February 23, 2026 – Select Board – Video & Transcript

February 23, 2026 - Select Board

Autoscroll:

Okay, good evening. As chair of the select board, I will call tonight's meeting of the select board to order. This is February 23rd, 2026, and we are meeting starting at 6 p.m. This is a remote access only meeting. This meeting may be recorded, and if recorded, it will be made available to the public on WACAM as soon as possible after the meeting. Pursuant to Chapter 2 of the Acts of 2025, this meeting will be conducted via remote access only in accordance with applicable law. No in-person attendance by members of the public will be permitted. However, one may watch or participate remotely with the meeting with a link that can be found on the select board's agenda or on the Wayland Town calendar on the webpage. When required by law or by allowed by the chair, persons wishing to provide public comment or otherwise participate in the meeting may do so via remote access. Public comment should be limited to two minutes per person. So, I'm going to read the agenda. Agenda item times are approximate. The items may not be discussed in order or at the times listed, and all topics will be subject to deliberation or vote. And please note on the agenda, if you're reading it, on item number three, four, says that we will enter into executive session. We are going to table rack for this evening, so there will be no executive session at this meeting. All right. So, for the agenda, we have announcements and public comment. We will have a discuss, possibly, of a select board issuing citations and proclamations. We will have an update and a discussion of the town managers' recommended FY27 capital budget, followed by a joint meeting with the finance committee to hear their recommendation and presentation on a possible debt exclusion. Approximately 730, we will meet with our legislators who have asked to come before us to talk about what's on their mind, see what questions we have. And also, we will discuss with them the homeroom article, homeroom petition, homeroom, homeroom petition articles that we are putting for us to town meeting. Okay. Then, approximately 8.15, we will spend pretty much the rest of the night speaking about the annual town meeting articles, discussing them and taking positions on these articles. That will be followed by the town manager report, consent calendar minutes, correspondence, select boards, reports, and concerns. I have no topics, not recently anticipated, 48 hours in advance, and approximately, hopefully, around 9.30, we will adjourn. So, joining me in the room this evening is Mr. Fay, Ms. Brinsley, Mr. Levine, and also, we have our town manager, Mr. McCall, our assistant town manager, Ms. Powell Spurlett, and we have, Jalen, I don't remember your new title here. I don't remember him, I'm going to find it, though, our management analyst, communications coordinator, Ms. Braddock. Okay. So, Mr. Whitney is attending another meeting on our behalf, and he will be joining us approximately 20 or 30 minutes from now. So, off we go. Because we are remote, all votes will be by roll call. So, before we go too far, do we have any announcements?
Mr. Fay? Yeah, so, Carol Martin and I attended a couple weeks ago an event in Framingham to celebrate Henry Knox's trip from Fort Ticonderoga to Dorchester Heights back in 1776. And as a result of that event, we received this wonderful plaque from the Knox Trail 250 group, which is part of the Wayland, is part of the Massachusetts 250 effort, right? And this commemorates America's semi-quincentennial, in particular, Henry Knox's train of artillery that traveled through Wayland, as many of you know. And so, I will get this to Jalen, where we can take the appropriate steps to let residents see it in the town building. And we also received a citation from the governor's office, signed by the governor, lieutenant governor, commemorating Wayland's role in the train of artillery. So, it was a very nice event, and happy to report that positive news. Thank you. There are other announcements from the board. All right. Is there any public comment? I see you, Alyssa, online. Okay. Ms. Carter, I recognize you. Hi. Thank you. Yeah. Elizabeth Carter, Sherman Bridge Road. I'm commenting again that I think that there is something going wrong with the, in the governmental process of the Sherman's Bridge renovation. And we really don't know how much is this going to cost us. I think there was, people got into it thinking, oh, we're going to get all this wonderful free stuff from MassDOT. But we don't have a guarantee on that. But our town managers here and in Sudbury sent a letter back in November acknowledging their understanding that MassDOT would fund the procurement of the glue-lamited timber materials required for these repairs, as well as the timber for the sidewalk and the bridge and approach railing. We will also provide a MassDOT contractor. Oh, no, that was from MassDOT. I'm sorry. The manager said that they understood that MassDOT would be including the financing and purchasing of all materials, as well as using its contracted service provider to carry out the work for both towns. But the reply from MassDOT was limited, which was like a couple days later. They're going to send one person. They're sending one person to help the towns. And so we don't know how much it's going to cost. We know already $50,000, more than $50,000 has been spent just on these, whatever's had to be done so far. There's been two consulting firms hired. And that's just from Wayland, not the other town. No other plan has been looked at. This plan completely changes the nature of the bridge and how it's used. And a lot of people are unhappy about it. And it should be going before town meeting. I think it is a real problem that the team doing this project, the two departments and the contractors and stuff that they've hired are trying to slip it by the voters by saying it's just a repair job. It is not a simple repair job. It's going to completely change how this bridge is used and how it looks. And I just really feel this needs to be addressed. I've tried to bring it up. I brought it up at the finance and they agreed with me, but they can't do it. And I will stop. Thank you. Excuse me. You're past the two minutes. Could you just wrap up, please? Yes, I'm done. Thank you. Oh, okay. Thank you. Appreciate that. Is there anybody else here for public comment, Robbie?
