oh you did get voted in oh i didn't hear
so maybe we can get it under control at this point um just so you know just one second i want to acknowledge that um the town manager has rejoined us at 8 32 and also to let you know that we are in the midst of discussing article ee our planning board appeal article with the planning board we've already gone through all of their articles we like them all i think we were good on that but now we're on this talk so thank you manager doug we have absolutely no control over traffic for dover amendment zero they did give us some it we have been kind enough in our dover amendment cases to give us some information about traffic because they just did they part of made it as part of their application they didn't have to give us anything i thought you guys had a peer review traffic report when i looked at the documents because they submitted one they submitted a traffic report so we had a peer review report but we can't impose any conditions on traffic no but we have very limited things that we don't work i'd like to go back a second and have the board kind of opine on the suggestion that robin made on the language that the project's large and certain size we all agree with that don't worry about the parking we've got that so have a meeting with not the select board but with the land use board and who will then report uh rise or what they used to select board of the project now that was your suggestion have i got it whatever you think i mean they could know i'm asking what you say yes so i think that is they could report to town manager i mean they could report to either of you so that there's something okay so i want to open it up to the board i'm going to start with uh tom or bill please what do you think about um suggesting this is a good compromise for us to get this vote we have to reconstitute this for it though right we don't even have this as a list on our boards and committees this school doesn't exist right yeah it's when they come together and they have to know they do that on the staff side now right on the staff side they used to give us minutes of the meetings and then it was sent out to all the boards you can all look at those units and have some idea of what each different department was thinking then it has to go to their words of course and the boards you know will go further but at least you all know what the issues are what everybody thought up front and you're marching in the same direction okay so i'd like to go back over here and find out if the board feels that language would accomplish this objective um i guess my question is whether town meeting approval is required whether the working group be convened well by codifying the suggestion the land use notice if you will land use work working group notice to the board of projects of a certain size no greater than so many days after their initial discussion gives us notice right right so that's maybe one way to go right so they would only have to excuse me if i heard you correctly they would only have to convene if a project this size became well just so i'm clear i believe mr time manager the land use group meets weekly or bi-weekly i would ask mr hummel actually attends i only uh attend from time to time if there's something that i've been asked okay so mr hummel one to two times a month every about every two weeks okay yeah so so within 30 days after a project uh what wording would you recommend mother after project uh is presented yeah sure but what's the trigger is it an informal discussion with the town planner is it uh formally filing site plan is it a problem with what would you wait for your timeline for formally filing site plan um the way our site plan regulations work and applicants if it's an application uh robert would use it to see if it's and sends it out to each of the land use boards and 10 5g police people they have 30 days to comment during that period if they have a land use meeting so that they can hear and robert can take them through what all of the details are that they should all be paying attention to in case somebody missed something they have the discussion i hope that we'll get minutes now um and i again i don't know how you can ask an applicant and require an applicant and have an applicant even realize that they have to come in before they file well we changed it to within 60 days after filing so they would be notified okay so that is we have it under our bylaw we need to be um well well in coherence because we have what is the yeah that's a decision within something like that yeah that's a decision within 60 i think it's within 60 days unless the applicant request continues to okay and we have to be able to get that sometimes because if you say no and they have to appeal i think you have to tighten it up and do like two weeks within two weeks of filing your application they've got to be with that board
well i think that um we've probably discussed this and we understand each other's positions and i'm looking over here are you i really appreciate your suggestions and um i think we used to throw the through the discussion right we're going to have to have a meeting on um first day or friday we could have discussed it but one of our members won't be there so very you want to put some edits together yeah you want to put some um okay i really appreciate you coming and talking to us and we're taking a lot of your time so i think it might move us to move to be at the next items that we had on the on the list and then um i'm going to start with um it was a route 20 task force so the select board has has one of our objectives we will share if you look on the line you'll see that number three 34 of the packet no no no this is my objectives i mean thank you i'm almost ready i'm almost with you um our third yes you're moving uh madam chair you're moving off from ee do you still need to vote to refer no we're not ready okay we're not ready right we're not ready no we're going to come back to i'm going to summarize that later though but thank you all right i just wanted to double check hey while you're alone we were in good state you're keeping me right on the top again all right number three so i quote objectives for fiscal year 26 develop and implement measurable progress on route 20 corridor that promotes economic development and employment growth including integration of review functions and participating in the joint task force that is the goal that we set up for ourselves last july for this year and i know that bill and uh as the liaison has reached out and had some conversations i think either with the board um itself or whatever about a possible a joint task force or a task force or how you envision it so my goal and our goal tonight was to really talk about you know how we each envision accomplishing getting some kind of a plan together here um for the route 20 corridor knowing that this is a very long term project um so what we had done a couple maybe about three or four meetings ago um just if they drafted a draft charge for a committee we gave him some edits and it's still draft and it is also in our supplemental packet if you saw it it's um very i think page what 45 is it way down there it's i think it's in the uh what's in the main packet supplemental page 34 34 it's like the very last so i'd like to kind of move us over to that and open up the conversation um so you're you're aware of how we feel we would like we would like to accomplish this goal and certainly we would like to work together and certainly we are open to suggestions but we also um i have several board members who feel that we need to get um moving forward on this fall before the fiscal year ends and i haven't done anything on it so i'm looking forward they're going to give me a bad word um so anyway we could just sort of um talk about this you know how you envision us to achieve this goal and you know do we want to work together or not or what what are you thinking so who would like to start on your side of the table me again okay um so when i looked at this quickly i thought this is really treading over ground that's already well trodden you know we had the beta study we understand what the goal is we've had public hearings we understand what the what the community wants we understand what you guys want the problem for us we had several meetings this fall when we started this process of trying to figure out what we need to change in our zoning in order to just implement what we've already done and then we got with two dover amendment applications and all of that stopped and had to be put aside what we really need help with is help with the legislative drafting we need people who have experienced drafting regulations and legislation who can take a stab at getting this started because what this what the whole plan needs none of it means anything until they're actually zoning amendments to our current route 20 corridor and you know some of the stuff in there is crazy like you can have a store there to sell and rent canoes you can have a stable uh you know some obviously that just has to be updated some of that is just ridiculous but i have heard rumors that some of the properties that are in that section of town are maybe going to be looking to make some changes soon and if that's the case we want to do this as quickly as possible because we don't want somebody who has something that doesn't fit with our plan to just kind of i don't want to say sneak in but come in and make changes to their property that aren't consistent with what the plan is which is you know i guess i would best express it what we what it came out of the study is buildings along the section of route 20 on the north side particularly that are more focused on the new town center more focused on the rail trail and businesses that have we would like to see shared parking around the backside so because you can't park on route 20 so if you drive through the buildings almost a very small version of linden square and wellesley where the parking is sort of in the middle and it can be shared parking so that no one builds for us to have a ton of spots and all of this we know what we need to do but we don't have time to draft those zoning bylaws we don't have the time and it is clear to us what needs to happen you need to mandate the sidewalks we have quite a few buildings that already comply with this plan we have a lot of buildings that are set back from the road that have a nice green space between the building and the road and it's just a matter of implementing that so having another task force to tell us exactly what beta already told us and all of the public hearings we had before isn't getting us closer to that goal it's the drafting that is what we are not having time to do if only people would stop filing doper amendment you know and if they stop passing laws that require us to make zoning changes it would be nice to be able to make the zoning changes in town that we actually want to make that the town wants right now we're just chasing after the governor's mandates and it would be nice to be able to have time to do this so those are my thoughts would you propose me i mean certainly you don't want me writing them so how would you propose that i don't know how we would find people you know there are people in town mr levine has a lot of experience doing legislative and regulatory regularly
you know there are other people in town who do have that experience um and looking to find people and you might want to have some of the other folks that you've got mentioned on here on there so that they're helping to guide the process but it's the drafting that's the problem it really is i mean when we sat and started to go through the existing zoning bylaws it's you know untangling vines that have been there for a long time and trying to really figure out what the history of is it why is that there do we need that no we don't need that so i think we had like two full meetings where we pulled it up and we were all looking at it together so yeah i think we had two full meetings where we pulled it up and we were all looking at it together to try to figure out what we could change and what we could adjust in order to encourage some development to happen there um have you reviewed the recommendations that are in the the current master plan wrap i mean the town center i'll start in route one do you think it needs work i was going to talk a little bit about that so i mean there are some nuggets of really good things in that master plan it's just figuring out which things we actually want to move forward with and chunk out into small projects that are going to help for development in that area there are things in there like the path from the supermarket down to the rail trail um you know a nice curling one that comes down for accessibility too and then you know if you go over there now it's just like some dirt trail that kind of goes up to this the sharp shopping area that's not great i think we also have this project coming in 2028 where they're going to finally finish the bridge and connect that over to town center area we don't want people to just go through there and go on to west and we want people to have a reason to stop and if we don't do those small projects to connect the rail trail to all those businesses there then no one's going to stop so i think i think we all need to sit down and just figure out like where where can we put some funding where can we apply for some grants what can we do with our state um funding programs to be able to do those smaller projects if we do a bunch of those it's going to lead to a really nice looking area that really connects everybody into that rail trail um and gets people excited about doing development projects in that area another thing if this is a multi-disciplinary group among different boards i in order to move projects like that forward it has to be right it's not just us um it's great that we have this plan that's in place but we really need to look at what's in there and choose and decide which things we actually want to prioritize and move forward with that's tap well when we met for example we called in the wastewater people to come and talk to us about could you put housing in there could there be more restaurants in there and those are all big questions and the assessors he called the assessor came and talked to us about um housing versus commercial buildings and uh the difference in tax revenue from them and we had the wastewater people come in and talk to us about what we have available for wastewater um we have spent quite a bit of time i mean the beta study was not commissioned by us it was commissioned by you uh and as we started working working with beta um members of the board had real difficulty with the uh scope of work they thought that it was just not deep enough but what we have is what we have and we spent a lot of money getting that and there's enough there to work with because we can't make people develop we can't make people put into little buildings we can set it up so that they might want to but i think we also have to see what uh once the uh terrain project was done what it looks like because part of the data plan have things on that side of the street which is part of the question now right because joanne is back it's not on the street we're aiming for things on the street so you know i i we've spent i mean i've got pages of uh things that we talked about discussed went over the entire bylaw uh looked at what kinds of uses we thought should be in this district what shouldn't be in this district um but we do have some commercial uses that if they weren't here who knows where else they could go in town and people rely on them people rely on the power of the place they rely on the other body place some people don't think it's a wonderful idea but it's there and others in town use it and rely on it and we don't want to force them out the studies from 2022 so that probably means that a lot of material that went into it was probably 2021 and maybe before that but you know the the one thing that we i think we talked about this a little bit is like maybe somebody comes in and does a market right study to see how viable some of those recommendations are five years six years later just to freshen it up a little bit um and then another thing that we talked about too and when we looked at the zoning and and i thought back to conversations that i've had with people in the town about mixed-use commercial residential we don't actually have that in the zoning for this area right now um so that's right away something that we should fix and we just talked about building height requirements and the feasibility of something being profitable or not i think we need to look at that too because i think in this area it's 35 feet and we might want to think about raising that to make you know maybe commercial to levels of residential above those projects are really attractive and those things that we're seeing going in a lot of other towns and it helps with our housing burden as well so just just see if that we can talk about it as a board the economics analysis thing is something that we've been talking about it really is that there needs to be market study not just somebody saying oh gee this will be great for us but you really need to know what the markets are are now i mean if you ride up route 20 starting from uh west and go and sunburn there are empty storefronts everywhere i mean retail is not here anymore and it's not likely to come back real soon so we wouldn't want to preclude it but we can't rely on that for development purposes but at the same time if a market study said there is a real interest and a real viability for a particular type of business then we would want to make sure we're actually encouraging it for whatever they need if they need you know extra wide driveways or more parking or you know if it's dental offices or whatever it is that we're doing things that encourage things that are actually viable for this neighborhood and not encouraging things that are just on somebody's wish list but are never going to happen comments from the board first of all i i just have to thank this board for all the time you put in thus far on mr 20 corridor we've had many meetings and reports but as i listen to the conversations it's a good conversation i'm hearing reasons why a task force is needed and your comments i think would help us revise this proposed charge to meet some of the goals that you've mentioned one of the arguments i've made more than once passed is that um task forces needed because you guys are so darn busy i mean if it's not dover it's something else it's just the nature of the beast planning board is a especially in in the times we live in i mean you know greater boston continues to grow in numbers and people are finding all sorts of properties to do all sorts of different things and planning board is a critical reward to
be the sheriff if you will and educate people on what they can and cannot do so you never you never have a vacation but and i think therefore a task force would kind of spread some of the workload it would improve um brainstorming and new ideas and develop some of the ideas you've mentioned and it would just move the train ahead it's not something to take it's not an effort to take responsibility from the planning board rather you would be part of it to a representative and we can um make you know creative good decisions collectively that uh would really improve that quarterback i'm sorry i'm just state law uh master plans and the supplemental ministry plans are exclusively under the jurisdiction of the planning all right so i was when it was my turn i was going to suggest if we did something maybe we did it together it's like when the planning or we put this on the planning the planning board um but i would like the board to go fine and then i'm gonna give my two cents be ready i might i don't see the word master plan in this proposed chart this is a an effort to uh well there is it says through 20 master planning that's that i mean we have in our annual report we list all of our responsibilities and you should look at that um and um i suggest you look at uh massachusetts general 41 sections 81 c 81 d 81 e and 81 f uh just so that you understand what our responsibilities are i don't think anybody on this board um wants to exclude public input i think that we seek it regularly um but we found over the last few years that um
certain interest groups uh take it upon themselves to uh propound things that we wouldn't necessarily relive as a board or run ahead of us so that we can't help fix the problems that they're creating um and again to me i don't think it makes sense to have additional uh these pushing things that we are required to be responsible for we have public hearings or um we have done over the years the things that we have done we've done uh the um master plans have been done in 62 2002 for a limited area 2010 there was a review of the master plan then in 05 and 06 we had planning forums for the town center project and before that we had planning people we had a town center project we had forums for uh for the planning board i wasn't on the board had forums for um what they wanted to see in a town center even before there was a project uh then we had the wayland real asset planning committee and that that report sits on the shelf and nobody looks at it that report has really
it's open on my laptop right now i've read it multiple times
that was looking at our own and what we could do with that oh that's always open on my look at that all right all right so no this i wanted to have committees we have had public input some people don't like the public input that we're getting and that we can't help that i mean this is not a pet project kind of thing and i feel like that's what it is and i'm sorry if it's too blunt if you look at if you look at other communities that have focused on their downtown we've all put together task forces from various you know elements of the town such as successful with here i understand your point about the master plan and that's why this should be revised but um to work with you uh to come up with uh a consensus and to help with what robin said find someone if we have the money or we need a warrant article get a warrant with some money to hire someone to put together a proposal warrant article that the planning board will cast those degrees to again it's to help this move on so i'm going to move on to bill and find you thank you one clarification your suggestion is town of residence as opposed to another beta coming in that has their own opinion another professional just a group of people that are interested i would say that would be up in the task force in other words the task force would decide what what's been done what needs to be done and quite frankly uh because of the work you've done it may not be a very long task may not be a long-lived task so we just help help move him we had to talk about it okay all right bill well i think jesse made an excellent suggestion which is let's take a look at what's there and uh there are i'm sure people in town can tell us what it is uh viable economically rather than hire a consulting firm to come in and give us a fact report um i i think the notion of having a whether it's the land use group or the land use group is supplemented by people sounds people just coming to a couple of charrettes uh to advise the planning board is is a good idea um i take your point annette you you've done a lot of process you you uh had a lot of public input but i think if it were a more focused effort uh that would be advisory to the planning board i think it's well to talk about what's the lot and see if there's a consensus about that before we then address robin's point which is okay but somebody's got to really draft this and how's that going to get done amid all the other demands on your time it's uh obviously a very fair question but i think a more kind of focused effort to see if there is some kind of an emerge uh helps with buy-in helps with both being tight with money and the capital and uh saying hey can we get some money to uh build a walkway uh find something no it's that kind of so uh i think it's uh it's worth the conversation i'm encouraged by the fact that we're all sitting on the table together i think there's a lot of agreement here and maybe this maybe this conversation's overdue but i think i'd like us to just sort of get started which is always the hard part so i'm going to all right thank you pop in um i agree with what bill was saying i'm really excited this is really a positive exchange of ideas i'm hearing a lot of things that answer some of the questions that i think we have had um and um i i think we all really want to work together on this so i'm i'm i'm encouraged i think you need some resources is what you need so i think we need to somehow have some discussion here of what those resources would be maybe isn't this what we put forth so that we get there because in the end it doesn't really matter how what path we take as long as we accomplish our goal which is to participate and have some progress progress and um and i'm willing to volunteer bill
and that and and maybe myself i don't know um see just in administratively what needs to be done see if i can listen to this a little better offline and hear maybe some pathway bill knows the air bills bill knows the planning world so he would understand things so maybe i think that's what we should should really do that i think that's good yeah so everybody's good with that so we'll reach out to you and maybe have some offline conversation here that's great so for now the idea of having an IRP and having a committee in mind something about it okay so let's not listen after nine i get grumpy so i think about wrapping up so if you believe me um the other item that we have on so we're all good with that topic right yeah thank you everyone appreciate it um the other topic that i had on this list was the fact of this master plan a select board being the select board um i do feel we have really really really hard this year to stay in our lane but when people have questions or ideas they often decide we are the number one stop and so we did receive i think a couple months ago and they came in to tom was a resident gave it to tom uh proposal to establish a whalen master town committee plan committee uh again that they wanted to have the the master plan updated um we said we'll wait until we meet with the planning board and have this conversation see what they have for thoughts um i know you've done some work i know you probably think there's some edits that could i just want to pass as long as our due diligence so that folks feel that we are responsive and listening but um again i don't think we felt this was our lane and we wanted to let you know we had and i'm happy to forward this document along to you but i didn't want to just send it without talking to you about it for a couple minutes so and sometimes now i'm going to give you i never do this i want to give you the last word that's how much we appreciate this dialogue