Yes. We have Michael Hill online. Okay. Thank you. Mr. Hill, I recognize you. So you have to give your address, please, sir. Mike Hill, 25 Orchard Lane. Thank you. I would like to ask this Blackboard. I would like to respectfully request that Article DD be removed from the upcoming town meeting. Agenda. There's not been sufficient community outreach or meaningful discussion with the residents, and they deserve the opportunity to be informed and provided input before the decisions of this magnitude are made. While neighborhood meetings and visioning sessions may not be legally required, they reflect respect and transparency. The values we teach our children in the Wayland schools, and both my children went to the Wayland schools. And this process of just cramming this on us without even any discussion at all is quite troubling. And so we'd like to understand how we can get involved in the process. And the neighborhood and a lot of the people in the surrounding area basically have a distrust of the different committees right now. And because someone suggested to me that maybe we should have meetings and talk about this. But the consensus for most people are, and we met on Saturday, is that, you know, unfortunately, politicians get a bad rap. And they think you just kind of tell them what they want to hear, and they go off and do what you're going to do anyway. So we would like it removed, and we would appreciate your consideration on that. And then we can have some further discussions about the property after town meeting. Thank you. All right. Is there anyone else who wants to provide a public comment? I see Richard Turner. Okay. Mr. Turner, I recognize you.
Hello. Can you hear me? Yep. You're recognized, Richard. Okay. Thank you. Two minutes, please. Well, one suggestion. We had a bad storm. We had very high winds. And yesterday, I went to Sudbury to do some errands, and I noticed that Herb Chambers had taken down all his big flags from his dealerships due to high winds. The flag of the town building, I was going to take it down for you, but I couldn't get to it. The snow was too deep. But that's something you should think about. That flag will get torn to shreds down there because the wind comes right across that field. And also, I want to thank the DPW for the awesome job that they did with this storm. This was a tough one, a lot of challenges. So that's all I have. Thank you, and have a good evening. Thank you, Mr. Turner. Robert, do I have anyone else? I see no one else online. Okay. Thank you very much. We will conclude with public comment. The next item is a fun one. I've invited Jalen to join us for this. Thank you, Ms. Bredica. A couple weeks ago, only about three or four weeks ago, we got a request for someone to attend the Girl Scouts Gold Award ceremony. And after I said I would have to come, I was then asked if we were going to be providing or awarding a citation. And I thought, we don't really do those. So I thought, oh, I don't know anything about this. But I know someone who probably does. So I called Jalen and said, do you know anything about this? And then after we discussed it, we discussed it with Kelsey as well. So, and Jalen, do you want to talk about a little bit what we were thinking? Yeah. So I will note that, like Carol said, I do have experience with this in my previous municipality. I handled all issuing citations and proclamations for the town. So after speaking with Carol and Kelsey, we thought that we could issue citations and proclamations on a case-by-case basis, having our office review those requests that come in. And then the select board could vote during a meeting to grant those citations or proclamations. So that's what's before us tonight, is I don't think that we have a formal thought to do this, but I do think it's really terrific. I think Jalen had done a little research, too. There were some that have a big, long list of when, you know, a citation or a proclamation may be issued. My thought to the board was, I don't want to create something, because Michael wasn't here, so we didn't tell him about this. I hope he knows about this now. I started just finding out, sorry. Not to create something that's labor-intensive or what have you, but for those wonderful things, like the Eagle Scouts, like the Gold Award from the Girl Scouts. Like last Wednesday, when I went to the 77th National Curling Bunsfield, Women's at the Broomstones, that would have been nice to, you know, have been able to do a proclamation. So this was our thinking, right? This was our thinking. And then I wanted to see what the board was in agreement with it. And if you are, we're going to be having one to sign next week. No pressure, though.
Does anybody have any thoughts? Go ahead, Darren. So I remember in past years, the board has given proclamations to Boy Scouts who achieved the Eagle Scout badge. And so there is some precedent, at least with our board, relative to proclamations or recognition. My question to Jalen is, are there guidelines that you've seen that would be, you'd recommend that our board should consider in this process if we went down this road? Yes, so for the guidelines in my previous municipality, we had it based on like if you were getting an Eagle Award, a Gold Award, a Girl Scout. So if you were a volunteer in the community and you were retiring or you served for many of years, we would really limit it down to that sort of stuff. And then same for proclamations. It was more for like an educational and awareness purpose. Like for an example, if it was National Recovery Month, it would be strict to like awareness and educational items for proclamations. So I think that our goal here was not to create something that's labor intensive. So there were, in Jalen's previous experience, there was a number of opportunities for us to issue those. And I just thought it would be really nice to have just a couple, maybe start with a couple ideas. So anybody else have any thoughts on this? I'm supportive of the general concept. Instead of us having kind of an ad hoc policy, I think it'll be good to have something uniform. And I'm sure, as Jalen know, that there are a number of other select boards in other towns that have such. And also, as Tom mentioned, we have precedent having issued some of these before. So, yeah, definitely, let's do this. Yeah. So I think if I could just hop in, I think our thought was just get a general sense of the board and also explain to you, probably issuing one next week, because I think I'm going on March 5th to the gold awards. So, and, but we'll come back next week with some broad guidelines for the board. Won't be a big policy, just a little one. Does that sound okay? Great. Great. Thanks a lot, Jalen, for that. Thank you. Guess what? You're free to roam around the country. All right. So I think, I think I mentioned earlier that Mr. Whitney is doing some, attending another, he's attending the consultant's report, I think, you know, from the school with the possible locations and configurations of the schools. So that's on our behalf as well. So I thought what we would do rather than go into a number six or seven, we might do some things like maybe we could do the town manager report, consent, those kinds of things, with the hope the bill comes in about 10 minutes. So, is that okay with you, Mr. McCall, if we move to you for the town manager report? So, you're on mute, sir. Yeah, on mute.
And that concludes my report. Thank you. And it was an excellent one. Yes. So, just a couple of quick items. As many of you know, I was out last week. That doesn't mean there wasn't a lot of business going on for the town of Wayland. And right before I left, you may have seen some emails. The building commissioner came in and informed me, based upon the construction that was going to be happening at Terrain, that there would be a construction fence required. So, we thought it would be prudent to put a message up on the website. And we did get some emails from some folks, specifically on Pelham Island Road, that were not happy with the fact that the fence was going up. You know, we gave some notice. We will reach out. Obviously, I wasn't in today when I got back to speak with the building commissioner. But we will reach out to the contractor to see, you know, whatever they can do to bring that down. It is being placed for public safety. There's going to be machinery moving about, you know, the containers in general construction going on at that time. So, there won't be any public access. This is temporary. They're hoping to get it done no later than August. I know I was at the ZBA. I attended remotely. But Terrain did promise that that would be left open for residents so that they could access Route 20 from Pelham Island Road. And I believe, and I'm confident, that is still their intent. But this is just a temporary measure. They've paid a significant amount to the town already in building fees for their permits. And, you know, there is a necessary cooperation with the town in ensuring that they can get the project done and making sure the public can be safe. So, we will work with the contractor to try and get this accommodation restored as soon as possible. But I just wanted to acknowledge that we received some comments about it, and we'll do the best we can. Second item on my announcements is we have a professional, our first professional development day. It's going to come this Thursday. We're going to close the town hall in the afternoon. Other towns do this. We thought this would be a good way to get a lot of our employees together and also accomplish a labor-intensive task of getting a lot of our employees trained and signed up for certain requirements. So, there's ethics training and other professional development that we need to maintain certifications and comply with state law. So, we thought this would be a great way to get everybody to show up at the COA. This first one is going to be to support employee growth and create a cohesive workplace. We're relying on some of our providers, in this case, Maya, our insurance, to come in and help with these. This also dovetails with our goals when we did the equity assessment of helping to train our employees. So, this first date and first session will align with a lot of the things that the town, the board, and my office is trying to do. Just a couple of quick items of recap. As Mr. Turner did say, I want to thank not only our DPW, but our public safety, our facilities, and my staff, a lot of whom participated in calls over the weekend, preparing for the storm, updating our website, and those that are still out on the road that are plowing the snow and ensuring that those who are without power can get to a warming station. We also did receive, and I will talk at a later date with the board about this, we received the arbitration award last week. I did share with you the email where it is posted, excuse me, the link where it's posted publicly, and we can talk about that. I did follow up before I left with our legislators again on our legislative earmarks for generators for the COA and the library, as well as some additional monies for our cybersecurity. And we will have an update later on about some of the issues with the budget. Because of the storm, as you know, we've had an extraordinary winter this year, and that is eating up our snow and ice budget. So Mr. Kevin A and I will be coming back. The FinCom has asked for an update on budgets, not only for FY26, but FY27. And there will be more to come on the following, but Mr. Holder did inform me today that they had heard back with regard to the State Revolving Fund for the financing of the MWRA, and our initial application did not get accepted. So we're going to have to regroup on that one. I'll get some more information and update the board at the next meeting. And that is what I have, Madam Chair. Thank you very much. All right. I believe we have one item in the consent calendar. Happy to move the consent calendar for tonight, February 23, 2026. Second. Thank you. If there's no further discussion, we'll have roll call vote. Anne? Yes. Doug? Yes. Tom? Yes. Carol? Yes. Consent calendar passes 4-0. We have two sets of minutes. We have February 9 and February 13. Take a motion, please. Happy to move the minutes to February 9, 2026. That's amended. Second. Thank you. Any comments on those minutes?