we look at the master plan regularly we looked at it when we did the mbta communities we looked at it when the self-storage proposal was in front of us um we looked at it a lot and um it is structured around residential users and small areas of community and this is a residential community and doing something that well that will cause great health people in a residential area is something we really tried to avoid we did that with the mbta thing we could have put multi-family housing in the middle of the neighborhood which we thought was really not a good idea um people who buy their houses here expect to live in a residential community they don't want a high-rise right next to them they don't want a business right next to them so the zoning that we have in place personally i think does its job for residential and the areas that we have scoped out is residential we can certainly do things with some of our commercial areas i don't think people are dying to have larger commercial areas and you're not required to have a master plan every year every five years they suggest every ten but we have looked at these zones and districts before so it would seem to me that we don't need a full master plan um but there are individual areas that we can look at and have i know that the people in constituent last year asked if uh the town could do one uh for the constituent area and that's certainly possible but we don't have money in our budget and every time he asks for money we're told we can't have it so we haven't proposed that uh we can try and put some money into it along with the grant budget so we know that we have money that's available to us we can scope out we need to adjourn
thank you so much everybody thank you thank you tremendously we're discussing go back thank you thank you thank you and we're staying the next item on our agenda will be
do we want to take a five minute recess or so you're welcome let's keep going i knew you were going to stay that i didn't notice how i didn't look at you when i'm okay we should do a seventh inning so you might have to leave but you're going to have to stop sneezing to keep it okay so the next item we have on our uh agenda number five is a discussion and review of the proposed uh community fuel pool mural project so this this request which came into michael and then um was sent to me and then was sent to the board for correspondence is actually the first item in our correspondence package and basically there's a several groups that have been working for about a year or so um on developing a mural for the community pool and um they've done some things okay you want to talk you're gonna say that excuse me so what they have done is they've they've actually done a lot of work they have uh commissioned a local very well-renowned mural artists who said initially no no i don't work with groups but then uh said oh well my parents use the pool i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna do it so the cost for the mural itself is about 21 000 and they've already done some small fundraising and i believe they've uh at least five thousand in their uh coffers but what they'd really like to do is apply to is it called t-mobile home town grant for fifty thousand dollars and this would include some obviously the fund the rest of the funding for the mural or some the three to five year funding for maintenance and upkeep of the mural and some security and some additional lighting and even some landscaping so the question has become that they need a fiscal agent for their for their grant and um so they went to michael first and um you know that he and i talked about it and um initially he was not thinking that was something i mean obviously it takes staff time even though everyone said oh we know time um and then i had a conversation with the uh with michael he was going to reach up to town council and he's going to give us what town council has to say second um but the reason um and also that he had reached up to brookline i think and they had done it and you didn't get to do with an article like yeah that but i don't think that they did it there so they are one of the few has done this but i think we were both really concerned about the number of things including precedent um we don't have the capacity probably nor do we want to take on any potential liability to be the fiscal agent for every group that feels that they are not well equipped in this case though i wanted it to come before the board because we do own that land so there's different the uh the proponent here that who's making this case is an actual professional grant writer they have sworn to me next time i said i'll be on the stack of bibles but not yet that they would be the only one from this rather large group that would reach out to the staff and they would work with one staff person and they would write the materials and they would write the follow-up reports it's still going to be a huge amount of work with the staff but i did want to bring this forward because for me also the big part of it was if they get 50 000 grant there's funding in there for enhanced lighting and security which is something a little bit of a capital project that we wanted to accomplish so to me i felt there was something there for the top you know uh improvement of our land and also the security which we would like to have so i went back to michael and said now here's my idea and let's bring it to the board and then he's going to tell you what town council said and then we're going to have a discussion thank you thank you madam chair um i did forward the question to town council and i did wind up speaking with attorney carolyn murray late today um she said can the town access a fiscal agent said yes but they said is a general rule of thumb they do not advise it and she indicated there were a couple of reasons why they don't um one is it can depending upon the extent the involvement it can be a burden on the financial department um there could be some potential tax issues for the town one of the the things is typically the town has to accept it as a gift coming in and then there may be some conditions on how the town then hands the funding out um and depending upon how the grant is worded the town may have to follow public procurement you have to look at how the grant is written whether it says you must apply with all state and local applicable laws relative to kermit um who is responsible if there was any mishandling of the grants by the not i'm not saying we're in the pool but these are just general concerns you know if there was any financial management is to fall back on the town to be responsible if if say somebody did something a non-profit that spent the money but they shouldn't and now um in this case t-mobile comes back so we want the money back somebody it's gone with those funds since it are um in this case we're we're what we're doing is our town building what obligation does the town have relative to the future use of that building if we want to change that building um demolish it whatever 10 years down the road is there any obligation again in the grant itself saying you must ensure that whatever you're doing is around for 5 10 15 years or in perpetuity and then also with specific regard to this one it involves an artist and attorney murray said typically if there's something like that we have to get some type of release or waiver from the artist for visual under the visual artists act that in the event we wanted to modify anything we're not violating the um the artist's intentions because it's a piece of work a piece of their art so there was a couple of rounds why she thought it's not advisable but if the board is inclined to do all we can you want to add before open it to the discussion that i don't know if i mentioned this but i believe one of the groups here um um some of the school folks are are involved but they and they were asked to act as fiscal agent and they said it wasn't a school building so therefore they they respectfully declined which is how it ended up you know to us um if i didn't mention it you had mentioned already she said one of the biggest issues is precedence because in this day and age we've seen with other cases like the flag case and one of the u.s supreme court typically if you do for one you have to do for others so we could potentially open the door for other non-profits to come and ask and sometimes you don't always attract the folks that you want when you you open your doors to do so to to me if we went forward with this i think we went if we went forward we might want to have an mou um and it would say something like this is one time we're not going to do another grant for this group um at the grant has to include the the capital work that we want done otherwise you know let's say the grant comes back and it's only 35 000 you can't cut out the security and the lighting because that's that's the hook because once you set up all those requirements it makes it difficult for another group to come forward and and you mentioned it because they are returning into well they were tenant and also because this is a professional grant writer here so i'm gonna open it to the floor um did you want to start yes i know you do
um i appreciate michael listing all of those prospective concerns and the the prospective wrinkles that are involved here's why i'm a strong supporter of this idea to to help these folks who have been working on this for the better part of the year is i think this is a chance for the town to spin what was a handful of really negative stories about our community at that specific space with a giant swastika painted on there prior to school starting and previous to that um the anti-black uh language uh when dr easy was here and unfortunately that that information is out in the public domain and i think that there are a lot of folks coming together including high school students and several of these non-profits including the whalen community action network they've been working hand in glove with the community pool and i think this is an opportunity to to spin this into a story where the community came together uh behind an idea and uh there are a lot of people moving in a similar direction and right now they'll the only hold up is the who will serve as the fiscal agent um none of these groups apparently are able to serve in that capacity with the bandwidth so i i do want to support this project as i'd really like to see it go forward may i just thank you um there's no grant exists this is they want to apply and the deadline is the end of march and um so they'll but they need to have fiscal agent on the racket is that the right word to apply so anyway open it to bill and tom i agree with doug's comments i think this is a great opportunity to do a good thing my question is to you mr time managers is there an easier way to skim this gap or to put another way is if the town simply issued an rfp i'm sorry the town applied for the grant um to a staff member with the help of a volunteer maybe is what is being sought here but um there's a way to simplify this this project or not really i hadn't thought of it that way how um this is a town owned property yeah we seek in the select board seeks to um have an artist painting mural much like the schools have used artists to go in there outside of the building yeah i just throw it out there oh i i think we could apply for the grant and then excuse me now we're expending a lot of labor to apply for the grant and what if we don't get the 50 000 then do we say the security is first
just want to throw that in there so why i i struggle with why would we apply for a grant for a specific non-profit wouldn't that be unfair of the other non-profits i would argue it's not for the non-profit necessarily it's for the town this is the town buildings just saying to paint it on towns we own the town so if we won the grant then it wouldn't necessarily go on that building it would go somewhere else no the rfp would be and they're going to be for this building for this particular building no not this building we're in the pool and that's what the grant is tailored to that space right you refer to an rfp to be or a grant application but the artist would have to be chosen to an rfp i would expect if the town at the town was they've already picked one so i i'm not trying to run afoul of your suggestion i'm just brainstorming i'm just brainstorming on the phone we have an agreement where i believe currently has kind of winning pool is responsible for the the maintenance and upkeep right to all three guys over there so the land we own we do all right fair enough all right no we would have to still have some type of agreement allowing us to go back in and paint yeah or put the mural all right so i i i'll go back to my earlier comment i agree with doug's comments this is a good opportunity to do a good thing i'd like to pursue tom's further so if the town were awarded would the town be obliged to do an rfp for an artist that wish to put a mural on the town building which is leased to a non-profit so if the funds come into us we're there i think it may change it a little bit where the the funds went to a non-profit we're now a governmental agency the funds were awarded to us we may have to do public procurement where if we're administering this for a non-profit and we're not truly spending um monies that are under town control there's there's a subtle distinction in there and it may depend upon how the grant is written if the grant was specifically for if it was written to just have this particular artist so let me start over if the wayland community pool makes the request to get the grant solely for this specific artist and they get it and we hold it town council said we may may not be bound to chapter 30b but if we just say we're applying for this grant to have an artist then we might have to do public procurement so it it could be a subtle change if we do it doesn't sound like a subtle change it doesn't sound like a subtle change i think it depends upon the wording but i'm not sure how we can pick an artist ahead of time if i may um i'm in a group with other public purchasing officials in massachusetts and there's a city in there's a city in massachusetts that's trying to do a call for art similar to this and they are experiencing issues that the artists want to get paid for the submissions so you have an issue where you're issuing an rfp but you're not getting any responses because the artists want to make sure that their art is not used and they don't get any remuneration for it so that's also something to consider especially in the public space is that these that artists are demanding compensation whether or asking for rightful compensation i should phrase it like that for the work that they've put out and if we don't choose them then that becomes an issue where how are we going to compensate people have submitted an rfp that we don't ultimately win so i think that um again we need to be mindful of the precedent concept and i think that if we did anything if we voted uh uh did uh we did a vote i think we're going to say it has to be an mou i am extremely concerned and sensitive about the time of the staff and there are a dozen plus people on this committee and i do not and i'm listening i probably listen i do not and i've said this already do not want 12 people calling that staff every week about this because this is what happens because this becomes i mean this is their number one thing this is one of a thousand we're working on so i think we need to have an mou yes can i just add we don't have a dedicated grant writer like a lot of other towns do right and some of us have very limited experience with writing grants myself and do we have people who are grant administrators this woman is in the strictest strictest sense they administer grants that they like we don't have any like a centralized administration it's all up to individual department heads to manage their own grants that they would manage this if we were a fiscal agent for among the broad most likely my office of member is powers for me with the assistance of mr kevin because if you think about the opioid that's how we're handling the opioid monies it's not a grant but we we get those settlement monies i have to be the fiscal agent i have to do the reporting every year with his assistance and then we look at how we're spending them and i give presentations to the opioid advisory committee on it so it would probably be administered the same way is that a manageable house i didn't say we could manage it
understanding that it's one person from this group because i can guarantee you we will have all of them calling in i mean we can but i mean you know the cost of something else it's exactly at the cost of something else and i grant reporting is very complicated there's a lot of steps i mean i don't know how t-mobile manages their grants and what they require but i do assist brian kevney with the management of the arpa grant and it is a lot of work and especially when it's not one person following the project and you're having multiple other people input within the project it just becomes complicated because you know if i'm just the fiscally let's just give me an example i'm the fiscal agent and i'm submitting these and certifying it on my behalf but somebody else is writing it how do i how do i make sure that those two things align that i'm properly reporting what i'm supposed to be reporting and that down the line we don't have issues where they try to claw back the money and now the taxpayers are now responsible for shoring up the funds that were acquired back from us i would note uh looking at this hometown grant website that it's specifically designed for small towns with populations less than 50 000 those are the only eligible to apply and so i'm assuming different than like a federal government grant from the doj this is going to probably be a scaled down series of reporting requirements and hoops to jump to but maybe that's something we can figure out we can gather all of that important to find because we don't know right so and i think the one distinction here is the proponent that has reached out to michael and myself is a professional grant writer no i haven't tracked up on that but so i think that makes a difference however we cannot have 10 people calling in this experiment yeah well i moved on that this board uh through appointment of the town acting a specific agent for grant application related to the proposed community pool mural project and i asked the select board chair and or town manager enter into mou with this organization outlining roles responsibilities limiting town town staff involvement so in discussion anybody have anything to say i'm curious why does uh why is a fiscal agent
as opposed to the grantee yeah absolutely why does the town have to be the fiscal agent and why can't the non-profit whoever's applying for it why can't they tell you that why they couldn't be the fiscal uh i suspect specifically i suspect because the town owns the land and owns structure not withstanding the fact that at least it's a too much problem the judge because the artwork's on the on the structure but the non-profit's got a useful interest it may have them this down administers the property right and the pool i mean they do have administrative staff there so i am i could follow up on that one that question if you like even though we're looking at this um i liked i liked the motion um i guess i i think it's a great idea uh some reservations but i have some questions about the necessity of the town being the fiscal agent let me find out about that the grantee being the fiscal agent is there something is a is a is a uh a requirement of the grant or the uh if the municipality who is
you mentioned it's in cities under 50 000 does that suggest that it's limited to government as opposed to non-profit well i do know um by looking that up i do i'm gonna hop in um i do know that the community pool applied previously for this point when they were doing the big project and they were not successful but um believe that um believe maybe because that was a piece of a much larger fundraising it's non-profit organizations are included who can request a grant we're looking for elected officials town managers and employees tribal leaders or non-profit organizations to submit a proposal for their project using the hometown grant application must be located in a town with less than 50 000 people and must provide a community benefit where it might otherwise be difficult to secure funding is is what campaign yeah non-profit yeah wait yeah they are now why don't you apply let me check on this what was the second question the first one bill was why does the town have to be the fiscal agent and what was the second part of that question which okay so i will draw the motion right mommy do you want to look into this and then we'll uh and address it right okay let me do that great so the next item on our agenda is um this can be happy to happy to move to reappoint brian chase the permanent missile building committee um determine in june 30th 2020 certainly thank you uh any further discussion otherwise all those in favor say aye all right all right motion passes four zero that brings us up to the town managers report with board follow-up questions mr mccall thank you madam chair so a couple of things um if some of you may know last late last week um my office got calls and i was quickly notified by chief mcpherson who was our emergency management director that we were having some type outbreak originally thought it was norovirus it's a related virus he did let me know he didn't have the name but it was not the exact norovirus but it happened here at one of our um assisted living facilities and what had happened was we were calling for mutual aid for multiple ambulances some media outlets thought we were having a multi-casualty or or some large-scale event here so people immediately started inquiring our um public safety uh communication specialist guild foil was contacted by media outlets so we we did issue through the acting police chief and the fire chief a public statement which was posted on our website and social media um i do know that those folks did a tremendous job responding is including our board of health so that the police department fire department our board of health including our public health nurse moro carter uh did a great job uh not only handling the situation but speaking to the media and working at our office to ensure people knew what was going on and getting the latest information um and our understanding was there was only one other case after that initially they thought they had to transport um numerous patients over there but it turned out not to be as bad as we should have thought but i just wanted to commend those folks for doing that um madam chair had spoken to me there had been a couple of emails about traffic studies on sherman's bridge road um there are currently some traffic studies posted on the project page one was done by tech the engineering company kevin dandrade as you know uh last fall speaking with then chief berman we he did some what are called stealth traffic studies where they put up like a signboard that actually captures traffic data um i don't think that has been posted i will look to see if we can get that posted on our sites i know i've had a public records request for that data so i'd like to pass that along um also indicated in that uh or i should say those emails was a request for traffic enforcement i've spoken with active chief hebert he's going to have our regular patrol shifts do some um monitoring in the sherman's bridge area and we are going to look for some traffic safety grants oftentimes the national highway transportation safety authority issues traffic enforcement grants he believes there's an upcoming um traffic safety grant opportunity in april and we'll look that would get us some additional money for overtime to put some dedicated traffic enforcement out around the town um and the the other question that was in one of those emails would be directed to the board and i think the board would want to wait until we get some of this traffic data back but whether the town should consider making that area a safety zone a 20 mile an hour uh speed limit but if you look at that statute safety zones are really geared towards high pedestrian traffic areas such as playground schools hospitals nursing homes things of that nature so i would just suggest that we get some updated traffic data work on the uh traffic enforcement and have that back to the board i'll ask the chief to work on that before you consider looking at the speed limit over there um just in terms of a recap i have we we haven't had a free monday but we're going to try and squeeze in my town manager office hours next week uh to the following monday after school vacation the 23rd between 4 30 p.m and 5 30 p.m before our meeting and i've been in communication with our legislative delegation in the last couple of days uh they reached out late last week asking for potential earmarks in the fy 2027 budget they sent an email around senior staff and department heads and uh three ideas were passed back to me um one is a combination but we're looking for uh emergency generators at both the coa and the library those are our cooling shelters and we need those not only for the cooling but to back up um receptive and things and then we're looking for some money for improved hybrid and remote uh systems through our it department as well as some additional monies to improve the navigation in our upcoming website upgrade so those who would be once it came back i've already forwarded those to legislators if anybody has anything else or if the board thinks of something i'm happy to submit something and that's all i have done sir um there are no minutes as i mentioned earlier i should have the fincon meeting went well mr kevin thank you um on the correspondence does anyone have any questions i have one quick one this is we got this i don't know we're supposed to do something on 26 boundary and annexation survey we're supposed to do something about this read the town read the select board read somebody it came to us yeah we've done that in the past i thought we did this it's a name for it this is what the boundaries isn't it yeah okay relation maybe yeah yeah when i was in select board remember we used to walk even before and i volunteered to walk up with terry but then we didn't have to do it or something so i don't know i'll pull this out all right and we will move on to concerns and mr whitney one item i say one thing real quick first we're going to have to have executive session this week and if you didn't respond already i'd like could you respond now are you available there's it's actually i don't go here because i already know the means not available it was um because i want to tell abby this was 10 10 30 or 11th i have a thursday or friday morning uh what if we did it at night okay michael we got a we have a team problem
what if i can i don't know he's out of town he said friday's no good i'm not well why don't i can't i can't commit until
uh the bottom line is it would be the next week or what are we going to do well well all right okay go ahead unless it's an emergency matter and you can we can do it over it's an executive session it should be very short uh no but if it could be an emergency matter where you don't have to post in 48 hours we do have to post we do have to post which is otherwise i would have already put it in for tonight and we have um so um time sensitive is this well um it and i'm looking at you now i don't have a good answer i don't either that's why i was looking at you um i just think it was it's because sooner the better later thank you um let's talk offline okay great so the one item i have is that the uh the 212 committee had its last meeting last week and the report uh due to the select board by the 15th of this month will be sent to you by the 15th of this month okay so then um you want to tell us what meeting you'd like to present to that when we talk offline okay more talking great you want to talk to my offline too uh did you have any no okay so i told you about that um i do want to tell you um very one very important thing that tom and i want to do report on together is uh yesterday so did you no go ahead bring it show it oh so bring it in
we were thinking about it so we went to um a celebration of henry knox's uh courageous
endeavor to bring 59 cannon from fort ticonderoga in the winter of 75 76 to boston via framingham where it was left for a few days before it made its way to uh cambridge and boston and there were other legislators legislators there nice talks and there were some horses pulling cannon he's very nice so don't put on the screen but i can show my fellow no i said like i'm not going to put on the screen i'm looking here oh yeah cool what's mesmerizing it was good yeah so it's a lot of fun and and and we have we received someone tell oh we received a plaque which i left in my car and a citation which i left in my car because i was so anxious to get this meeting because i get so excited i just slack is fabulous and it's huge i will bring it to the next meeting everybody else was just whatever we did it together we were very excited about it it's huge and we'd like to have it put in a prominent place um in the town building so all right i'm happy to i'm happy to move this i do want to mention that there has been conversations and i think everyone knows it doesn't know we meet on the 23rd the deadline for those articles is going to be like the well it should be the thursday before but probably no later than eight or nine a.m on the friday before so we can get all these articles we've talked about into that packet both them make some progress i really don't want to be having a lot of extra meetings on this um the legislators are going to come i believe all three are coming before us on the 23rd to do an update they asked us if they could come in and give us an update i did send them a list of some of the home rule petitions that we're putting forth to our meeting so that we could let them know about those and say hey when they get in there make sure you push them through personally liquor licenses because we really want all these things in the green barrel and um so many might want to be thinking about what questions you might have that you want to bring you know to that item as well and i think that's about it i've been moved at this board adjourned at 9 43 pm all those in favor thank you thank you
6 15 pm this is a hybrid meeting we are in person and remote the meeting may be recorded and if it's recorded it will be made available to the public on lake ham as soon as possible after the meeting pursuant to chapter 2 of the acts of 2025 this meeting will be conducted in person and via remote access in accordance with the ethical law this meeting has remote access and one may watch or participate remotely with the meeting link that can be found on the agenda and on the wayland calendar when required by law or allowed by the chair persons wishing to provide public comment or otherwise participate in the meeting may do so um here in the town building at 41 constituent road or through the remote access public comment should be limited to two minutes per person so our agenda for this evening is going to be announcing some public comment followed by a fairly lengthy discussion of the 2026 annual town meeting articles we'll do a few of those approximately 7 30 we will have a joint meeting with the planning board have a number of discussion topics including their zoning articles on the article we're putting for that would be followed by a discussion review of the proposed community for mural project we have a reappointment on the permanent municipal building committee town managers report i don't believe the minutes were available for the packet so those will be tabled review correspondence select boards members reports and concerns i don't have any topics not reasonably anticipated 48 hours in advance and hopefully by 9 30 we will adjourn so joining me this evening um in the select board meeting room here is mr faye and mr whitney um i'm is there in are there any members online robbie no i don't see any other okay uh we we anticipate that mr levine will join us shortly and we will check regularly to see if miss friendsley joins us remotely we are joined tonight and will be assisted by uh town manager mr mccall who will be with us until seven and he will have to excuse himself come back about approximately eight ish um and we are also joined by our assistant town manager miss um helsey house burlett who will um assist us in michael's absence and obviously through all of this in tell me the article discussion so all right i also want to say please note the agenda items times are approximate and the items may or may not be discussed in the order and all topics are subject to liberation and both so having said all that are there any announcements on the board
so i have one for those who watch our meetings um select board has called uncle on this fan situation and the audio and we uh will be moving back or to our old space in the former coa area effective our meeting on february 23rd so yeah nice to look up after a recent internal poll we are now calling that area the wailing commons in the comments all right will we seriously yes somebody smirks it sounds nicer than the former coa meeting room all right and we felt it was time since they've been gone for more than half a year and then you should start referring it to something okay so that's where we're going going to the other side of the building and um and i do want to ask if once we move we could remove this sign up here because one of the concerns that bothered me was we had twice someone was coming to a select board meeting came to this meeting and there was someone else here and they never got to our meeting all right no more answers do we have any public comment yes mr carpenter first of all everybody can hear me tonight it's that y'all can hear me back there mr property you can hear me back there i can hear you i'm sorry your turn uh hello mr faye you're gonna have to be the timer tonight is my time is my carpenter is exhibited extreme appreciation the two-minute rule all right thank you and i plan to keep to that tonight so uh thank you chair and members uh for allowing me to speak and having public comment uh i want to acknowledge firstly the school committee's discussion with you last with uh carol and bill uh present to discuss article dd last week uh they raised substantive questions about alternatives to the parcel in question and about whether they will transfer custody and about the sequencing authority related to it i think it's important that the town meeting get a clear picture of how those questions are being handled within the article so my request is as you finalize article dd my request is about clear wording so voters understand what they're funding uh specifically if the intent is a joint engineering study i ask that it please be stated and that it will be jointly scoped in the article and that both boards will agree to the scope and any major changes before work begins um secondly um it would also help to state plainly that the study does not assume a transfer a development plan or any future town meeting vote that will keep it informational uh or thirdly uh the town meeting should be able to read the article and understand is this a joint study with the school committee or is the select board moving forward on its own so my ask is simple uh write the article so it clearly states whether this is a joint or an independent uh for the select board and then how the scope will be approved and that the study doesn't presume an outcome thank you that's all thank you very much is there any other public comment in the room um robbie do i have any public comment questions online okay great and i'm going to move on to um you see mr holder there yes he's there yeah would you like to bring him over um we're going to talk about a number of articles tonight uh article hh is actually in the supplemental packet i had thought we might end up having a uh revised draft but i think super bowl got in the way i mean what's and so that we uh the original has been put into the supplemental good evening tom how are you i'm doing well i hope the same with all of you thank you um so what what we're doing is we're having um all the sponsors of the various articles come before us and so that we can ask any questions that we have you know about the article we have seen you and the board of public works together and separately many times so i'm not sure if we have too many questions but um does anybody have any questions about this article for mr holder tom we've had a previous discussion uh with ryan keveney i'm not sure if you were part of that discussion excuse me with respect to sort of the flow of the dollars the warrant article seeks to appropriate 38.6 million and to authorize borrowing at the same the warrant article notes that with respect to the two elements there is a 10 contingency for each so the question i guess i have is whether once the borrowing takes place does the mwra or the lender provide the entire amount to the town which would enable us to earn some interest on it or is it more a typical construction draw where there's authorization to borrow the funds are drawn down pursuant to a periodic maybe monthly draw request
yeah so i would unfortunately like to defer to brian keveney on this uh because for me to offer an answer to that i wouldn't be confident that it was the correct one i have a sense of how things will proceed but i would i would prefer to have him be able to give you the precise answer to that i do know that um relative to timing of it you know this is going to be a zero interest loan um typically the term is in the next 20 years we do have the ability to extend that 30 years um but if we make that decision it would no longer be zero percent it would be a higher percentage just to uh be able to enable the clean water trust to absorb some of that risk with a with a small interest rate we will be making payments beginning after the construction is complete so that's scheduled for the summer of 2029 so it would be that uh next fiscal year which in as in essence would be fiscal year 31 is when the town would begin making payments on that stood and again this may be a brian question but to the extent that the 10 contingency for both elements is not required what happens to those proceeds so the two contingencies that you're referring to will be included in the loan application which will actually occur we'll make that application later this summer uh into the fall into october we will not have an exact bid price until a little bit after that when the design is complete and we actually go out to bid and receive construction figures we'll at that point know what the bid price is but then with any sizable construction project uh there's always the risk of unanticipated conditions that are confronted whereby change orders would be submitted and approved so we will likely not know how much of that contingency is actually used until later on perhaps nearly um when the project is nearly completed right but to the extent that let's say hypothetically five percent remains that the change orders aggregate to five percent rather than ten percent do you have a sense of what happens to the remaining five percent follow it yeah i i do not again i can speculate but i would prefer to have brian weigh in on that sorry sorry no that's fine thank you i believe that becomes issued but authorized but unissued debt and that's why we have that article periodically to rescind authorized but unissued debt however this is a little bit different because it's coming from the state third party yeah so we would probably have the brian or final rules but under ordinary borrowing that we do that's what happens there all right uh excuse me i'd like to have note that mr levine has joined us at 625 thank you how are you good and we are on article age age as you can see mr uh holder is with us we does anyone have any last questions for him on this article i did mention doug that i had thought i was going to have a revised write-up this morning but uh super bowl got in the way and uh didn't receive anything until very late today so this our this write-up will be streamlined you know in accordance with um you know our new streamlining
recommendations particularly the pros and the cons and i and uh you know if we can use 400 words instead of five that's what we're going to do here so but in the meantime does anyone have any last questions for tom before we move on with this article um i had a question though for mr mccall we voted this article to co-sponsor it which should be added by the way to the top of the um the article on the proposed thanks guessing um but we should probably still take another vote to support it you know although we've already supported it that's my question you know how we vote to support articles yes yeah i mean i i never see any harm in reaffirming your part of position so i think you all think your rights to do so kind of chair um so if you want to make a motion um
in this article you want to wait and do them all at once okay happy to move that this board vote to co-sponsor article hh with the board of public works already co-sponsored now we're supporting it to put it in the warrant we vote in favor of it but we say um article each year i was inserted on january 20th i moved a motion might read something like i move that the select board through uh really long-term water supply gas construction funding and then that's the article that we're supporting that it's in the supplemental yeah first one in my supplemental yeah i could uh i've lost the packet of mine mine see this there's mine right so so move
okay is there any further discussion all right all those in favor say aye aye all right motion passes four zero may i have my track deck we're not going to level that's right just getting used to it oh yeah no no no no getting used to it um mr holder thank you very much for your time unless you have anything else to add you're you're free to leave us all right well as always i do appreciate the consideration thank you all right by the way before before tom leaves um i do want to add in that there is going to be a forum about this article and all it entails so april 7th that's correct april 7th at the coa community center yes right and the time 7 p.m 7 p.m and that's is that on the town calendar already do we know um i do not know whether it's on the town calendar i've secured the room and coordinated the audio visual needs uh with the coa staff so it we are good but i'll ensure that it makes the town calendar so everybody is apprised of it because we would like to have a strong attendance we'd like to be able to do a fair amount of outreach and and let people know what this project is about and what this article entails so should we also put it like in the newsletter and do we have a press release going out about it does anybody know we do okay we're good i think we're good so far all right very good thank you sir all right good night all so if you look in our regular packet there are a number of articles which are determined the no financial impact articles and these are the ones that the finance committee will write this little blurb down here um it's not on this one but exactly they're not on here um one they're not on any of these hang on i've seen one oh come on careful where on this one cc is one i know it's on cc because i did that last night it's not there what are you looking for well the finance committee will write on all of these non-financial articles this group that adds in the next agenda item have been all deemed by the finance committee is what they call no financial impact and they have a little phrase that says after discussion with the finance director has been deemed that there was little or no financial impact in the town this article and therefore under code 19 i think it's four um they will not provide a full report with pros and cons and so then what stands on the article is just what we see here here is our 150 words background information and then the select board recommends and then that little phrase from the finance committee and then their vote is to not um this is not a financial impact article so let's these articles that are coming in next starting with p right through cc are all in that group and i thought we could look at those tonight and then possibly vote them uh the ones that are in the packet are missing that vote and the phrase from the finance committee but really what we need to focus on is the wording that's on these to make sure this is what we want and then i think we could take a vote on these so everybody following me we do okay that's great so um the first one of course is p and that's a little bit different because this is one we've done before and it has an awful lot of material in it because it's got pros and cons it was done under the old system we actually could yeah we're going to revise that we could get a lot out of this um yeah so also by the way on this one um tom this is your article right that's correct can you read the first thing under the finance committee comments so we're going to look at this and talk about what's missing or what needs to be added in or taken out on these and then we that's that's our plan um so on the first paragraph it talks about this article is identical to article 19 and 22 were adopted at the 23 24 and 25 annual town meetings but if we had three town meetings shouldn't we have the articles right so yeah so i wrote missing one and um i don't know if we need this paragraph about expedite legislative review but why don't you work on that you'll work on that okay and really reduce all these arguments pros and cons really we need like one or two right does everybody agree you agree okay so how do we want to handle this so we're making these edits do we want just tom or the liaison to make an edit and then maybe show them to someone else and we're done with them or do we want to see them come back in the revised form before they go on the warrant i think if it's going to change substantially even if it's going to be constricted i think we can see it one more time yeah i'd like to do that all right so why don't we talk about them and vote on these and then if you can get them if they're yours and you're here next week maybe you can get them we can get them cleaned up and then just have them for quick review on the 23rd but i'd like to vote and so we'll tell the finance committee we've moved on here okay so that's the first one we're all set we're going to do one vote for all of them would you like to do that you want to do them all separate ah because we may have different i'm not sure we're going to vote on pf you want to vote on p without uh that's what's p or what we have for the remote participation yeah we have one tonight yeah let me give us support to support the audience right then i'll move that that this board vote to support article t entitled reaffirm the old dissipation of time meeting opposed the more time in article 2026. okay well i'm going to also make a suggestion there if you don't mind it's easier for the minute taker when you do these because there's so many we have the same person make the motion the same uh second all right is there any further discussion that's my only question is whether we wanted to prefer this action until we have five members just thinking about that too come on guys we've got a lot we've got 50 some articles to do we've got five weeks you don't want to be in here a lot of extra meetings we've got to move some of these just saying i would feel more concerned about that if they were articles that were that were more controversial the ones we're dealing with tonight are fairly non-contro that's awesome and i'm not sure that miss brensley will be able to join us next week she may be but she may not be are you allowed to take someone else yeah why don't we just do it and then if she's here we'll take that vote again and it would reflect five zero if it's going to be five zero only then the point is why do it right if i'm going to do another vote because if she if she doesn't attend then this is our safety bill and that second one we could potentially do a whole list follow a single vote we're going to do that then just wait for the 23rd right but let's go over them all and see what edits we need to make so that when we're looking at them on the 23rd they're really good to go and perhaps then you can reach out to the finance committee liaison if you're a liaison get that paragraph in there that belongs in there with their vote all right all right so that's what we're going to do so we have to withdraw your motion then i think what should we draw okay we're out all right anybody have any more comments uh no now we're on our right acceptance of mgl chapter 53 section 18b provide information regarding valid questions right um um anybody have any comments i think this is a fantastic article and i'm glad we're going to think are we the ones
my question is i don't know that historically we've put the whole and the whole have we put this is a question for you all of this language this is the entirety of the law yes yeah because in another one we don't you'll see later i see you saying in other words this isn't but the description that we're going to take that stadium well i think this is kind of unique it'd be one thing if it was a statute that was maybe i i think this is kind of unique i think it's good to have the language in this one you are right carol sometimes we don't but i think this one is you know it has some value in having statutory language okay whose article is this who has our i mean levine pay attention please um you know what i lay it up tonight because i think it'll be oh okay i want to make sure you just double check that the text totally mirrors the law because i noticed on a couple of these they'll say something and then maybe something's not exactly that way it might say see we might be voting to have the select board do something we're down here it might say the town clerk so just could you just make sure when you go through this that they we have a match set so we don't end up and there'll be no finance committee comments and and finance committee comments will be that phrase i just stated that speaking with the finance director consultation with the finance director this is deemed a no financial impact article and then there'll be no a favor so will that will those lines be gone you'll get that from them who's your who's your no i mean will this be deleted yes okay who's finally is on yeah all right okay so you want to talk to him about that and um you know um i just want to hop in real quick here kelsey and i were talking about this today we are moving in a direction where there are more the finance committee is uh voting that more articles have no financial impact and so then really they become we're the ones that really finalizing the write-up into it so it has it switches back and um because and i sent in i spoke with kelsey today i sent an email to uh the chair of the finance committee did they want us to be the ones that submit these once we get their verbiage and their vote or do they want to submit them all so i will advise on this all right anything else on this one all right let's go to article s acceptance of mgl chapter 30 138 section 12d conversion on the wine slash malt licenses i think this one's bill yeah yep okay have any comments here i've had something here this article and authorize the term solutions um this one i think in the background information needs to say authorize the select board to convert um because that's what the text says so the text says let's allow the select board as the local license to approve requests to convert and so i think we need that same language in the bottom versus otherwise the town so is that duplicative is that duplicative if if the article description includes that information and we're trying to pare down these foreign articles well i think we just need that to match them because someone can go out at the town meeting and say well is it the town or is it the select board that can do make the change you could use some synonyms for the verbs maybe germs i don't know and the other question i have here is it's it talks about that people can just apply and you know send in their request to convert uh but shouldn't they be applying i mean is it an automatic conversion if i have a beer and wine license do i automatically get to convert or you'll have to apply to the select board so those were a couple points i thought we should have in um that's got to be an apply right yeah and they have to apply they it's not an automatic thing because it um right it go if they ever give up their wine and malt transfer license it automatically converts back to them so it's almost like a special permission for each specific wine and malt person who already holds that license so they wouldn't have to apply for this description says uh uh this white board is licensing authority would approve a request from it but it doesn't say in the background in the background that says it allows the holders to convert their licenses for an on-premise alcohol license so i'm saying i think they have to match so i i can edit it all right we're okay with that and you want to have that going to jalen for the contact person yeah okay article t is this you home rule allow additional liquor licenses all right so again we have the language here anyone have any comments on this i have no idea what this means in the article description the last sentence it says provided however that the general court may reasonably vary the form and substance of the requested legislation within the scope does that mean they may or may not give us the 10. well that means they can revise it they can edit it revise it should we say in the text that we're looking for 10. so i it was recommended to me by members of our delegation to aim high right but we don't say anything here we just say that the authorizes for special edges oh 10 oh it is in here may grant 10. all right um let's get rid of that one all right again can you just read those bill to make sure they match um and in the background information uh if we have enough wording i was wondering if we would say um one of the reasons we're doing this is for economic growth you know so the proposed specialist provide the town the option to grant additional liquor licenses prospective response um we feel our economic reach the limit on the current quote so i think when terrain came in they took the last all alcohol restaurant license it's going to add a sentence at the end carol talking about social licenses important to attract additional restaurants we have none and we have none available right now but also be careful now you have to stay within 150 words you just said it's the code all right are we good on that great how about you that's me home go ahead you know what i would like to be able to wait a minute let me read it that so people are listening home rule allow print free digital legal notices go ahead i wonder if