On paragraph, under Section 3, first paragraph, we could change the word, has, change the word, had, H-A-D to H-A-S. So it should be had as many demands, not had. I think I'm in the wrong one. 2-9-26. Yeah. Under A-3? Yes.
Okay. Does anybody else have anything?
All right. That sounds pretty good. So roll call vote. Tom? Yes. Doug? Yes. Anne? Yes. And Carol, yes. That's 4-0. Happy to move the minutes to February 13, 2026 as amended. Second. Thank you. Is there any comments on this one?
Anybody? You will hear. I have one, actually. On the A-5, the follow-up of the updated proposed Community Pool Mural Project, it says there was no discussion. I actually believe that I reported the request for the town to act a fiscal agent was withdrawn. So I think probably we should have that edit. Everyone's good with that? All right. Then roll call vote. Anne? Yes. Doug? Yes. Tom? Yes. Carol, yes. Most minutes passed for zero. Okay. Let's review correspondence.
Okay.
Almost set. Okay. That brings us back to the beginning. I think number six. Michael, this comes back to you. I don't know if Brian is available. If he is here. I don't see him online here, but he might be. As we know, the Finance Committee is coming in at seven o'clock to present a debt exclusion. This debt exclusion request was made to us, I think, the Friday, we could go Friday, like on the 13th. And then Michael and Brian had gone to the Finance Committee a few days before and had presented a revised or their recommended capital budget. And it were two debt exclusion questions. And I thought it would be good for us to kind of catch up and find out what is the difference between what was recommended by the Capital Improvement Planning Committee, which was a capital budget of about $8.2 million with no debt exclusions, and what is being recommended by the town managers. So I thought we could do that first, so we kind of understand what the FinCom is talking about when they come in. So anyway. And can somebody, I'm sure someone is, but Keith, I hope to see if Bill has, when Bill joins us, bring him over. Thanks. Okay. Michael, the floor is yours. Thank you. Well, it would be beneficial at some point if I get Mr. Keveney in here. Okay. Oh, is he out there? I didn't see him. No, because he probably doesn't think he's on yet. Well, it's 6.40. We're only about 10 minutes.
Do you want to do a couple more articles, Madam Chair? I do.
I'm going to put you on hold. How's that sound? Then I'm going to come back. What I am going to mention is that in the correspondence packet, this is part of my discussion for the annual town meeting, we received a notification from the town clerk that she is withdrawing. She has two of the articles, which are QQ and RR, Chapter 91, Dogs, and RR, which is Penalty Regulations of Dogs. She felt that she needed to have a little more input. But I think there's been some changes at the state level. So we have not voted to insert those. We will not do write-ups. They are Tom's articles, so there's no need to do a write-up, and they will not go before the warrant. There was also a discussion about some other articles that may or may not appear. Madam Chair, my answer. Yes? According to the article list for the 2026 annual town meeting, it indicates that QQ and RR were inserted on 1-20-26. Oh, they were. You're right. So we have to vote to not insert them, to pull them. Is that a vote to take them out? Yeah, pull them. All right, so I moved in at this board to pull. Bill Whitney just joined, if you want to make that note. I did. I said hi, Bill. At 629, thank you, I, Bill. All right. So I moved at this board to pull articles, QQ and RR, from insertion out of the 2026 annual town meeting. Entitled Chapter 91, Dogs, and Penalties, Regulation of Dogs. That is correct. That is correct. Okay. So do I have a second, please? Thank you. Thank you. Any further discussion on those? Just for your edification bill, we received in the correspondence packet an email from the town clerk, withdrawing QQ and RR, which are the two dog-related articles for code. We have a motion on the table now, and we're just going to vote, because we did insert them. We have to pull them back out. Mr. Fay. So, as far as discussion is concerned, it's the intent to bring these articles back next year, and the suggestion also is maybe a working group to review these topics between now and then would be beneficial.
Okay. We can deal with that in the future. No other questions, then I'm going to take a vote. Bill. Yes. Doug. Yes. Ann. Yes. Tom. Yes. And Carol. Yes. So that passes 5-0. Article W, while we're on this withdrawal topic, we did. This is the pension obligation bonds that we had. We devoted a gender item time to two or three meetings, and then at the last meeting, Mr. Kevin, he said he did not really recommend this process. We said we would wait a week or so before we made a formal decision to not insert. We have not taken a vote to insert, so I just want to make sure it's the consensus of the board, and if you want to vote to not insert, that's fine as well. But we're getting down to the wire, and this is a meaty one, and it would require some back and forth to write up a write-up. So I think we just should make the decision we're going forward with this or we're not. So I'm opening that to discussion.