we're very behind the curve on this one and there are a whole lot of towns that have already adopted this would be okay i would put in there but i think this largely speaks for itself and i do think we need to put in all of the law in there the act yeah so on this one in the description it says the select board will uh what will we do authorize and request the select board a petition the general court no at the top it's no i know what is in the background info i think it talks about the select board only uh selects two means of legal notice but if you look in b the school committee so you've got to add in the select board in the school committee as appropriate we'll select and again that's going to be 150 words you might have been chopping up some ands and bs and those see what i mean are you talking about here yeah so here the legislation says the school the select board can do it and then the school committee also selects two publications yeah but down here in the background information we only said a select board i see so this is what this is what the residents read they are not reading usually yeah so this we want to match them up i think any more questions or comments on this one okay article v amend general bylaw prohibition of cryptocurrency machines uh who's is this is this one okay yeah go ahead again my one thought on this one is xx-3a says the bylaw shall be enforced by the town away on select board or its designee um and you probably should put that in the background and there's plenty of wrong there and are there any fines are there any fines if if um i guess what kind of fine would you have but you put one in and we didn't know it and be the enforcing and who would be in the enforcer like who would who would go into businesses and check and see if they have a bit my view is if it's an issue we can start finding people but i'm not sure there's going to be an issue right yeah i don't know ma'am what was the when it comes to this matter share our if there's a concern we would send our code enforcement officer their building commissioner and then you can report that to me and possibly the chief of police and then we would take the appropriate next steps informing them to cease and desist in the move some desist sounds good any other comments i'll take that as no article q um mine that's you too acceptance of mgl chapter 60 section two a bait up to 25 dollars on fast food tax bills right so brief trade forward i uh hope to get religions to you this week anybody have any questions of course i do so it says up here if the collecting of the town is satisfied that an unpaid tax on land on land that also included there you have the building on your land i'm going to defer to miss i think she probably knows this i can check on because it's my understanding it's all tax bills and i just that paragraph is how it reads in mgl chapter 60 section two paragraph two is i just copied that directly from general law so um i can have that clarified i think it's an interpretation carol as to how the assessment the basis of assessments generally right on the possible right part of the land land is enhanced by the structure right i think i think it's a legal thing that's why you do it land if we've copied and pasted this from the it's on the state website we're probably good i just i hate to put something in and then the next year we have to go back and sort it out because that's that's not fun as town council looked at this you know person yeah i don't send you know i'm supposed to town council to there in the final form as like i don't check but the statute yeah that's verbatim in the statute exactly so yeah okay yeah right yeah i just pulled up chapter 60 section one definition saying it doesn't define land they're probably defined more generally elsewhere that's general i'll ask the discussion so what will happen is once we finalize you know we vote on the 23rd and then you get the final puppies in in the next few days because it would be free to send those off the town council you know all right all right article bb is um home rule authorization of being barrels in the town of wayland and yes mr living i'm excited about this article me too we've been hoping for this for a while do you think it needs to be beefed up in the background section do you want more anybody have any comments on this uh the text or you know and um michael kelsey speak up still if you want yeah okay i believe jamon was working on some proposer's comments for that so i don't know we're all set can forward that over to beef up it's all set in your last sentence you'll maybe be fascinated if you only have a new town meeting and just the fact that you have to go to town being for it this just doesn't seem right i just have a question kelsey will the background information term be changed to proposes proposes information proposes comments yeah that's what it says in the war yeah so um that's so when doug puts it together and finalize it he should exchange background information put in the post yes when we finalize the warrant that's the finance committee is not not going to opine so this is a good point so if we end up being the group that sends in the finals we'll change those before we send them in um mr mccollins is going to leave us thank you we'll see you within the next five minutes right on the next to last sentence the summer position would allow the select word to insert the word to brand permission i also want to add in the very last full sentence to work annual they say aims to avoid delays with families who press green barrels at annual town meeting so here sorry where is that your last background deprivation
um you're distinguishing it from special county meeting just sounds funny because annual is once a year so you're saying once a year once a year yeah oh i would say green barrels at annual town meeting and then just have a period maybe that's a better because that's where we go no and we'll request green burial oh and they request requested the special town meetings they can yeah i wouldn't say the main argument to me is the fact that you should that they don't need to come before a town meeting right present this right so we're defining it to the select board not necessarily the frequency although that's something to be said without getting into the weeds even special i think the town has 45 days there's there's a i mean jesus yeah 45 to call and the reason people need this immediate approval is oftentimes for religious reasons or other so is there anything you want to add to this that this looks at that last sentence um you want to say at town meeting which typically occurs once a year which typically occurs once a year and sometimes time meeting is spicy without saying annual just say town meeting but i think you already agree i agreed on time meeting by itself that's fine get rid of the once a year then okay green bells at time meeting period that's right at time meeting period i should say not else yeah at time meeting period all right i was coming in this way what else is coming in that way we're right where we should be
is there anything we want to add to this one so mr levine can point that in i'm going to make a couple of tweaks okay and then you'll have it ready for the 23rd yeah okay um just go back so here's a good example of last year um let's see what it goes into one article 24 was here reports is the text proposes comments because the select board because it's a lot of um um she said by politicians but this is us and then it's finance committee but we'll that's it all right but it does say that um we're good on that one so the next the next one is um me cc um chair carol soon as a most of that look uh amend town code chapter 31 36 dash one parentheses town meeting and election right um what's interesting here is 36 dash one refers to us as the selectment and uh slice do we want to change that or we're not allowed to change it go ahead sure we change it select board right yeah yeah so we'll have to um do the strike out there and put the one word in voice yeah twice and uh are we still comfortable with march 15 through june 1 i am right anybody else finance committee expressed a little bit of concern about that early what did they want it to be what year by year year by year because it's all about flexibility right we're all set yeah right um this one i do have somewhere um maybe all done from the uh the finance committee i'll just make those two at edits for that so for example this one do we need to see this one again we yeah we'll put them all back in so we can vote them all right that takes care of that now i think in this anybody have any comments final comments on the ones you looked at that's really good so all right uh i'd like us to go into a supplemental packet and look at article ee please which is the beginning no page page five of the the supplemental packet thank you just because i don't have the page on this right so they edits to the language itself of the the article reflect what we discussed last time so hang on just one second actually on page seven is the revised cc there it is i knew i had this in here and if you scroll down you'll see this is the finance committee comments that all appear on all of these non-financials following consultation with the finance director the finance committee has deemed this article the negligible financial impact on the town sure to town code check on 19-3 detailed comments together with a summary of arguments and they were out in an opposition to the article and not reply that's the phrase that they're going once they take the vote it's going to be in every one of these non-financials so everybody's got that yes i knew i had one done okay so let's go back up now to page five article ee amend town code um is it chapter 198 planning board appeals and um this is doug's article and then we had some edits last week and do you want to walk us through any filled out the background info so let's i wanted us to um look at this be comfortable this is the language we want and then we're going to vote tonight to refer to the planning board and then when they come in we'll talk about it and then um the town manager's office hopefully um can send it out tomorrow to them right maybe the planning board first before make him referral no we're going to do it tonight i think what you want to do it after you mean don't vote right there don't vote we're voting we're voting to refer it do we want to hear from the planning board if they have concerns about this yeah article we could vote after they leave all right
in the meantime let's look at this you want to walk us through well we talked about this last time and two of the items that we discussed um were actually requiring a meeting with the select board versus scheduling meeting with the select board and instead of having that be required to be 60 days prior to submitting any application for site plan approval it would be within 60 days after submitting such application what i still don't know is where the threshold is how we can draw the line because we obviously don't want it to be for the vast majority of projects in town this is for the larger projects in town and bill do you have any suggestions on that for square footage or parking we know that the mbta zoning has a minimum water area but five acres we have lots of home lots that are 60 000 square feet which is an acre and a quarter or something so um because this says construction of a structure greater than x square feet or alteration of more than x square feet of a site because there could be a number of small structures we want to be able to cap i think that second part captures that the alteration of more than x square feet of a site this is a unique article we'll put another way of other communities adopted yeah this was suggested to us by time council most communities might provide some guidance on square footage lot size i can ask miss murray what's your what's your general sense
bigger than a bread box but how much bigger bigger than what a bread box like if we said 10 to 15 000 square feet but for a structure is that an unreasonable demarcation a typical office floor in downtown boston would be 20 000 feet net um stop and shop is about 20 000 square feet but if you think about the three dover amendment projects that are currently happening i don't know that any single structure would be anywhere near that size potentially but there's a minimum acreage in all those three fun right maybe that's the key figure minimum acreage mean the part of alteration of more than x square feet of a site what might look at what might i do it right because that's not just building that's altering the site you could say construction of a project greater than x square feet
or you'd want to make sure refers to structures and not park areas like that's just any sense on parking function the size of the building right yeah yeah and to bill's point maybe you take the language out regarding parking spaces that's much of this that's necessary okay all right i'll consult with town council you have to work for michael okay thank you well kelsey i'll remember he's in charge of delegating that today i think it would be interesting maybe the assessor has this information about how many structures or how many projects as we're thinking about it exceed 20 000 square feet 25 000 square feet 50 000 square feet yeah your sense of order of bankruptcy this course doesn't get into things like site disturbance and what's like it doesn't get into things like site disturbance or taking down trees which you don't think that the term alteration of more than x is site disturbance you're altering the site but it starts with the first line construction of a structure right what do you just want to take down it's construction or alteration so they're trying to capture both okay okay gotcha and i agree i'll take out parking spaces well we have a bylaw that refers to uh site disturbance or excavation or isn't there something within our zoning bylaws i think so memory serves from years and years ago
and then tom you had made a suggestion about the appeal language that that wasn't clear so i made that edit toward the bottom of the page okay like an appeal isn't mandatory obviously but if you file appeal then it must be filed within 20 days so kept that may but added the shall language no and you guys tell me what you think i just wrote up a little explanation to arguments in favor and to oppose but let me know if you think i missed the boat on any or should include certain arguments or other points yes i asked doug to fill that in because now we have a complete article submission should we vote to go forward argument opposed that last one doug i'm not sure worded properly but i think you want to say establishes another potential hurdle for a developer because if i actually use the word hurdle obstacle step it's not a requirement of the developer right it's it's a it's a challenge to the developer if certain residents we're making it a requirement though right they have to come present that's our bylaw but it doesn't not only if
it could impose an added cost and delay it could add cost and delay just by virtue of having to come present yeah i would say added cost and delay for development okay may establish may it cause added costs and dollars okay i'm going to ask one question yeah here when i'm reading that based on what we put you know match what we have on the top it says um the by first line it's the bylaw amendment permit residence to file blah blah blah to termination by the planning button and prior to the issuance of the building perfect early time the earlier timing requirement would allow for any appeal to occur well before construction the project begins but up at the top we have construction in the top language with construction alteration so that we want to you know all have at both oh i see you're saying construction or alteration or alteration so we want to come down here and say that in property alteration yeah say that again property alteration yeah i mean this is this isn't the code but we're explaining what's in the legal language yeah you have it's two things here so yeah all right um i'm sure i'm not gonna i think of the word construction as an umbrella term you know like what's happening at veritas they're clearing the site and you see construction vehicles there you know but because we say that specifically i can add that i think most people that should be the word construction to uh building modification or new new building a raising a raising of other
you don't think when they clear a site construction is beginning before they've laid any issues i i do but what if there's no plan to put anything on just take down your cut you want to put in a cornfield baseball baseball gotta construct the field yeah okay i'll make that change anything else so then mike i'm going to go with the the process here is that in order for us to to i guess a recommendation for planning we have to look forward the articles to them so they can then have a hearing close to hearing right which is why i have it on here that we would vote because
they need time you know to receive it to advertise the hearing schedule the hearing and then they have someone will help me out here how many days after so they have to write the report 45 45 up to 45 just about town meeting so this article if it goes forward and we haven't gotten it out like today which doesn't seem like we're going to then um most likely this will have no recommendation or anything on it until town meeting you want to make a vote now to that's why i was um keeping my eye on the calendar to advising you i have no problem with what we're doing but i think i just that's my job to advise you that what i this is why i pushed it in here and said vote but i understand we're not ready are we ready no right well it's only going to be window dressing changes yeah i'm happy to vote
again we said we wait till that we discussed it with the i think they have questions yeah well i mean i think it's good because they're going to want to ask us questions about our article yeah i mean rather not shifting rather than not prefer something and then have them say oh so you've got all those changes in your mind that we have yeah um this just went in our supplemental packet today so i don't think they have copies of this so should we get some hard copy for them for when they come into it and we can review that so you think we should do yeah would you mind making hard copies of that article for now for the joint meeting it's one of the supplemental i mean we've made some edits to it but i think it's you can kind of walk through the additional edits right yeah i just think we should have five or six copies for them and then doug will take care of us okay everybody's good with that idea all right um okay so i do want to um next items i want to talk about here is that we did hear this in the uh the public comment that after last week's meeting i think bill um the board asked us to go you know and connect with the school committee which we've been trying to do they were very gracious they fit us in you know right even at the beginning of the meeting very nice um last wednesday so bill and i went and uh we want to give you an update of what of what they said so would you like to start surely um describe the intent of the article uh there were a few questions pertaining to the article and a few questions about route 20 and it was a broad range discussion um at the conclusion the chair suggested uh that the board consider adding school as one of the uses to be examined i i should say parenthetically it's time we described the the uses not only as set forth in the draft article but also looking with respect to housing at extending the current r40 zone to create single-family lots as well as something akin to the conservation cluster concept pursuant to which a portion of the site would be devoted to ownership uh really you know townhouse kinds of uh uses with a balance the remainder indeed the majority of the site being open space um there is we've gotten some public comment and some letters that's expressed concern that the board is considering looking at densities that could approach something on the order of alta oxbow and i thought that we had made that clear at a prior meeting on the second and at the school committee on the fourth that we are not looking at a density approaching that and we so i think the school committee is aware of that with respect to the question of of adding the school use i had a conversation with first the superintendent and then the consultant at hmfh that is working for the school committee on a k-8 facilities master plan and inquired of them as to their process in their timetable it was indicated that they will be coming back to the advisory committee on the 25th of this month the school committee on the 26th of this month with a menu of options and there would be a public meeting held i believe on march the 5th to describe those i don't think at the time there will be a specific recommendation by the consultant but rather describing various approaches i also inquired of them as to what the deliverables would be as a result of their study specifically would it be duplicative of the kinds of deliverables that we're anticipating under this article the consultant indicated that their process would be to file once a direction was determined that they would file a request with this um the building the massachusetts state building authority
setting forth the proposed project to the extent that the msba was supportive of that it would the funding matching funding could be available to do things like site surveys site engineering conceptual design whereas the product of this study i think will be a series of what are called test fits just essentially looking at blocks that might represent the footprint of a school and parking so i think that and the so i'm clearest of the timing of that vis-a-vis the printing of the warrant and vis-a-vis the the actual town meeting but the deliverables that we envision are those that could be financed with msba funding and town funding if a project were to advance to that point so i'm not sure that it makes sense for us to include school and get to that level of development absent some better direction recognizing the fact that the figure state funding that we help defray those costs so i haven't had a chance to go back to the school committee to discuss all this and they're probably aware of and i'm sure the staff was aware of it but that's that's the current state of play so
there is some willingness you know to discuss there is some comprehension that we are doing our due diligence um this has been brought to our attention that we have low new growth and that if we could increase our growth that would help us with our budget um our two and a half formula and help us to um avoid some operating overrides i do believe that we were clear about that don't you think then and um but um and actually it's probably really good timing because they are in the middle of this came through aid you know evaluation and study and so then they are looking i believe i heard them say that those gentlemen the consultants were looking at all town properties not i i took from that to believe you know any property in town that might be available for them to build on so but because bill is on this there's some committee representing us you'll have more info as they go yeah the committee has not had any discussion about sites who are and the consultant has not come back with any recommendations or options as deciding so so we are getting a lot of um comments asking us to um you know explain exactly what our what we're going to do and i think as i said at the spoken meeting when i said to someone follow me this morning um it's kind of a chicken and egg situation as we discussed if we just went to town meeting and asked for the land to be transferred we would have been asked what we're going to do so now we have some funds to evaluate the land we're being asked what's the plan and so it's a it's one of the beauties if you will or the challenges of uh public public uh use well i suppose if the uh list of potential uses were for school the work of an engineer still would be a value to the town uh bill your point well that could be a cost borne by the state i'm not sure all of it will be borne by the state maybe it would but it would be um possibly at least a portion but from what i've seen um i haven't seen much relative to preliminary thoughts on uh future school construction um um that acreage holly road wasn't at the forefront of discussion at all in part because clay pit um seems to be a solid location with a fair amount of land um why you would build a school holly road and and often be shut down clay pit is is unclear to me but um maybe that's what the consultant will will recommend who knows uh but um you know i personally think that um the consultant is coming back to the committee on the 25th and school committee on the 26th and bill will be at that i probably will probably listen in on the other i would think maybe on our march second meeting we'd probably i'll put this obviously for a discussion we can have a discussion and see what what we think for direction on this um that helps i think you raise a good question we're trying to remember when we did the local roof if we had to pay for the design and then um the msba paid for we'll see if i can find that article or they paid for the design so that that's a good point but if they were going to trade for the evaluating and the engineering you know it's about for us because we're an afro community at the time the last few projects we did we came in somewhere around 30 you won't have to talk my head you know 35 percent you know return to um so for example the local roof was a four plus one million dollar project like this but four million plus and our cost ended up being somewhere around about 20 29 but we had already paid paid for um design work i'm going to look that up now because you've got my mind working on this anyone else have anything on it we just want to give you an update where we are on that so okay um the last thing before we go off on this topic so perfectly on time i want to give the floor to kelsey because kelsey and jalen are the staff engines of getting this warming together and the select board are going to hire the team and then for the finance you know there are two members that are the team trying to put this together and uh you know we want to make sure we have but every year we try to make the process a little smoother for the staff so would you like to add anything before we go off to this topic um no just that if we've kind of had some internal discussions about it but i think for us and i don't mind it i don't i don't want to speak for jalen but i think jalen wouldn't mind it either um that any edits if you could just keep us both from the loop because we're both working on instead of me alone this year thank you um so nice to have you nice to have help um just to keep us and if you forget one of us is fine but you know uh just so that we're the people we're catching all of the correspondence because there will be there have been times where you know edits have gotten missed in different um iterations flying around so you know we can always go back we're the we've got all the records and go back we don't necessarily save everything but the emails are just such a great uh way to go back and find things if we're missing things the second thing i did want to point out is because jalen and i had a lot of discussions about town meeting today um we did reaffirm that march 27th is going to be the drop dead date for all edits everything march 27th march 16th we're in what's that on the camera says we have to have stuff in on march 16 final for us to be able to edit and get it to the printer in time for it to be delivered to everyone that's not our date that's not our date to give in edits that day sending in articles because you've got to do the format great that's why i'm just reiterating which has built in some time for us as well that the 27th is it's obviously we want it as soon as possible but i just want to reiterate that that is the last day right great so that sounds good and of course to all of us those were documents as we've been working on the articles and also um the streamlining cheat sheet that we had created back in november just to refresh everyone's memory our goal is to have a warrant that's about a hundred pages but then our friends in the in the planning board have got some really lengthy articles so i don't know if we're going to make that 100 page cut this shit but we're going to try um i'm going to that was a joke and then thank you larry and that i wrote for laughing all right i'm gonna get copies yeah okay oh thank you so much um so the next item on our agenda is to um have a joint meeting with the planning board i assume have you called to order already have you called to order yes yeah yeah okay so there's three a couple seats here but can you just kind of pull chairs up so we're all together here we want everyone to do you have to stop putting my ipad in front of that microphone because i'm going to make a lot of phone calls again tomorrow so at least some of the calls while saving me he's coming back yeah i like that we've got his own name tag good for you so enough room for everybody or should we squish up a little bit okay
now maybe kelsey could move down maybe you could move in i don't want to touch her first but where do you want yeah do we need more room um robert needs to get in here next to seat over here right okay all right everybody in okay so welcome thank you for coming um we thought we would have a joint meeting and we haven't met together for a while and we have a few topics of interest that we kind of wanted to share ideas and have discussion and see if we can develop some strategy on what we're going to do and how we're going to do it it's a good plan um but at first i thought i would open the floor to you to talk about your articles that are going to time meeting if there was anything in particular you wanted us to know uh sorry the timeline or when we'll get the reports or not or whatever you'd like to tell us the floor is yours you want to do until march the 17th that's my recollection your schedule yeah um and we will leave that um on the articles that we that were proposed right so did you want to just start with an article ll in our packet is on page somebody help me in i don't know i mean housekeeping we each have taken an article yeah okay do you mind if i just do them anywhere no okay so i thought we would do those first and you can tell us what you want us to know what we need to know and after each one pause the board asking any questions and then go through them so that sounds good everybody knows everybody we're good all right how about ll housekeeping zoning i guess i have that um these were changes that were submitted by our e-coder to um you know i'm just a little uh oh sorry i can't just ever submitted by the e-coder to um the town clerk um basically are emulating what they suggested in a few additional articles but i i have i apologize i haven't summarized these the paraphrase the recommendations but i am going to do that obviously i'm not going to read through this whole thing but i think it's pretty obvious what if they're you know recommendations to change uh zoning or it's just clarifying definitions and language that are in the sections that they're talking about i think what that we were sent was about this thick um and over the summer robert and i went through it um we were going to try and do the whole thing at one time but it was just much too long so um we chose things that were obvious like the name of um it becomes an agency change that we're changing that um and there are other things like that in there is nothing i don't believe that's really substantive um but next year we'll be back again and probably the year after again so that we don't and we take the whole code that we discussed i really like to continue to have us um refer these to you in december so that you had time to get them that was a really good idea yeah way ahead of time yeah but because yeah you have to do it before the articles does anyone um um select would have any questions about this article no okay thank you um i think the next one is going to be at the page 31 i'm going to read them for those who are listening page 31 in the packet article mm amend floodplain and federal flood protection district all right um so this is uh really straightforward kind of changes to align our um the flood plain district and the federal flood plain uh protection district um like i said mostly housekeeping um it will incorporate the latest fema flood uh insurance rate map and preserves our uh national flood insurance program for anyone and we did do a change last year where we adopted the new uh what was new at the time the flood plain maps um and we did that at the request of the conservation commission uh subsequently the conservation commission was informed by the state that what we have wasn't good enough we needed to have much more i'd say boil and plate kind of stuff and we had we have two different flood districts in wayland one is a local one and one is a federal one and we needed to keep those separated as well i think there are comments in the background are on page 43 right i am the right one no i'm on the wrong page all right um anybody on the board have any questions about this article this is this mr fair so this really isn't changing the lines as they exist it's just a recognition yes of the role um the maps we announced last year um we had an approval date on them but i it's it appears that maybe one or two of them wound up having different approval dates on their issue but they're the same okay well there's a there's going to be a map here did you say there's going to be a map for the warrant um yeah you're pretty
i set off my list
fine you're all set okay um oh nm that's me yeah to find it so that is the yep page of my own document okay 38 thank you article n n accessory dwelling unit zoning amendments yes so last year we had to rush through changes to the accessory dwelling unit provisions we already had in order to comply with the new statute and we had to be incredibly conservative so that the attorney general's office would accept them and we would get them passed with a 50 vote for the things that were urgent and it was always our intention to come back because the the law was for 900 square foot adus and many people in whalen want larger adus but we had to stick with the 900 to comply with the statute and not sort of overreach um and so this year we're coming back to allow larger adus by special permit we also we required the affordable adus to be by special permit because they have to have deed restrictions and all kinds of crazy things but we have rolled those back and made the ones that are under 900 square feet by right and the paperwork goes to robert to be checked um instead of having to come before the board for a special permit and then just like everybody else if there is going to be more than one unit or a larger unit it will come for a special permit we played with different ways of increasing the by right footprint but because we have such variance in zoning you know down in south whalen you can have a small house on a small lot and in whalen you've got huge houses on huge lots there was no one size fits all way to to say if it's this big then we'll allow it so we just stuck with the special permit for a larger multiple units because it allows the town to have more control and to allow what people need and as long as it's reasonable so i have any questions on this um i remember when i went to the league review of articles and that spoke to this that you know you would be coming back and looking at and when some i think we had some resident questions but they also asked if you could build more than one and if there was a builder wanted to build more than one adu on an existing law and i'm assuming that they met with a house or something so i wanted to know if that is addressed here so it is addressed here but the interesting thing is that if you build more than one you very quickly hit the multi-family definition and so we're a little wedged in between trying to allow more than one but not venturing into the where we're all of a sudden granting what is a multi-family you know unit in a single family it was owned so there's a little bit of a balancing act to be had there but uh it is our intention to try to allow multiple if people want to and the property can handle it you know in south whalen where someone's got a much smaller lot and they want to build some big structure with multiple units in it it's going to be more of a stretch where someone with eight acres up in the north part of whale and maybe they can hide one in the woods and you'd never know how many units are in it so i can't recall exactly how we do it one of the things to think about is if you were to allow more than one extra multi-family one extra adu um in a separate building the taxing would be different and um because where our tax structure is it's a house the dwelling and the land around it that is taxed so if you have one lot and a house and an accessory dwelling unit that is large you're essentially creating a second house but you're losing the property value for the assessment because you won't have two lots we have a minimum of in a sixty thousand square foot stone you've got a minimum lot size of sixty thousand square feet if you add an accessory unit and that's okay you still have one sixty thousand square foot lot and only the one sixty thousand square foot lot is let's pass and the building would be as well but they've been using different kinds of criteria on accessory dwelling units versus um principal dwelling units so it it becomes an issue also you wind up with
if you've got say a five acre lot you wind up with as robin says multiple houses on one lot and you're in better shape for us as a town to be dividing that lot into the right size for that district wouldn't the assessor the assessor established separate values for land and buildings right so wouldn't the assessor recognize the fact that there are two buildings having a certain value you would lose you would lose you would lose the extra value of if you want more housing in wayland these accessory dwelling units are going to count as housing units right um so if you want i mean it's it's a policy decision it's not a policy decision no i understand um but you get it for the building but you would not get an extra fit for an additional lot right and the one thing we could nail the assessor down on the only thing we could really nail him down on was that adding an adu to a property does increase the the the assessment the value of the of the home because you add rental income the improvements potential for rental income it's not even a matter of improvements it's the potential for rental income plus you're getting more households that you need to provide services for so the incremental cost is less at the internet think what you're saying is the incremental tax revenue that's i think is is is yeah smaller yes so well can you expand on your comment is it an assumption by the assessor that any adu is equivalent to rental income even though maybe you have a family member going it is the potential for rental income that creates the increase in the assessment whether you rent it out or not it is the potential for rental income that he said increases and he said it didn't matter whether it was affordable or not it increases because it is the potential for rental income um have you had um have you had um have you had many applications or um or formats for adus have you about five six five six i think there are people who are waiting for this to pass because they definitely want something larger than 900 square feet tell us yeah we did last year with the legislative discussion of the articles because i remember that
fielding those questions all right that sounds pretty good so then the next article um that you have submitted is going to be on page what 43 am i in the right one 44 44 and this is oh oh multiple family housing route 20 west sub-district and this is to amend the maximum dimensions
we got a request from proper unit we want to do the development there um but in order for the financing to work out numbers of construction to work out um we wanted to increase the maximum number of units from 20 to 32 which is equivalent to what rivers edge already have and they wanted to increase the maximum building height from 35 to 58 um the next highest uh sub-district height is 45 for rivers edge and it's set back from the road here we um we would have if we knew it before we would have offered these higher numbers cut down moving but we didn't know um the 58 feet doesn't look like 58 feet from the roadway most of the property is below grade like about 20 feet below route 20 so when you're driving along it would not look higher than river's edge in fact it would look lower than represent and we think it's wonderful to have a a new development of housing uh because you get um affordable housing as well any questions um one of my concerns with this 58 foot figure is it really um it potentially sets a precedent although i know that it's this figure is only contained within the mvta communities act but still 58 foot building is very very tall and um that's one of my concerns um you mentioned a property owner approach is the property owner what's the property owner's name that's appropriate to be discussing from a full disclosure perspective i think it's appropriate let me ask you this is the property owner um on the left side of the driveway or the right side of the driveway of that site uh currently i can read this on the right side and i think we've been looking at purchasing okay so whoever owns the property we're talking possibly two two buildings 58 feet high i don't think that's what would happen well but you don't know it couldn't right i mean under the if this passes of potential right because i guess the question is i hear what you're saying um the question becomes if we want to have money to own health and we want to allow it and one has to be able to do it in a financially viable way and i don't think that the other portion would be developed because i think
well that was the argument put forth by the potential developer at the whole food site that they couldn't make enough money if they didn't have a five-story building which was a real problem for our board because of the height of very various reasons one of the concerns i have is public safety so i reached out to the fire chief he didn't tell me that now i'll read his email
i believe that the current height restriction is 35 feet an exception was made for river's edge at 45 feet if they are proposing 58 feet that does that does make a big difference and it would be a real concern the larger structures 373 commonwealth 490 492 and 494 boston road assisted living communities etc i have created some channel have created some challenges for us we've had a number of kitchen fires in these large buildings and simple things like removing smoke caused by current food can require mutual aid assistance so i just think that's another factor that that um we need to consider my next question is affordable housing because of uh it's a it's a uh mhea communities act uh donning we're only entitled to a maximum of 10 percent there's no way around that not unless they have performance will and we have be able to uh we have been able to study for it to increase it and instead of just say we do not so a maximum it's that kind of set but don't keep our number exactly the same we wouldn't lose any units so if i may um if two buildings went up there based on these zoning numbers you're proposing how many maximum units can you see that well what's the number of units i think around 100 i think that's what they propose about 100 units don't call me that but so it'd be 100 per building or 50 per building 100 per we don't want to develop it one building i developed one building one multi-family housing building potentially selling on any potential means of retail let's say they so and they sold or developed the property across the street if they if this if this property owner bought that and how many units could be built there i would go back to see how many groups i mean overall it's no more like five acres i think that's correct um and it also depends on um actually the whole area is two acres right the whole area is um and um it's not that's that's that's where you can build it too five acres you have five acres to do in the zone okay i think well it's like 5.5 acres like that well they remember movies don't have at least five acres overall i can't remember um tom we did reach out to the police chief twice by fire chief rather twice and we're told no problem i mean our equipment will go up there and that's i mean we have memos so i'm kind of disturbed to hear that that is not the case
maybe he understood that it would be similar height to um all the rocks no he knew exactly what it was that's all i have thank you i think you want to say this would be a great opportunity to actually see multi-family housing actually be built under this bylaw and right now we're not seeing anything with the hurdles of town center that was something that that we in the town thought that was gonna happen next few years and and that has slowed down so to see something actually be managed to be built under the zoning is incredible and it would be a great opportunity to be a champion of that in this area i couldn't agree more my concern is the height and i'm not convinced that uh even 45 feet wouldn't be profitable it's popular i mean i can't speak on the plans that's i didn't hear what the explanation was about why it couldn't be a town-friendly 40b to have the 25 percent affordable and then we would count all the units what was the reason you need a market study we have studied presented to the state showing why this is why it's it's feasible we did not submit once the state we did the original plan so we had 10 and we didn't do it because we couldn't make the limits we couldn't show that we would be able to accommodate that we didn't look at it do you have a sense whether this uh potential project would be rental or ownership okay and if 10 of the units were affordable would they would all the units count just um how how many stories can you fit in 58 feet oh this was proposing let me see before with the garage again we're not doing it necessarily for a project no i know it just but i believe it was four stories above the garage i'd love to respect if i may the background information says a property owner approached the town planner and the planning board concerning a developmental development proposal so that's a project for multi-family houses so that's a project no we don't necessarily in general we don't be selling for projects we try not to sell it for projects the town has done it we did it with the town center project which didn't come out for a lot uh to cover for other projects as well which personality is appropriate this is not being done for a project this is being done because somebody has gone to the effort of showing that one could put something in there and we think that it's a great idea to be able to put something in there you know we can lower the number we can ask it can be lowered it till we need it so we can uh whatever but it is below it is below for the most part below the uh surface of the road 58 feet how is that measured is that to the top of the last occupied floor or the top the top top of the building
it's not a peak it's the top it's the top it's the top if there were a parapet parapet well the river's edge it has parapet and so did the town center you know sound kind of centered because you know if they were due to the development there would have been higher than 35 people right right there's no asterisk asterisks though on this one so presumably 58 feet is the top of the mechanical equipment
that's how if it's a flat roof with a parapet i don't have an application in front of us in our general model and with the way we did the way we did the way we operate the general bylaw everything else separately um and i don't know what the violence one of them right now and i can't recall i almost brought it um exactly what it says but i thought that it said i don't know that we i don't know if we picked up the actual definition the original current bylaw says 45 these difficulties like it's to the booth and then um things on top that are needed for uh hdac and blah blah blah blah they're over right right um kind of know about that but i can't recall yeah okay thank you thank you um so this project is as you stated in the background information is going to be part of um i call it the mbta thing but the multi-family housing overlay district was part of that project so that would basically this is helping us to accomplish that goal of getting closer to the 750 units that we need correct and if we were to put 100 here we probably wouldn't be looking to put 100 somewhere else that was a large parcel or something like that we would say this is a good step am i close i want to say something else okay i i share tom's concern about the height i understand because of the way the elevation is but i do think we will have to check with the we will have to check with the uh the public safety to make sure that that truck did they send it i mean it's been emailed it says i know but i'm just saying we have to check that's how we are we're going to check too how's that um i mean i think it's creative i think it's right where we would like the farm i don't think i am i am going to say um you know i'm a champion for making sure that maintaining 10 plus percent on our subsidized housing index and so i would really hope that if the town went to bad and did this that the there would be consideration for a greater number than 10 percent not just the required i think we all have to roll in the same direction here so hopefully you'll have some input on that
maybe we all have to have input on that i don't know
all right and we all any other questions i see do you have any questions i need this i'm sorry i didn't even ask you all right now we're going to look at article pp which is the ground mounted solar photovoltaic installations who hasn't nice job i can say it better than i can i can try um so the reason we put this in here is in here is because we don't we don't actually have anything to guide people for this um there are a few that have been installed already in town on property but um what we did was we we wrote this in a way that allows small installations less than one acre by right on property and gives some guidelines for height setbacks lot coverage screening storm water management noise glare environmental protection all the things that you feel should be in there um also has some instructions for site restoration and decommissioning at the end of a project flight um and supports renewable energy and development while keeping our character and public safety and natural resources attack um this was borrowed maybe cobbled together from surrounding towns who have a bylaw and also we we checked it against state guidelines to make sure that they were in line with that we have heard that there are some new state guidelines potentially coming um maybe in the middle of this year which could impact uh if we want to push this forward or not um our folks at the energy commission sent some notes on it this week um we did try to include them in this um different levels of engagement there but um we figured we should try to at least draft something and even if we put it on the back burner at least it's there and we can uh we can wait for the state laws as well anybody have any questions on this go ahead let's see oh i'm i'm just reading for it really quickly so battery storage systems that i know are kind of coming in small other towns they will only be permitted as as long as they're photovoltaic things they cannot be as separate you can't just have battery storage the way we worded it was integrated battery systems and associated equipment used to store energy from these installations and discharge it but yeah it would be they're one and the same thing they can't be without the other okay okay thank you mr
i gather uh there were uh some comments uh from the energy uh climate committee and uh i heard from the chair and encourage her to get in touch with the planning board have those discussions occurred only by email okay yeah um we want to fight to a meeting on thursday yeah okay okay
the history of this is we started this three years ago right um i went to the energy committee and all for assistance um and as in particular while i was there what the right sizes were to be regulated and they said whatever you think and i said well i don't really think that i should think i think um and um i said we'll get our two comments back we didn't get anything uh we sat on it then we tried to do it down for a notebook we had um a meeting in uh august where they were invited uh with the uh mr feya um and abigail and um the new person right um and they came and we tried to talk through things uh after that jesse and robert repeatedly contacted them and we got nothing so um and we have had a public hearing on this already um and they asked we don't have time to sit down with them right now um if they want to note that we sent back to them was if they could uh tell us what the changes were that they thought we needed to make you know we would look at them and and make a decision so we weren't quite ready to pull the thing until we knew about the issues and then have you heard from them we got a note today a very long note saying that we should have included some more why didn't we include them more are there any specific language changes that they recommended no they have to me they do not said that they have to meet as a board to discuss it and then we need them on thursday and if any of us wanted to come we can remember what we did but we have um to release this we've already
i think what i might do is just ask them if they have if they can comment you know you know copy of it let me see what we can incorporate in the limited time that we have you know yeah as liaison both to the committee and the board i'd love to see you we can work something now yeah sure sure i'm i know you would