I'm happy to move the vote to insert with the expectation that the vote would likely be 0-5, if that's a clean process. All right, we could do that. Right. We could vote to insert. Oh, I like that. Thank you. So I need a motion now to insert. I move this board vote to insert Article W entitled Issuance of Pension, Fund, Bonds, or Notes concerning the 2026th Annual of Town Week. Thank you. Thank you. Is there any further discussion? All right, so before we vote, if you're – this is one of these backwards ones for us because we praise all of our votes in the affirmative. So if you would like to insert this, you will vote yes. If you would like not to insert this, you will vote no. So then, as I take your vote. So I'll start with Mr. Fay. No. Mr. Levine. No. Mr. Whitney. No. Ms. Brensley. No. And Ms. Martin, whose article is definitely no. That's a long one to write. Okay. All right. So then we took care of that. We also sent – just while we're looking at articles, there are four other articles I think we need to find out whether they're going to be going forward. And Mr. Keveny, you've joined us just at a perfect time. Thank you. We're interested to know – I'm not looking at my list here. Kelsey, you probably have it. JJ, accept gifts of land, right? Is that going to be going forward in the warrant? I don't see us doing that, Madam Chair. There's simply no – there's been no communication with anyone who wants to gift land. So I'm happy to make a motion to insert with expectation that the vote would likely be 0-5. Second. Second. Thank you. Do we have any further discussion? Before we take a vote, I want to just make sure that the town manager and the assistant town manager and the finance director do not have any objections to that before I proceed. I don't. Speak up now and forever hold your peace until next year. I'm not aware of any gifts of the land, Madam Chair. Thank you. All right. So we're going to take a vote. Anne? No. Bill? No. Doug? No.
Tom? No. And Carol, no. The vote is 0-5 not to support. Brian, are we going to have any current year transfers? I mean, it's possible for this reason. We do have an article that transfers $537,000 from the salary reserve account to the police – I'm sorry, the fire personal services account. The current year transfer article can do the same thing. It's highly likely that the amount of money we're going to have to transfer to satisfy the COLA may be greater than the 537, which means we're going to have to find an additional funding source. So it is possible that we could simply lose the current year transfer article in place of the other one. But the current year transfer article, I believe, in the past has been abbreviated, and I don't know if you want to do an abbreviated on something like this, if we did have the current – No, we don't want to do that on abbreviated, I don't think. We will discuss that next week. But there are two then that are going to – two or three that are accomplishing that same thing. One is AA, transfer funds to the FY26 payroll budget. Does that have to happen after current year?
Which article is that again? It says AA, transfer funds to fund the FY26 fire payroll budget. Is that the transfer to the general stabilization? Then the stabilization one is another one. So that one's going to get pulled. Which one? The article to transfer $537,000, buy free cash to the general stabilization. Okay. Can somebody tell me the letter of that? I'm not finding it right off the bat. Letter X. How about letter X? So perhaps we don't need to insert that one either, correct?
Yeah, you do not need that one. Okay. How about if we have a motion on that one, please? I move the Slack board votes to insert article X, transfer to general stabilization fund the prior contract. Do I have a second? Second. Okay. And now we'll have the vote. No further discussion. Mr. Levine? No. Ms. Brinsley? No. Mr. Whitney? No. Mr. Faith? No. And Ms. Martin? No. So the vote is 0-5-0. Okay. Now, so current year transfers was one. Do we going to have any L, sell or trade vehicles and equipment? This is all good. We can get these all cleaned up. I would say I would leave that for now, Madam Chair. Okay. There may be one vehicle that we were looking at disposing the police department. Madam Chair? Yeah. We have multiple vehicles. Yeah. I haven't finalized the list yet, but there are multiple vehicles and equipment that is being traded in or sold. And also, I'm going to ask you, are you looking at the list that we had today? Did I miss one? It was C. It was JJ. It was L. And there was... I think we're in pretty good shape. Okay. Mm-hmm. All right. So having done all that, thank you. It's terrific. We will update our chart. Mr. Levine has run away, but when he comes back, we'll tell him, please update the chart. So now we're going to move our attention to... Madam Chair? Yes. You want a motion to insert L based on the fact that it sounds like we have vehicles or equipment that we want to... Well, I suppose we could insert it, but we also could insert it and vote it at the same time when we see it. No problem. Okay. Is that okay? I'll take a look at the chart and get a better, you know, another goof for next time. So at 740, we are scheduled to have... And I started to talk about it, Brian. I don't know if you heard, but we thought we should have kind of an update. The differences between what was recommended by the SIPC for capital and then your recommended budget that you and the town manager put together. And in particular, we really want to just hear the additions, deletions, and the changes in the funding source. Just to remind everyone or refresh our minds, the SIPC group, Capital Improvement Planning Committee, put forth about an $8.2 million budget. And I think the one with no debt exclusion, and I think the one that was being recommended was 12-4, am I right? I saw this in the paper, with two debt