it was like you're using my gavel there thank you no worries so my only question was i said no i was going to say this but have you had any input from the ecc so i'm going to move to mr bay are you also i'm good thank you i think i'd like to say that with regard to these kinds of things we are not having an effective land use we need to have land use meetings and all these things need to be discussed as they come up because clearly people don't look at what the announcements are and they need to be spoon fed so we need to spoon feed them so that everybody's on the same page and we work together and walk forward together my two states yes i'll just have another clarifying question if i may um on the regulation so you say that you say small scale residential installations but when you talk about medium and large scales you take away the residential part and i'm sorry i don't know they're zoning very well would this potentially allow for commercial uses or only residential for both small i mean medium and large commercial too so so small scale is just considered small scale residential but medium and large is presupposed to be commercial okay i was just curious thank you i mean if you look at the sizes there right yeah very large right and we know there's you know limited lots and towns where you can even do that okay we've well read about uh cranberry bogs on the cave being converted to that's kind of why i'm talking because i know about this yeah so do you anticipate any concern expressed by either in a butter or generally people who have significant tracks that could be converted it's always a possibility i suppose we have to see the state law i think it's allowed
it makes sense to think about screening requirements or that's it um the fact of the matter is right now we have no way to regulate that right no i appreciate that yes some some guidelines no i appreciate that see yeah one of our biggest concerns has been the battery storage stuff right now we have nothing yeah we really want to have something in place so that we have some kind of control with the fire protection sure and all that um that's important and there has been there have been incidents uh i'm sure it's right around the country so thank you so much so i'm going to say this out loud i'm pretty sure i do the timeline and how this all fits the process but in case people are listening so i think we're really good on our questions and and what have you on these on these planning articles which is great um that's we're doing a lot of discoveries first couple weeks and then we're going to move forward with taking positions but i don't think we're allowed to take a position until we have a report from the planning board right i'm looking at tom i'll see somebody i believe we have he says we have to have a report from the planning board in order to take a position and then i'm going to go um look at that you don't do now i can look into that but i'm not planning board report is required by state statute and it has nothing to do with you yeah okay so but i would imagine we are pretty ready to vote um we're not ready to vote not today though i'm just saying in general we don't need any more information okay we're not voting on these today but anyway but i think find out whether we can when we can pass it so the select board by the way um the next topic will be well look Doug's looking that up we like to keep moving here so um we also have an article that we are submitting and it is in our supplemental packet um it's in there because um it wasn't quite complete and the page of mine on here somebody for those who are but Kelsey who made hard copy for you because page five and this is called article 10. do you have enough copies perfect thank you um okay so this is article ee amend talent code uh section 198 dash planning board appeals we have made a few edits additional edits to it tonight doug is the liaison excuse me all right i put it down within the supplemental packet i'm sorry right whatever um and this is different in the supplemental packet if it's what do you have in your hand whether it's one today yeah let me just finish can i i'm just going to come here to some i had it i don't know right yeah it's it's not further than friday being friday you know gotta walk out again excuse me for one second just want to finish because we have a lot of people listening so what's in the supplemental packet is some revisions that doug made and he submitted it this morning at 11 30 so it's in today's supplemental packet um and i'm going to let him walk you through not only that changes that we made from what you may have seen forever previously but also edits we made tonight and then also the logic of why we're estimating this um this particular article so if floors yours please um did you find it in it no the one you have in your hand is to be the most recent
okay so i discovered um this uh was an issue that presented itself um as we've been working our way through the three dover amendment projects and so there was a question about appeal timing on one of those dover amendment projects involving baritas and so we consulted town council and she indicated to us that as a result of the way the whale and bylaw is drafted uh a resident aggrieved by a site plan approval could not file the appeal after the site plan approval was determined but had to wait until a building permit issued so in the in the instance of this case i believe site plan approval issued sometime in spring early summer of 2025 and the building permit issued from the building department on the on october 30th once that building permit issued then the appeals clock started and the appeal was filed but before the zba could hold a hearing construction had started um and so now the zba has had a couple of hearings and they're going to deliberate um on a determination on that appeal tomorrow but all the while and construction has been happening uh since sometime late november early december so when we consulted with town council she indicated there are other municipalities where an appeal can be filed after site plan approval but prior to the building permit being issued and so we asked her to draft up some language uh which she presented we made some changes to that as reflected in the draft um before you and the the other item that we wanted to include was for purposes of foreseeability for the select board to have some visibility into some of these larger projects impacting a neighborhood or multiple neighborhoods or the town writ large uh she indicated there are other municipalities that have put in a requirement in their bylaws if a project above a certain threshold uh is going to submit their application to the planning board that they also present the concept to the select board so the select board has some visibility into the project um on the earlier side uh when everything is just getting going so um that is the language before you from town council i took a crack at on page two there of summarizing in just a couple of sentences of what it would do we've tweaked some of the arguments in favor and opposed um we're going to talk about under the arguments opposed instead of establishing another requirement for a developer to build in wayland we're going to say language to the effect of that that this may cause added cost and or delay for a developer to have that added step to come before the select board um and then just a couple of other language tweaks that we made throughout just to make it a little clearer uh the part that's unresolved is in the initial paragraph of the language it still says greater than x square feet for construction or alteration of more than x square feet of a site uh i was i'm trying to get some input from the building commissioner i'm going to also speak with town council to see what other municipalities set as a threshold and then it was suggested to me tonight that i could talk with the assessor to to get some information about some larger projects in town historically and i think we also determined tonight that it doesn't make sense to include parking as a threshold so we're going to delete that language that says or requires more than y parking spaces so that is essentially a synopsis of article ee so we talked about a couple times and then we made some edits last week and then we made some edits again tonight our goal here is first of all to have a conversation with you and get some more input and discussion about this um we know we have to vote to refer it you know to you for the process and so i'm trying to keep it forward if it's going so um i'm going to open it up now to anyone you can just have your questions back and forth yeah i have a few things um first of all i question with the first provision that you're adding uh how would that be enforced and would it even be permissible for a dover amendment applications um if they didn't come to you i don't know that dover would support us denying the application because they didn't come to you first i'm only leaning on town council for that who indicated you can't make it specifically tailored to dover amendment but it can be above a certain threshold which could include a dover amendment yeah so i don't know the answer to that specifically but i that is exactly what she was thinking in her mind when we were drafting this yeah um in the section which is amending 607.2.1 you've left a word out so the decision of the planning approving so it should be i'm pretty sure planning board approving where are you 607.2.1 about halfway down the page the planning decision of the planning um and i think to me it sounds like this is going to increase the opportunities for litigation that the town will have to defend against um because if they if somebody appeals prior to the issuance of a building permit then the applicant is going to jump in and and then fight that and the town has to then be fighting on that side and then when they go to court they have to be defending on the other side it's just it creates a bit of a an opportunity for some legal messiness so um because at one point you're in the opportunity is then for the applicant to appeal but then later on when it if it ends up in court we're switching sides basically and having to defend the applicant so so you're saying that potentially
well it's if any person agreed by the decision so anybody could appeal if a neighbor appeals before there's a building permit and the applicant will go to court saying no i want my building permit and so then the town is is the the town is not on the side of the applicant but then later on if they get their building permit or they don't they don't get the building permit or it we could be in a position where we're switching sides in the way i hear you because right now it's kind of shifted because the building permit issues construction has begun the zba can issue a stop construction order if they're following the permit to the letter yeah according to the concom order of conditions the board of health and the planning board no stop construction corner so now the abutter or the neighbor is agreed and so it's one or the other at that point so they the town could end up having a switch sides and having some weird conflict of interest with itself i don't know it sounds bizarre so i i had some questions pop up with that with the way this flows i see some issues has this ever happened before this is the first time someone got caught on the appeal between the the timing issues going up yeah exactly for some other projects and i don't think i don't know if they're a special permit or i think they were even special permits i don't know and they didn't know certain things that issues right but i just see it as a real cost and at times the same with the town instead i don't see it as a benefit site plan approval is for something that is an as a great project it's not a special permit it's not asking for anything special when you go through the hearing process as long as the planning board um is adhering to what its requirements are uh then it goes to the building commission if he thinks that the planning board does not comply it's only a site plan he does not have to uh adhere to what the planning board says it's not a great idea but he doesn't have to so in particular in dover in the phases we are so constrained with what we can look at that things that would be appealable in a regular site plan maybe would not be i don't think really repealable in dover for example um we can only apply the aquifer protection district bylaw we can deal with open space and that's how we dealt with it in veritas um the aquifer protection district has a coverage requirement we said okay then that's open space and we dealt with it and you had we asked for the applicant that we weren't going to approve it because it was two different parcels and it needed to be you know our bylaw says you have one parcel and that's how you determine the application so we worked through that um and i know that people aren't happy with it but what is the zoning board going to do if they are familiar with the dover amendment and all of the case law which is extraordinary um how how is the zoning board going to be i agree with you i don't think we're creating an avenue for appeal we're just changing the timing of the appeal if the appeal is going to be filed anyway why do we want the appeal process to be ongoing once construction has started that's the part that makes no sense to me now tensions and emotions are high construction has begun but this could have happened over the last few months between may and october and maybe there would even have been a chance then for some type of negotiated settlement before the construction begins and i think that this would permit that to happen i think okay whatever i think that there was large opportunities for negotiation and that there was negotiation and we've been pushing that in all of the government because there are things that we can't control right well i have a couple thoughts so i definitely share the thinking about this is probably going to lead to additional litigation and cost of the town for sure um and i definitely understand fixing the order of these appeals that that makes sense to me people shouldn't have had to wait for the construction permit that seems backwards um and i also get like the um desire for added visibility for large projects to the select board too but i think this kind of sort of undermines the hearing process that we have in place a little bit i think you're going to get people that just don't like a project and they're going to say i won't participate i'll just wait to appeal it once i have that window so that's that's definitely something that's going to happen i think um but you think they're less likely to do so after they're going to permit it to and they're not going to come and they're not going to argue and then we're not going to get information for what we can put in our conditions i think they'll just say i'll skip that part and they always could appeal right right i could buy more creative in the hearing process though if i know that i can just skip right to the okay but they could do that right now after and try after the building permanent issues which is just which goes back to like yeah the order should should definitely projects and you're going to see it even with the multi-family housing stuff um because we do under the mbta sector doing site plan review um you know with holding up the projects it just it just seems very costly costly for the town and also putting the select board in the middle of it to me seems inappropriate you have an elected party board required to be elected on the state law um and i think you should i i hate to say it but i think you should stay in your own lane i think that the select board should do what the select board does and the planning board should do what the planning board does conservation should do what conservation does we should all work together yeah yeah and you you are you know having a hearing because we have everything's on the website we have it on our agenda when there's something big robert tells um i mean it's not like it's brand new and nobody knows about this stuff just to carry on that table please give it two cents the first first paragraph like what what's the intention of meeting the sub board like what how can you get in the way that you now today now most people will come to the meeting and say hey i'm going to do a build a church and then we will stay to a language meeting with all the boards around so this this information is really happening we we have a time we gather the information we review the projects fire said hey these are my issues i say thank you for that conservation says you know to make sure it's on floodplain check check out the list of the afghan i have my my comments to them we we have this process it's okay but it happens today i think that's exactly the problem is that we were talking to some of the residents about this is there's so much to follow in separate boards through the conservation commission process the board of health process and the health department and then the planning board and it's so much to be aggressive if the select board has some visibility into this earlier i think one of the roles of the select board is to be communicated to the community i think one of the roles of the select board is to make sure that we have an organized land use organization i've been asking for this for years we need to have combined hearings on certain projects i've been able to do it with barry with um let's see
and with the copic church we've been able to do it with the conservation commission and we have a consultant who's working with the board of health so the three of us at least together are doing that we need a better organization in land use so that it is easier for the public to follow i mean even for us it is very difficult to render a decision for example conservation hasn't rendered theirs or we don't know what their concerns are so it's more this is like a step a stop gap that i don't think is helpful i think we need a bigger organizational change um when i was practicing um i had very very very large project it was five years in licensing um and it was for permits through the u.s for canada and for all the new england states it's a high to quebec water project thanks mission line and we did just that and it worked beautifully it was a long process but we all knew what was going on we tried to do it during the uh town center project and the applicant was just impossible they didn't want to do it and they kept fighting us i don't know that these two suggestions are are we can't do both because i agree this is this is much smaller this is a smaller step it just gives us some initial visibility but what you're saying is a more substantive solution but i don't know why they'd be mutually exclusive and you can't do both of these things because i think if you let the land use boards work and do what the land use boards do and you worry about the larger things in the operation of detail and the things that are more within your bailing with i think that for me that works better so i have a question here myself now you ready they're ready they're ready up in the top we talk about in our intent initially when it was proposed was not become an adjunct to the planning board or any other boards because you're right we have enough to do but for these large large projects which is why these parameters are in the top right square feet construction or square feet alteration of the property blah blah blah but the ramen's point in i think jesse's made it down here i owe two i got to find it now on the right line uh the appeals it says any person to grieve by a decision of the planning board it doesn't say bring down the size again so in other words we need to if if we were to propose this further i think we have to have a discussion on the board level here if we also want to bring that size down because that limits the number that are going to be able to projects that are going to be you see what i'm saying this is just an open i mean you're listening to me it's just an open blanket any project could be any project so that's but that wasn't your intent i don't think when you put it forth your intent was the larger ones so um i feel like this is being a bit of rush and helpful to get some feedback on the plan board before this is drafted because i already learned about this unless you can have i've got to find my attention once i've figured it out um so i i don't i hate to rush something and not be what we will be lost let's see so one speaker there's no reason you have to rush to have the task i mean there's no law or mandate by this by the chili milk by this thick don't see how it's like you need to pass this this year right let's take some time think about what you want and how you want to do this and then come back that's that's that's what i would do i think everybody appreciates the fact that the planning board has a terrific workload and you've you've dealt with all these fires of mbta zoning and and these requirements from the state and so forth and i think uh you know with your work on these uh dover projects uh i think people feel that you represented the towns and the residents interests well but the difficulty i think is uh as doug indicated that for whatever reason there isn't great visibility and people who should know should have been paying attention didn't know are waking up and finding the trees are gone where their kids have been playing for 10 years and you know it's it's a legitimate concern um i think um annette to your point i think that you know better integration the administrative uh regulatory processes makes a ton of sense i don't think it addresses the question of someone saying geez louise i can't believe this is being proposed uh what can we do to intervene and if you can't formally intervene until after your building permit issues and all those and show up it's it's a difficult situation
the butters sure but but the people across the street probably don't get that yeah right but it's when we do a butters we do do do you admit for a site plan do we do across the street or not
that will be on a lot of site plan the site plan and state statute does not say you have to notify you of the about us so it's not a way that i chose to go to to match the current criteria information you know usually for all that so it's it's yeah we we do a bad job to notify people um i like like like annette said i make a good job to like how manager make sure that select one knows it isn't coming out of the pipeline so that select one of the comment and knows public church the care of school um i mean and all of these big dover projects that we've done recently there's been no shortage of neighborhood outcry and participation i mean if somebody's didn't have a paper uh that folks read during veritas but that was missing uh yeah certainly on the next uh yeah but it would have been all over it's covered it's right gated we all know so but even on veritas that whole jaeger way neighborhood and the people who are on the back side because they're worried about being a cut through they were all very very active during that and they had attorneys that they'd hired and yeah for me though it can be bigger than whatever the law requires so that you go beyond we hear from people on old connecticut path who are concerned about the traffic at the five paths intersection it's bigger than that and so i think the more visibility you have into these larger projects i think that's just a helpful thing because the more that folks end up being educated and and they learn about what the details of the project are sometimes the sky is falling attitude comes back down to reality yes but it's a lot to follow but to not to burst your bubble doug i don't think there are any more people tuning in and watching select board meetings to learn about this then there would be incumbent upon us to get right so this stuff really fixed that so to me the fix is to have the requirement actually be that they go before the land use board and that the land use board then have to report to you guys on what this project is give you a little summary of what's coming down the pike and then somehow make sure that it goes on the town's website or something that there's some sort of other way of making sure that people who aren't sitting at home watching zoom meetings all week long um hear about this and that i'm not sure what the right avenue is because i'm not sure that the bulk of people are reading the paper either um and there are certain people who do and i think there's a little bit of a cross-section there who's tuning into zoom meetings but i think the people who are being caught unawares are people who are doing neither of those things and so the question is how do you reach them what you're saying in other towns there's actually a land use board comprised of representatives from the various names in the past it was always run by the town planner when joe laden was here and after that it fell apart circus wasn't doing it and then julia um took it over and then we got an earring and then nothing happened oh you did get voted in oh i didn't hear
so maybe we can get it under control at this point um just so you know just one second i want to acknowledge that um the town manager has rejoined us at 8 32 and also to let you know that we are in the midst of discussing article ee our planning board appeal article with the planning board we've already gone through all of their articles we like them all i think we were good on that but now we're on this talk so thank you manager doug we have absolutely no control over traffic for dover amendment zero they did give us some it we have been kind enough in our dover amendment cases to give us some information about traffic because they just did they part of made it as part of their application they didn't have to give us anything i thought you guys had a peer review traffic report when i looked at the documents because they submitted one they submitted a traffic report so we had a peer review report but we can't impose any conditions on traffic no but we have very limited things that we don't work i'd like to go back a second and have the board kind of opine on the suggestion that robin made on the language that the project's large and certain size we all agree with that don't worry about the parking we've got that so have a meeting with not the select board but with the land use board and who will then report uh rise or what they used to select board of the project now that was your suggestion have i got it whatever you think i mean they could know i'm asking what you say yes so i think that is they could report to town manager i mean they could report to either of you so that there's something okay so i want to open it up to the board i'm going to start with uh tom or bill please what do you think about um suggesting this is a good compromise for us to get this vote we have to reconstitute this for it though right we don't even have this as a list on our boards and committees this school doesn't exist right yeah it's when they come together and they have to know they do that on the staff side now right on the staff side they used to give us minutes of the meetings and then it was sent out to all the boards you can all look at those units and have some idea of what each different department was thinking then it has to go to their words of course and the boards you know will go further but at least you all know what the issues are what everybody thought up front and you're marching in the same direction okay so i'd like to go back over here and find out if the board feels that language would accomplish this objective um i guess my question is whether town meeting approval is required whether the working group be convened well by codifying the suggestion the land use notice if you will land use work working group notice to the board of projects of a certain size no greater than so many days after their initial discussion gives us notice right right so that's maybe one way to go right so they would only have to excuse me if i heard you correctly they would only have to convene if a project this size became well just so i'm clear i believe mr time manager the land use group meets weekly or bi-weekly i would ask mr hummel actually attends i only uh attend from time to time if there's something that i've been asked okay so mr hummel one to two times a month every about every two weeks okay yeah so so within 30 days after a project uh what wording would you recommend mother after project uh is presented yeah sure but what's the trigger is it an informal discussion with the town planner is it uh formally filing site plan is it a problem with what would you wait for your timeline for formally filing site plan um the way our site plan regulations work and applicants if it's an application uh robert would use it to see if it's and sends it out to each of the land use boards and 10 5g police people they have 30 days to comment during that period if they have a land use meeting so that they can hear and robert can take them through what all of the details are that they should all be paying attention to in case somebody missed something they have the discussion i hope that we'll get minutes now um and i again i don't know how you can ask an applicant and require an applicant and have an applicant even realize that they have to come in before they file well we changed it to within 60 days after filing so they would be notified okay so that is we have it under our bylaw we need to be um well well in coherence because we have what is the yeah that's a decision within something like that yeah that's a decision within 60 i think it's within 60 days unless the applicant request continues to okay and we have to be able to get that sometimes because if you say no and they have to appeal i think you have to tighten it up and do like two weeks within two weeks of filing your application they've got to be with that board
well i think that um we've probably discussed this and we understand each other's positions and i'm looking over here are you i really appreciate your suggestions and um i think we used to throw the through the discussion right we're going to have to have a meeting on um first day or friday we could have discussed it but one of our members won't be there so very you want to put some edits together yeah you want to put some um okay i really appreciate you coming and talking to us and we're taking a lot of your time so i think it might move us to move to be at the next items that we had on the on the list and then um i'm going to start with um it was a route 20 task force so the select board has has one of our objectives we will share if you look on the line you'll see that number three 34 of the packet no no no this is my objectives i mean thank you i'm almost ready i'm almost with you um our third yes you're moving uh madam chair you're moving off from ee do you still need to vote to refer no we're not ready okay we're not ready right we're not ready no we're going to come back to i'm going to summarize that later though but thank you all right i just wanted to double check hey while you're alone we were in good state you're keeping me right on the top again all right number three so i quote objectives for fiscal year 26 develop and implement measurable progress on route 20 corridor that promotes economic development and employment growth including integration of review functions and participating in the joint task force that is the goal that we set up for ourselves last july for this year and i know that bill and uh as the liaison has reached out and had some conversations i think either with the board um itself or whatever about a possible a joint task force or a task force or how you envision it so my goal and our goal tonight was to really talk about you know how we each envision accomplishing getting some kind of a plan together here um for the route 20 corridor knowing that this is a very long term project um so what we had done a couple maybe about three or four meetings ago um just if they drafted a draft charge for a committee we gave him some edits and it's still draft and it is also in our supplemental packet if you saw it it's um very i think page what 45 is it way down there it's i think it's in the uh what's in the main packet supplemental page 34 34 it's like the very last so i'd like to kind of move us over to that and open up the conversation um so you're you're aware of how we feel we would like we would like to accomplish this goal and certainly we would like to work together and certainly we are open to suggestions but we also um i have several board members who feel that we need to get um moving forward on this fall before the fiscal year ends and i haven't done anything on it so i'm looking forward they're going to give me a bad word um so anyway we could just sort of um talk about this you know how you envision us to achieve this goal and you know do we want to work together or not or what what are you thinking so who would like to start on your side of the table me again okay um so when i looked at this quickly i thought this is really treading over ground that's already well trodden you know we had the beta study we understand what the goal is we've had public hearings we understand what the what the community wants we understand what you guys want the problem for us we had several meetings this fall when we started this process of trying to figure out what we need to change in our zoning in order to just implement what we've already done and then we got with two dover amendment applications and all of that stopped and had to be put aside what we really need help with is help with the legislative drafting we need people who have experienced drafting regulations and legislation who can take a stab at getting this started because what this what the whole plan needs none of it means anything until they're actually zoning amendments to our current route 20 corridor and you know some of the stuff in there is crazy like you can have a store there to sell and rent canoes you can have a stable uh you know some obviously that just has to be updated some of that is just ridiculous but i have heard rumors that some of the properties that are in that section of town are maybe going to be looking to make some changes soon and if that's the case we want to do this as quickly as possible because we don't want somebody who has something that doesn't fit with our plan to just kind of i don't want to say sneak in but come in and make changes to their property that aren't consistent with what the plan is which is you know i guess i would best express it what we what it came out of the study is buildings along the section of route 20 on the north side particularly that are more focused on the new town center more focused on the rail trail and businesses that have we would like to see shared parking around the backside so because you can't park on route 20 so if you drive through the buildings almost a very small version of linden square and wellesley where the parking is sort of in the middle and it can be shared parking so that no one builds for us to have a ton of spots and all of this we know what we need to do but we don't have time to draft those zoning bylaws we don't have the time and it is clear to us what needs to happen you need to mandate the sidewalks we have quite a few buildings that already comply with this plan we have a lot of buildings that are set back from the road that have a nice green space between the building and the road and it's just a matter of implementing that so having another task force to tell us exactly what beta already told us and all of the public hearings we had before isn't getting us closer to that goal it's the drafting that is what we are not having time to do if only people would stop filing doper amendment you know and if they stop passing laws that require us to make zoning changes it would be nice to be able to make the zoning changes in town that we actually want to make that the town wants right now we're just chasing after the governor's mandates and it would be nice to be able to have time to do this so those are my thoughts would you propose me i mean certainly you don't want me writing them so how would you propose that i don't know how we would find people you know there are people in town mr levine has a lot of experience doing legislative and regulatory regularly
you know there are other people in town who do have that experience um and looking to find people and you might want to have some of the other folks that you've got mentioned on here on there so that they're helping to guide the process but it's the drafting that's the problem it really is i mean when we sat and started to go through the existing zoning bylaws it's you know untangling vines that have been there for a long time and trying to really figure out what the history of is it why is that there do we need that no we don't need that so i think we had like two full meetings where we pulled it up and we were all looking at it together so yeah i think we had two full meetings where we pulled it up and we were all looking at it together to try to figure out what we could change and what we could adjust in order to encourage some development to happen there um have you reviewed the recommendations that are in the the current master plan wrap i mean the town center i'll start in route one do you think it needs work i was going to talk a little bit about that so i mean there are some nuggets of really good things in that master plan it's just figuring out which things we actually want to move forward with and chunk out into small projects that are going to help for development in that area there are things in there like the path from the supermarket down to the rail trail um you know a nice curling one that comes down for accessibility too and then you know if you go over there now it's just like some dirt trail that kind of goes up to this the sharp shopping area that's not great i think we also have this project coming in 2028 where they're going to finally finish the bridge and connect that over to town center area we don't want people to just go through there and go on to west and we want people to have a reason to stop and if we don't do those small projects to connect the rail trail to all those businesses there then no one's going to stop so i think i think we all need to sit down and just figure out like where where can we put some funding where can we apply for some grants what can we do with our state um funding programs to be able to do those smaller projects if we do a bunch of those it's going to lead to a really nice looking area that really connects everybody into that rail trail um and gets people excited about doing development projects in that area another thing if this is a multi-disciplinary group among different boards i in order to move projects like that forward it has to be right it's not just us um it's great that we have this plan that's in place but we really need to look at what's in there and choose and decide which things we actually want to prioritize and move forward with that's tap well when we met for example we called in the wastewater people to come and talk to us about could you put housing in there could there be more restaurants in there and those are all big questions and the assessors he called the assessor came and talked to us about um housing versus commercial buildings and uh the difference in tax revenue from them and we had the wastewater people come in and talk to us about what we have available for wastewater um we have spent quite a bit of time i mean the beta study was not commissioned by us it was commissioned by you uh and as we started working working with beta um members of the board had real difficulty with the uh scope of work they thought that it was just not deep enough but what we have is what we have and we spent a lot of money getting that and there's enough there to work with because we can't make people develop we can't make people put into little buildings we can set it up so that they might want to but i think we also have to see what uh once the uh terrain project was done what it looks like because part of the data plan have things on that side of the street which is part of the question now right because joanne is back it's not on the street we're aiming for things on the street so you know i i we've spent i mean i've got pages of uh things that we talked about discussed went over the entire bylaw uh looked at what kinds of uses we thought should be in this district what shouldn't be in this district um but we do have some commercial uses that if they weren't here who knows where else they could go in town and people rely on them people rely on the power of the place they rely on the other body place some people don't think it's a wonderful idea but it's there and others in town use it and rely on it and we don't want to force them out the studies from 2022 so that probably means that a lot of material that went into it was probably 2021 and maybe before that but you know the the one thing that we i think we talked about this a little bit is like maybe somebody comes in and does a market right study to see how viable some of those recommendations are five years six years later just to freshen it up a little bit um and then another thing that we talked about too and when we looked at the zoning and and i thought back to conversations that i've had with people in the town about mixed-use commercial residential we don't actually have that in the zoning for this area right now um so that's right away something that we should fix and we just talked about building height requirements and the feasibility of something being profitable or not i think we need to look at that too because i think in this area it's 35 feet and we might want to think about raising that to make you know maybe commercial to levels of residential above those projects are really attractive and those things that we're seeing going in a lot of other towns and it helps with our housing burden as well so just just see if that we can talk about it as a board the economics analysis thing is something that we've been talking about it really is that there needs to be market study not just somebody saying oh gee this will be great for us but you really need to know what the markets are are now i mean if you ride up route 20 starting from uh west and go and sunburn there are empty storefronts everywhere i mean retail is not here anymore and it's not likely to come back real soon so we wouldn't want to preclude it but we can't rely on that for development purposes but at the same time if a market study said there is a real interest and a real viability for a particular type of business then we would want to make sure we're actually encouraging it for whatever they need if they need you know extra wide driveways or more parking or you know if it's dental offices or whatever it is that we're doing things that encourage things that are actually viable for this neighborhood and not encouraging things that are just on somebody's wish list but are never going to happen comments from the board first of all i i just have to thank this board for all the time you put in thus far on mr 20 corridor we've had many meetings and reports but as i listen to the conversations it's a good conversation i'm hearing reasons why a task force is needed and your comments i think would help us revise this proposed charge to meet some of the goals that you've mentioned one of the arguments i've made more than once passed is that um task forces needed because you guys are so darn busy i mean if it's not dover it's something else it's just the nature of the beast planning board is a especially in in the times we live in i mean you know greater boston continues to grow in numbers and people are finding all sorts of properties to do all sorts of different things and planning board is a critical reward to
be the sheriff if you will and educate people on what they can and cannot do so you never you never have a vacation but and i think therefore a task force would kind of spread some of the workload it would improve um brainstorming and new ideas and develop some of the ideas you've mentioned and it would just move the train ahead it's not something to take it's not an effort to take responsibility from the planning board rather you would be part of it to a representative and we can um make you know creative good decisions collectively that uh would really improve that quarterback i'm sorry i'm just state law uh master plans and the supplemental ministry plans are exclusively under the jurisdiction of the planning all right so i was when it was my turn i was going to suggest if we did something maybe we did it together it's like when the planning or we put this on the planning the planning board um but i would like the board to go fine and then i'm gonna give my two cents be ready i might i don't see the word master plan in this proposed chart this is a an effort to uh well there is it says through 20 master planning that's that i mean we have in our annual report we list all of our responsibilities and you should look at that um and um i suggest you look at uh massachusetts general 41 sections 81 c 81 d 81 e and 81 f uh just so that you understand what our responsibilities are i don't think anybody on this board um wants to exclude public input i think that we seek it regularly um but we found over the last few years that um
certain interest groups uh take it upon themselves to uh propound things that we wouldn't necessarily relive as a board or run ahead of us so that we can't help fix the problems that they're creating um and again to me i don't think it makes sense to have additional uh these pushing things that we are required to be responsible for we have public hearings or um we have done over the years the things that we have done we've done uh the um master plans have been done in 62 2002 for a limited area 2010 there was a review of the master plan then in 05 and 06 we had planning forums for the town center project and before that we had planning people we had a town center project we had forums for uh for the planning board i wasn't on the board had forums for um what they wanted to see in a town center even before there was a project uh then we had the wayland real asset planning committee and that that report sits on the shelf and nobody looks at it that report has really
it's open on my laptop right now i've read it multiple times
that was looking at our own and what we could do with that oh that's always open on my look at that all right all right so no this i wanted to have committees we have had public input some people don't like the public input that we're getting and that we can't help that i mean this is not a pet project kind of thing and i feel like that's what it is and i'm sorry if it's too blunt if you look at if you look at other communities that have focused on their downtown we've all put together task forces from various you know elements of the town such as successful with here i understand your point about the master plan and that's why this should be revised but um to work with you uh to come up with uh a consensus and to help with what robin said find someone if we have the money or we need a warrant article get a warrant with some money to hire someone to put together a proposal warrant article that the planning board will cast those degrees to again it's to help this move on so i'm going to move on to bill and find you thank you one clarification your suggestion is town of residence as opposed to another beta coming in that has their own opinion another professional just a group of people that are interested i would say that would be up in the task force in other words the task force would decide what what's been done what needs to be done and quite frankly uh because of the work you've done it may not be a very long task may not be a long-lived task so we just help help move him we had to talk about it okay all right bill well i think jesse made an excellent suggestion which is let's take a look at what's there and uh there are i'm sure people in town can tell us what it is uh viable economically rather than hire a consulting firm to come in and give us a fact report um i i think the notion of having a whether it's the land use group or the land use group is supplemented by people sounds people just coming to a couple of charrettes uh to advise the planning board is is a good idea um i take your point annette you you've done a lot of process you you uh had a lot of public input but i think if it were a more focused effort uh that would be advisory to the planning board i think it's well to talk about what's the lot and see if there's a consensus about that before we then address robin's point which is okay but somebody's got to really draft this and how's that going to get done amid all the other demands on your time it's uh obviously a very fair question but i think a more kind of focused effort to see if there is some kind of an emerge uh helps with buy-in helps with both being tight with money and the capital and uh saying hey can we get some money to uh build a walkway uh find something no it's that kind of so uh i think it's uh it's worth the conversation i'm encouraged by the fact that we're all sitting on the table together i think there's a lot of agreement here and maybe this maybe this conversation's overdue but i think i'd like us to just sort of get started which is always the hard part so i'm going to all right thank you pop in um i agree with what bill was saying i'm really excited this is really a positive exchange of ideas i'm hearing a lot of things that answer some of the questions that i think we have had um and um i i think we all really want to work together on this so i'm i'm i'm encouraged i think you need some resources is what you need so i think we need to somehow have some discussion here of what those resources would be maybe isn't this what we put forth so that we get there because in the end it doesn't really matter how what path we take as long as we accomplish our goal which is to participate and have some progress progress and um and i'm willing to volunteer bill
and that and and maybe myself i don't know um see just in administratively what needs to be done see if i can listen to this a little better offline and hear maybe some pathway bill knows the air bills bill knows the planning world so he would understand things so maybe i think that's what we should should really do that i think that's good yeah so everybody's good with that so we'll reach out to you and maybe have some offline conversation here that's great so for now the idea of having an IRP and having a committee in mind something about it okay so let's not listen after nine i get grumpy so i think about wrapping up so if you believe me um the other item that we have on so we're all good with that topic right yeah thank you everyone appreciate it um the other topic that i had on this list was the fact of this master plan a select board being the select board um i do feel we have really really really hard this year to stay in our lane but when people have questions or ideas they often decide we are the number one stop and so we did receive i think a couple months ago and they came in to tom was a resident gave it to tom uh proposal to establish a whalen master town committee plan committee uh again that they wanted to have the the master plan updated um we said we'll wait until we meet with the planning board and have this conversation see what they have for thoughts um i know you've done some work i know you probably think there's some edits that could i just want to pass as long as our due diligence so that folks feel that we are responsive and listening but um again i don't think we felt this was our lane and we wanted to let you know we had and i'm happy to forward this document along to you but i didn't want to just send it without talking to you about it for a couple minutes so and sometimes now i'm going to give you i never do this i want to give you the last word that's how much we appreciate this dialogue
we look at the master plan regularly we looked at it when we did the mbta communities we looked at it when the self-storage proposal was in front of us um we looked at it a lot and um it is structured around residential users and small areas of community and this is a residential community and doing something that well that will cause great health people in a residential area is something we really tried to avoid we did that with the mbta thing we could have put multi-family housing in the middle of the neighborhood which we thought was really not a good idea um people who buy their houses here expect to live in a residential community they don't want a high-rise right next to them they don't want a business right next to them so the zoning that we have in place personally i think does its job for residential and the areas that we have scoped out is residential we can certainly do things with some of our commercial areas i don't think people are dying to have larger commercial areas and you're not required to have a master plan every year every five years they suggest every ten but we have looked at these zones and districts before so it would seem to me that we don't need a full master plan um but there are individual areas that we can look at and have i know that the people in constituent last year asked if uh the town could do one uh for the constituent area and that's certainly possible but we don't have money in our budget and every time he asks for money we're told we can't have it so we haven't proposed that uh we can try and put some money into it along with the grant budget so we know that we have money that's available to us we can scope out we need to adjourn
thank you so much everybody thank you thank you tremendously we're discussing go back thank you thank you thank you and we're staying the next item on our agenda will be