exclusions. Now, I know we've been to the finance committee and they've done something else, but just sort of bring us up to date so that we're a little on track here before the finance committee comes in. It would be great. Thank you. I can start, Madam Chair. Thank you. Let Mr. Kevney talk the numbers at the end. As you know, each year, it's my responsibility to present the omnibus budget and the capital to the finance committee. Generally speaking, the way we've been working this in most communities, as you do the current year capital budget, the next year in your five-year plan slides over, everybody shifts over. And that was essentially how our budget was shaping up until we had this newly formed capital and planning improvement committee. In a perfect world, they would have started over the summer working on this, but because it took a while to get all the members, they really didn't get working on this until the fall. And we attended, Mr. Kevney and I attended several of their meetings, as well as my department heads. They ultimately did not have their report until January 20th, and they had made some significant changes relative to what we had initially presented. Their charge was to take a look at the plan and make recommendations to us. As we've discussed at our meetings, there is a real question in their minds about what needs to be done with the town office building. And so that influenced a lot of what they did relative to the plan that Mr. Kevney and I had originally had been working on. They wanted to take out some of these items. They really wanted to get a better perspective from not only DPW, but facilities about some of their long-term projects. They went through a process where they rated and prioritized in their minds what they thought were projects that should be tackled first. And they came back with us initially with an FY27 recommendation that looked quite different from what we had. And then keeping in the spirit of the newly formed commission, the committee, Mr. Kevney and I went back and met with our DPW facilities and some of our public safety departments. And we worked to incorporate a lot of the recommendations from the CIPC. I would say we adopted about 90% of their changes. And Mr. Kevney did the yeoman's work of then going back and reseeding some of the projects that we had into later years and readdressing the funding sources. And I'll let him speak to that in a moment. We then worked. We met a couple of times with the finance committee. We presented an updated financial plan to them with the capital budget. The Wednesday, we could go Wednesday. And then we had some follow-up meetings with the chair to discuss what we were going to do with some of our financing, which included excluded debt. One of the big differences between the CIPC proposal and what we were proposing was how we were going to deal with the high school wastewater. We had factored that in as excluded debt and the CIPC recommended that be levy debt. We had also recommended working on the high school baseball fields at the same time because, as we were led to understand, they would be disrupted when the high school wastewater solution was implemented on those fields. It would tear up at least the varsity field. So we had asked our engineers to see if they could find some efficiencies by doing those at the same time. And the recently adopted policies that we had in late fall said we really shouldn't be doing a debt exclusion for anything less than $5 million. Although this was not $5 million, the $2 million for the wastewater solution and the $2.5 million for the fields, which would also reduce some of the rectangular fields, was an aggregate of $4.5 million, which we felt would be close to what the new policy was. But we also looked at, we just cleaned up some of the levy debt. Was this a good time to go right back there? We also looked at the potential votes that we may be incurring in future years. Next year, we'll likely be looking at an override, potentially for three years. And then we will have to make a decision. We've talked about having a visioning committee for the town offices. There's a likelihood that there will be a debt exclusion for that. And we also know that we have a moratorium on turf fields. And we are going to see the end of life for the high school field in a few years. And we had to make a determination how we're going to accommodate if we go back to a natural turf or a different infill, all these playing fields. So we felt that slotting these two projects in for a debt exclusion at this time would be probably a good idea, given what's going to happen in future years with the other votes, as well as the timing of the high school field. I know that's getting a little towards the other agenda item when the finance committee comes in. But at a high level, those are the major differences. As I said, we tried to embrace what they had recommended because we want this to work, having this capital improvement planning committee making the recommendations to us. We had, as I just outlined, a couple of minor differences. And we did send the board per policy the request to have you entertain the debt exclusion questions. And the finance committee will be here later to talk about it. But we have shared this with the finance committee, our FY27 capital budget. And we just received last week an updated report from the CIPC about the five-year plan. Mr. Kevin and I haven't had time to work on that, but we're going to try and integrate some of that and get it to the finance committee. And we can get it back to this board as well. And I can turn it over to Mr. Keveney for any detailed questions or any further information that you may desire, Madam Chair. Why don't I, should I open it? What do we want to do? Do I, do you want to ask questions now or do you want to wait until Mr. Keveney speaks as well?
You're muted, Tom.