do we want to take a five minute recess or so you're welcome let's keep going i knew you were going to stay that i didn't notice how i didn't look at you when i'm okay we should do a seventh inning so you might have to leave but you're going to have to stop sneezing to keep it okay so the next item we have on our uh agenda number five is a discussion and review of the proposed uh community fuel pool mural project so this this request which came into michael and then um was sent to me and then was sent to the board for correspondence is actually the first item in our correspondence package and basically there's a several groups that have been working for about a year or so um on developing a mural for the community pool and um they've done some things okay you want to talk you're gonna say that excuse me so what they have done is they've they've actually done a lot of work they have uh commissioned a local very well-renowned mural artists who said initially no no i don't work with groups but then uh said oh well my parents use the pool i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna do it so the cost for the mural itself is about 21 000 and they've already done some small fundraising and i believe they've uh at least five thousand in their uh coffers but what they'd really like to do is apply to is it called t-mobile home town grant for fifty thousand dollars and this would include some obviously the fund the rest of the funding for the mural or some the three to five year funding for maintenance and upkeep of the mural and some security and some additional lighting and even some landscaping so the question has become that they need a fiscal agent for their for their grant and um so they went to michael first and um you know that he and i talked about it and um initially he was not thinking that was something i mean obviously it takes staff time even though everyone said oh we know time um and then i had a conversation with the uh with michael he was going to reach up to town council and he's going to give us what town council has to say second um but the reason um and also that he had reached up to brookline i think and they had done it and you didn't get to do with an article like yeah that but i don't think that they did it there so they are one of the few has done this but i think we were both really concerned about the number of things including precedent um we don't have the capacity probably nor do we want to take on any potential liability to be the fiscal agent for every group that feels that they are not well equipped in this case though i wanted it to come before the board because we do own that land so there's different the uh the proponent here that who's making this case is an actual professional grant writer they have sworn to me next time i said i'll be on the stack of bibles but not yet that they would be the only one from this rather large group that would reach out to the staff and they would work with one staff person and they would write the materials and they would write the follow-up reports it's still going to be a huge amount of work with the staff but i did want to bring this forward because for me also the big part of it was if they get 50 000 grant there's funding in there for enhanced lighting and security which is something a little bit of a capital project that we wanted to accomplish so to me i felt there was something there for the top you know uh improvement of our land and also the security which we would like to have so i went back to michael and said now here's my idea and let's bring it to the board and then he's going to tell you what town council said and then we're going to have a discussion thank you thank you madam chair um i did forward the question to town council and i did wind up speaking with attorney carolyn murray late today um she said can the town access a fiscal agent said yes but they said is a general rule of thumb they do not advise it and she indicated there were a couple of reasons why they don't um one is it can depending upon the extent the involvement it can be a burden on the financial department um there could be some potential tax issues for the town one of the the things is typically the town has to accept it as a gift coming in and then there may be some conditions on how the town then hands the funding out um and depending upon how the grant is worded the town may have to follow public procurement you have to look at how the grant is written whether it says you must apply with all state and local applicable laws relative to kermit um who is responsible if there was any mishandling of the grants by the not i'm not saying we're in the pool but these are just general concerns you know if there was any financial management is to fall back on the town to be responsible if if say somebody did something a non-profit that spent the money but they shouldn't and now um in this case t-mobile comes back so we want the money back somebody it's gone with those funds since it are um in this case we're we're what we're doing is our town building what obligation does the town have relative to the future use of that building if we want to change that building um demolish it whatever 10 years down the road is there any obligation again in the grant itself saying you must ensure that whatever you're doing is around for 5 10 15 years or in perpetuity and then also with specific regard to this one it involves an artist and attorney murray said typically if there's something like that we have to get some type of release or waiver from the artist for visual under the visual artists act that in the event we wanted to modify anything we're not violating the um the artist's intentions because it's a piece of work a piece of their art so there was a couple of rounds why she thought it's not advisable but if the board is inclined to do all we can you want to add before open it to the discussion that i don't know if i mentioned this but i believe one of the groups here um um some of the school folks are are involved but they and they were asked to act as fiscal agent and they said it wasn't a school building so therefore they they respectfully declined which is how it ended up you know to us um if i didn't mention it you had mentioned already she said one of the biggest issues is precedence because in this day and age we've seen with other cases like the flag case and one of the u.s supreme court typically if you do for one you have to do for others so we could potentially open the door for other non-profits to come and ask and sometimes you don't always attract the folks that you want when you you open your doors to do so to to me if we went forward with this i think we went if we went forward we might want to have an mou um and it would say something like this is one time we're not going to do another grant for this group um at the grant has to include the the capital work that we want done otherwise you know let's say the grant comes back and it's only 35 000 you can't cut out the security and the lighting because that's that's the hook because once you set up all those requirements it makes it difficult for another group to come forward and and you mentioned it because they are returning into well they were tenant and also because this is a professional grant writer here so i'm gonna open it to the floor um did you want to start yes i know you do
um i appreciate michael listing all of those prospective concerns and the the prospective wrinkles that are involved here's why i'm a strong supporter of this idea to to help these folks who have been working on this for the better part of the year is i think this is a chance for the town to spin what was a handful of really negative stories about our community at that specific space with a giant swastika painted on there prior to school starting and previous to that um the anti-black uh language uh when dr easy was here and unfortunately that that information is out in the public domain and i think that there are a lot of folks coming together including high school students and several of these non-profits including the whalen community action network they've been working hand in glove with the community pool and i think this is an opportunity to to spin this into a story where the community came together uh behind an idea and uh there are a lot of people moving in a similar direction and right now they'll the only hold up is the who will serve as the fiscal agent um none of these groups apparently are able to serve in that capacity with the bandwidth so i i do want to support this project as i'd really like to see it go forward may i just thank you um there's no grant exists this is they want to apply and the deadline is the end of march and um so they'll but they need to have fiscal agent on the racket is that the right word to apply so anyway open it to bill and tom i agree with doug's comments i think this is a great opportunity to do a good thing my question is to you mr time managers is there an easier way to skim this gap or to put another way is if the town simply issued an rfp i'm sorry the town applied for the grant um to a staff member with the help of a volunteer maybe is what is being sought here but um there's a way to simplify this this project or not really i hadn't thought of it that way how um this is a town owned property yeah we seek in the select board seeks to um have an artist painting mural much like the schools have used artists to go in there outside of the building yeah i just throw it out there oh i i think we could apply for the grant and then excuse me now we're expending a lot of labor to apply for the grant and what if we don't get the 50 000 then do we say the security is first
just want to throw that in there so why i i struggle with why would we apply for a grant for a specific non-profit wouldn't that be unfair of the other non-profits i would argue it's not for the non-profit necessarily it's for the town this is the town buildings just saying to paint it on towns we own the town so if we won the grant then it wouldn't necessarily go on that building it would go somewhere else no the rfp would be and they're going to be for this building for this particular building no not this building we're in the pool and that's what the grant is tailored to that space right you refer to an rfp to be or a grant application but the artist would have to be chosen to an rfp i would expect if the town at the town was they've already picked one so i i'm not trying to run afoul of your suggestion i'm just brainstorming i'm just brainstorming on the phone we have an agreement where i believe currently has kind of winning pool is responsible for the the maintenance and upkeep right to all three guys over there so the land we own we do all right fair enough all right no we would have to still have some type of agreement allowing us to go back in and paint yeah or put the mural all right so i i i'll go back to my earlier comment i agree with doug's comments this is a good opportunity to do a good thing i'd like to pursue tom's further so if the town were awarded would the town be obliged to do an rfp for an artist that wish to put a mural on the town building which is leased to a non-profit so if the funds come into us we're there i think it may change it a little bit where the the funds went to a non-profit we're now a governmental agency the funds were awarded to us we may have to do public procurement where if we're administering this for a non-profit and we're not truly spending um monies that are under town control there's there's a subtle distinction in there and it may depend upon how the grant is written if the grant was specifically for if it was written to just have this particular artist so let me start over if the wayland community pool makes the request to get the grant solely for this specific artist and they get it and we hold it town council said we may may not be bound to chapter 30b but if we just say we're applying for this grant to have an artist then we might have to do public procurement so it it could be a subtle change if we do it doesn't sound like a subtle change it doesn't sound like a subtle change i think it depends upon the wording but i'm not sure how we can pick an artist ahead of time if i may um i'm in a group with other public purchasing officials in massachusetts and there's a city in there's a city in massachusetts that's trying to do a call for art similar to this and they are experiencing issues that the artists want to get paid for the submissions so you have an issue where you're issuing an rfp but you're not getting any responses because the artists want to make sure that their art is not used and they don't get any remuneration for it so that's also something to consider especially in the public space is that these that artists are demanding compensation whether or asking for rightful compensation i should phrase it like that for the work that they've put out and if we don't choose them then that becomes an issue where how are we going to compensate people have submitted an rfp that we don't ultimately win so i think that um again we need to be mindful of the precedent concept and i think that if we did anything if we voted uh uh did uh we did a vote i think we're going to say it has to be an mou i am extremely concerned and sensitive about the time of the staff and there are a dozen plus people on this committee and i do not and i'm listening i probably listen i do not and i've said this already do not want 12 people calling that staff every week about this because this is what happens because this becomes i mean this is their number one thing this is one of a thousand we're working on so i think we need to have an mou yes can i just add we don't have a dedicated grant writer like a lot of other towns do right and some of us have very limited experience with writing grants myself and do we have people who are grant administrators this woman is in the strictest strictest sense they administer grants that they like we don't have any like a centralized administration it's all up to individual department heads to manage their own grants that they would manage this if we were a fiscal agent for among the broad most likely my office of member is powers for me with the assistance of mr kevin because if you think about the opioid that's how we're handling the opioid monies it's not a grant but we we get those settlement monies i have to be the fiscal agent i have to do the reporting every year with his assistance and then we look at how we're spending them and i give presentations to the opioid advisory committee on it so it would probably be administered the same way is that a manageable house i didn't say we could manage it
understanding that it's one person from this group because i can guarantee you we will have all of them calling in i mean we can but i mean you know the cost of something else it's exactly at the cost of something else and i grant reporting is very complicated there's a lot of steps i mean i don't know how t-mobile manages their grants and what they require but i do assist brian kevney with the management of the arpa grant and it is a lot of work and especially when it's not one person following the project and you're having multiple other people input within the project it just becomes complicated because you know if i'm just the fiscally let's just give me an example i'm the fiscal agent and i'm submitting these and certifying it on my behalf but somebody else is writing it how do i how do i make sure that those two things align that i'm properly reporting what i'm supposed to be reporting and that down the line we don't have issues where they try to claw back the money and now the taxpayers are now responsible for shoring up the funds that were acquired back from us i would note uh looking at this hometown grant website that it's specifically designed for small towns with populations less than 50 000 those are the only eligible to apply and so i'm assuming different than like a federal government grant from the doj this is going to probably be a scaled down series of reporting requirements and hoops to jump to but maybe that's something we can figure out we can gather all of that important to find because we don't know right so and i think the one distinction here is the proponent that has reached out to michael and myself is a professional grant writer no i haven't tracked up on that but so i think that makes a difference however we cannot have 10 people calling in this experiment yeah well i moved on that this board uh through appointment of the town acting a specific agent for grant application related to the proposed community pool mural project and i asked the select board chair and or town manager enter into mou with this organization outlining roles responsibilities limiting town town staff involvement so in discussion anybody have anything to say i'm curious why does uh why is a fiscal agent
as opposed to the grantee yeah absolutely why does the town have to be the fiscal agent and why can't the non-profit whoever's applying for it why can't they tell you that why they couldn't be the fiscal uh i suspect specifically i suspect because the town owns the land and owns structure not withstanding the fact that at least it's a too much problem the judge because the artwork's on the on the structure but the non-profit's got a useful interest it may have them this down administers the property right and the pool i mean they do have administrative staff there so i am i could follow up on that one that question if you like even though we're looking at this um i liked i liked the motion um i guess i i think it's a great idea uh some reservations but i have some questions about the necessity of the town being the fiscal agent let me find out about that the grantee being the fiscal agent is there something is a is a is a uh a requirement of the grant or the uh if the municipality who is
you mentioned it's in cities under 50 000 does that suggest that it's limited to government as opposed to non-profit well i do know um by looking that up i do i'm gonna hop in um i do know that the community pool applied previously for this point when they were doing the big project and they were not successful but um believe that um believe maybe because that was a piece of a much larger fundraising it's non-profit organizations are included who can request a grant we're looking for elected officials town managers and employees tribal leaders or non-profit organizations to submit a proposal for their project using the hometown grant application must be located in a town with less than 50 000 people and must provide a community benefit where it might otherwise be difficult to secure funding is is what campaign yeah non-profit yeah wait yeah they are now why don't you apply let me check on this what was the second question the first one bill was why does the town have to be the fiscal agent and what was the second part of that question which okay so i will draw the motion right mommy do you want to look into this and then we'll uh and address it right okay let me do that great so the next item on our agenda is um this can be happy to happy to move to reappoint brian chase the permanent missile building committee um determine in june 30th 2020 certainly thank you uh any further discussion otherwise all those in favor say aye all right all right motion passes four zero that brings us up to the town managers report with board follow-up questions mr mccall thank you madam chair so a couple of things um if some of you may know last late last week um my office got calls and i was quickly notified by chief mcpherson who was our emergency management director that we were having some type outbreak originally thought it was norovirus it's a related virus he did let me know he didn't have the name but it was not the exact norovirus but it happened here at one of our um assisted living facilities and what had happened was we were calling for mutual aid for multiple ambulances some media outlets thought we were having a multi-casualty or or some large-scale event here so people immediately started inquiring our um public safety uh communication specialist guild foil was contacted by media outlets so we we did issue through the acting police chief and the fire chief a public statement which was posted on our website and social media um i do know that those folks did a tremendous job responding is including our board of health so that the police department fire department our board of health including our public health nurse moro carter uh did a great job uh not only handling the situation but speaking to the media and working at our office to ensure people knew what was going on and getting the latest information um and our understanding was there was only one other case after that initially they thought they had to transport um numerous patients over there but it turned out not to be as bad as we should have thought but i just wanted to commend those folks for doing that um madam chair had spoken to me there had been a couple of emails about traffic studies on sherman's bridge road um there are currently some traffic studies posted on the project page one was done by tech the engineering company kevin dandrade as you know uh last fall speaking with then chief berman we he did some what are called stealth traffic studies where they put up like a signboard that actually captures traffic data um i don't think that has been posted i will look to see if we can get that posted on our sites i know i've had a public records request for that data so i'd like to pass that along um also indicated in that uh or i should say those emails was a request for traffic enforcement i've spoken with active chief hebert he's going to have our regular patrol shifts do some um monitoring in the sherman's bridge area and we are going to look for some traffic safety grants oftentimes the national highway transportation safety authority issues traffic enforcement grants he believes there's an upcoming um traffic safety grant opportunity in april and we'll look that would get us some additional money for overtime to put some dedicated traffic enforcement out around the town um and the the other question that was in one of those emails would be directed to the board and i think the board would want to wait until we get some of this traffic data back but whether the town should consider making that area a safety zone a 20 mile an hour uh speed limit but if you look at that statute safety zones are really geared towards high pedestrian traffic areas such as playground schools hospitals nursing homes things of that nature so i would just suggest that we get some updated traffic data work on the uh traffic enforcement and have that back to the board i'll ask the chief to work on that before you consider looking at the speed limit over there um just in terms of a recap i have we we haven't had a free monday but we're going to try and squeeze in my town manager office hours next week uh to the following monday after school vacation the 23rd between 4 30 p.m and 5 30 p.m before our meeting and i've been in communication with our legislative delegation in the last couple of days uh they reached out late last week asking for potential earmarks in the fy 2027 budget they sent an email around senior staff and department heads and uh three ideas were passed back to me um one is a combination but we're looking for uh emergency generators at both the coa and the library those are our cooling shelters and we need those not only for the cooling but to back up um receptive and things and then we're looking for some money for improved hybrid and remote uh systems through our it department as well as some additional monies to improve the navigation in our upcoming website upgrade so those who would be once it came back i've already forwarded those to legislators if anybody has anything else or if the board thinks of something i'm happy to submit something and that's all i have done sir um there are no minutes as i mentioned earlier i should have the fincon meeting went well mr kevin thank you um on the correspondence does anyone have any questions i have one quick one this is we got this i don't know we're supposed to do something on 26 boundary and annexation survey we're supposed to do something about this read the town read the select board read somebody it came to us yeah we've done that in the past i thought we did this it's a name for it this is what the boundaries isn't it yeah okay relation maybe yeah yeah when i was in select board remember we used to walk even before and i volunteered to walk up with terry but then we didn't have to do it or something so i don't know i'll pull this out all right and we will move on to concerns and mr whitney one item i say one thing real quick first we're going to have to have executive session this week and if you didn't respond already i'd like could you respond now are you available there's it's actually i don't go here because i already know the means not available it was um because i want to tell abby this was 10 10 30 or 11th i have a thursday or friday morning uh what if we did it at night okay michael we got a we have a team problem
what if i can i don't know he's out of town he said friday's no good i'm not well why don't i can't i can't commit until
uh the bottom line is it would be the next week or what are we going to do well well all right okay go ahead unless it's an emergency matter and you can we can do it over it's an executive session it should be very short uh no but if it could be an emergency matter where you don't have to post in 48 hours we do have to post we do have to post which is otherwise i would have already put it in for tonight and we have um so um time sensitive is this well um it and i'm looking at you now i don't have a good answer i don't either that's why i was looking at you um i just think it was it's because sooner the better later thank you um let's talk offline okay great so the one item i have is that the uh the 212 committee had its last meeting last week and the report uh due to the select board by the 15th of this month will be sent to you by the 15th of this month okay so then um you want to tell us what meeting you'd like to present to that when we talk offline okay more talking great you want to talk to my offline too uh did you have any no okay so i told you about that um i do want to tell you um very one very important thing that tom and i want to do report on together is uh yesterday so did you no go ahead bring it show it oh so bring it in
we were thinking about it so we went to um a celebration of henry knox's uh courageous
endeavor to bring 59 cannon from fort ticonderoga in the winter of 75 76 to boston via framingham where it was left for a few days before it made its way to uh cambridge and boston and there were other legislators legislators there nice talks and there were some horses pulling cannon he's very nice so don't put on the screen but i can show my fellow no i said like i'm not going to put on the screen i'm looking here oh yeah cool what's mesmerizing it was good yeah so it's a lot of fun and and and we have we received someone tell oh we received a plaque which i left in my car and a citation which i left in my car because i was so anxious to get this meeting because i get so excited i just slack is fabulous and it's huge i will bring it to the next meeting everybody else was just whatever we did it together we were very excited about it it's huge and we'd like to have it put in a prominent place um in the town building so all right i'm happy to i'm happy to move this i do want to mention that there has been conversations and i think everyone knows it doesn't know we meet on the 23rd the deadline for those articles is going to be like the well it should be the thursday before but probably no later than eight or nine a.m on the friday before so we can get all these articles we've talked about into that packet both them make some progress i really don't want to be having a lot of extra meetings on this um the legislators are going to come i believe all three are coming before us on the 23rd to do an update they asked us if they could come in and give us an update i did send them a list of some of the home rule petitions that we're putting forth to our meeting so that we could let them know about those and say hey when they get in there make sure you push them through personally liquor licenses because we really want all these things in the green barrel and um so many might want to be thinking about what questions you might have that you want to bring you know to that item as well and i think that's about it i've been moved at this board adjourned at 9 43 pm all those in favor thank you thank you