I'd like to hear from Mr. Keveney if he has anything to add. Okay. Thank you, Brian. The floor is yours. Okay. So good evening. So last year, we left off with a five-year plan that really was for the first four years of the 27th through 31. So we did have a capital plan for 27, 28, 29, and 30. And as Michael said, we did receive the reports. So on January 20th, we did receive a report from the group, the CIPC capital group. And it really only had fiscal 27 capital items in there with funding sources. So what we did with that is we met with the department heads and we went over with them what the CICP was recommending. And I also noticed that there were 15 brand new items in the fiscal 27 capital budget. So really for the capital budget to be working well, you don't want to have that many new, brand new projects coming into the first year of the capital plan. They should be working their way through the plan starting at the fifth year, the fourth year and working their way down. So you had 15 new items in their plan. And then, so I pretty much was following the work papers that Brian O'Herlihy was sending. They were an Excel file. So I was monitoring what they were putting in the different areas and comparing that against our existing five-year plan. So even though we did receive the capital plan, as Michael said, this past Tuesday, I was simply monitoring what Brian O'Herlihy was doing with his work papers. So at the end of the day, what we ended up doing was meeting with the department heads and bringing in some of the projects that were not recommended by the capital group and then moving things around. And I've said it previously, we really need to come to the point where we have a capital plan that's consistent because it maps in to our debt service into our long-term operating budget. You can't have this magnitude of changes every single year. But, you know, for example, we had three new IT initiatives. There were initiatives related to the school. They wanted a literacy curriculum that was not in the program. So they were things that were brand new being asked. So, like I said, so we ended up bringing in about 15 of those projects as well and pushing some of the stuff that was in our existing 27 plan back. So the whole thing shuffled around. At the end of the day, I think our plan pretty much sizes up to what they were doing. They were monitoring things based upon, they were rating projects based on high priority, medium priority, and low priority. We sort of did the same thing, but not identifying that way. You know, for example, the CICP did not recommend moving $250,000 of the public safety HVAC system forward. We had $750,000 in fiscal 29. Michael Fay has said that only one of the four compressors of the public safety building is even working. So we had to bring in $250,000 forward into 27 to at least stabilize the HVAC system over at the public safety. So that's an example of something that we did that they didn't do. Another one, for example, is they cut the roads to Tom Holder's road repair in half. I believe the original ask was $831,000. They funded about 50% of that. We do agree that there's a lot of open capital projects. There's no question about that. And I think they took a look at the open capital projects and said that some of the projects need to be pulled back and some of these other ones completed. But in talking to Tom Holder and looking at what he had open, you know, road construction projects take about two years to be done. They're not simply done on the first shift. So that's an example of what we put back in the $831,000, where they had, you know, that and a half. They also had $2 million related to the wastewater plant that, again, moved from fiscal 29 to fiscal 27. They had it in his levy debt. We had it in excluded debt. So that's an example of something that they did differently than we did. But overall, what I try to do when I map this out is I try to make sure that we have the revenue to support the expenses. Free cash is used relatively at the same amount. The levy debt is relatively the same amount. I try to avoid spikes in any one year to level off the impact on the taxpayers. When the fiscal 27 budget came in from the CIP group on January 20th, they did not have any surplus capital in the plant. And that's not their fault. So what I did was when I got the plant, in order to fund some of these projects that were brand new, I pulled in many of the department heads and we ended up coming up with almost $700,000 in closeouts to fund these projects that were not planned. So what I tried to stress from the group is that although you may need the project and it's important, we still need the revenue to pay for it. So I was able to bring in $700,000 and all of the department heads were accommodating. They moved some stuff back a year. They moved things around. The school was accommodating. So at the end of the day, we made it work. So you have a plan that for the most part is pretty much what we had last year, except for the injection of 15 unanticipated projects. So overall, the revenue is going to be attainable. Free cash is consistent over five years. Like I said, the use of the ambulance fund, the use of levy debt. We gave the finance committee all of the files on this. I do believe they have the capital group's report as well.
You know, another example of something that was not in the plan is that last year we had in fiscal 27 to do excluded debt on the town building. So now this is last year's plan. So we were going to have about $6 million for town building improvements. The CICP group did not do that. What they did was they put, I believe, about $5 million in the 28 budget and brought some of the other ones forward. One of the things that was brand new to the town building was the elevator. There's an elevator repair for $471,000. That was not in the plan anywhere last year. But it came to be that the elevators in the town building needed to be fixed. So we had to now fund $471,000. So that's an example where we both agreed that that needed to be in there. So that came up as unexpected. They had it in their plan. And we also had it in our plan. And I think, I mean, I can go on and on. But I'll stop there, Carol, if you want. But yeah, the finance committee is coming in at 7. And I do want the board to have a chance to ask some questions. And then you can hop back in, I'm sure, Brian and Michael. So questions from the board.
Carol? Yep. I'm thoroughly confused. I thought that when I was on the board years and years ago, it was a practice of having a five-year capital plan. And I understood that we were creating the CICP to do long-term planning. When would you do a school? What would you do about the town building and so forth? And it sounds as if this has morphed into an FY27 capital planning group. Is that right? Well, the answer is yes and no. Because they only were established in, I think, first meeting was in September or October. And they had to put together the first. Part of their plan is to tell what's going to happen in year one. But they are planning to meet year round. That's the goal, what they're doing. And they will be doing all of that. Who's doing the five-year capital plan?
Does one exist? I think they've just submitted something. So under the Town Manager Act, Madam Chair, through you to Mr. Whitney, I'm responsible for making the recommendation to the Finance Committee, which I share with this board for the annual budget and the annual capital budget, as well as a recommendation for a five-year plan. The new Capital Improvement Planning Committee, their charge really is to look at all of that and make recommendations to me. Because they got such a late start, the first task that they tackled was looking at the FY27 budget and making some recommendations to me. They have continued to work on the five-year plan, and they just submitted the five-year plan to Mr. Keveney and me last week. I wasn't here. Mr. Keveney and I started today talking about how we will integrate that. The Finance Committee wants to see how that will come into play as well. So they are continuing to work, even though the budget process is ongoing, and ultimately they will be looking at things beyond five years from that five- to 20-year range to help make recommendations to me and Mr. Keveney for the long-range planning and for this board. So what did we do about a five-year plan previous to the establishment of the CIPC? That was developed by the, well, under the Town Manager Act, by the Town Manager with the assistance of the Finance Director. So the last two years I was here, Mr. Keveney and I put it together, and in large part it was based on shifting over the five-year plan in the previous years with some minor changes, and that's how a lot of communities do it. But a lot of communities also have a capital improvement planning committee that helps develop the recommendations to the administrator or manager to help build that and make changes along the way. Does anyone else have this confusion that I thought the CIPC was long-term? Technically it is, because the Code says that they will develop a capital plan for a term of not less than five years, but as established by the Town Manager. Right, but we initially, when it was discussed, I thought we talked about it long-term, and then the draft came back and it had, it didn't even have five years on it. It was silent on that point, and somebody kind of grabbed five years out of the air, I suspect. But I guess I'm concerned that these recommendations vary so widely from what was initially proposed.
I'm troubled by, you know, 15 new projects and so forth. Yeah, I mean, looking at the charge of the CIPC, it is fairly broad. It is specific on the five-year plan. It says specifically the committee is also charged with developing a long-range capital plan of at least five years. Right, so that is part of their charge. But, you know, the charge also talks about being charged with the responsibility of planning and subsequently recommending to the Town Manager a capital improvement program, identifying the town's future capital projects, programs, improvements, and acquisitions, having a useful life of greater than five years, and a cost of at least $25,000. That's pretty broad, and I think that might be one of your points, Bill, is we've created a committee that has more scope than anticipated. Is that one of your concerns? Yes.
It's also kind of hard because, you know, we had to wait from town meeting. It's through 90 days or something, and then you have to post, you know, after you hear from the AG's office, and then you have to post that in the paper, publish it for a couple of weeks, that that language has been accepted before we could move forward. So we voted it in April, and we weren't able to establish the committee until September. So I'm going to ask those who are coming in now. Thank you.
So can you make your videos go blank for a bit? We're coming in a few minutes. How's that sound? Thank you. So that's where we are. You know, I mean, they obviously, I can tell you, share our frustration with it because, you know, they had a lot to do in like three months.
But I would assume that next year we'll see it, you know, more. Also, the idea of the debt exclusion, is that to be on the April ballot?
Is that what's proposed? Yes. So we're talking about, and I don't think the board has discussed a debt exclusion here to four for these items, right? No. So it's practically March, and we're talking about a debt exclusion item on the April ballot? That strikes me as difficult. There were two debt exclusion, even though it's one debt exclusion, there were two projects on that. And the Finance Committee did discuss them last week, and they did take a vote. So maybe we should hear from them first, and then we can do some questions. How's that sound? Well, I'm curious why the Finance Committee heard about it before the Select Board did, since the Select Board has to approve this on a four-fifth vote, as I recall. And gosh, it's just a surprise, a little disappointing. So the way this happened, if I may, Madam Chair, is we were working on the integration of the CIPC's recommendations, because under the code now, they prepare the next year's fiscal plan recommendation, as well as the remainder of the five years. So wanting to work with them, we wanted to make some of the changes that they had suggested. The FinCom had asked us to come in and present our budget to them, and the difference between, the chief difference was they wanted the levy debt, and we disagreed and wanted the excluded debt. We waited to see what the Finance Committee's feedback was before I wrote and asked the chair, I think on Friday, maybe on the 13th, to have this placed on an agenda. So we went to the initial Finance Committee meeting, presented the plan as amended after we got the information from the Capital Improvement Plan, integrated that after we met with all our department heads. The department heads wanted to go forward with the wastewater treatment plan, but we felt that it should be excluded rather than in the levy for the reasons why we got the DPW building out. It happened somewhat last minute because the changes that were coming in from CIP came in later. Under the code, they should have been in in October. They came in in January and working in good faith to try and accept their recommendations or work to accept some of their recommendations this year. It came together rather quickly, you know, in the last several weeks. Wouldn't we need a warrant article for authorization to borrow at the town meeting? I believe there's already a request in there. Mr. Keveney, can you? Yeah, the $2 million is already in the omnibus capital budget. So the article to raise the capital and raise the debt would be in the omnibus budget. So, excuse me. Which, but is that a majority vote or a two-thirds vote? Two-thirds vote because it's borrowing. So, you know, I went to a lot of the SIPSI meetings, and I have to tell you, a lot of times it's just a liaison. I was the only one there. None of the ex-officios were there. I do know they came when they would present their products, but the rest of the time, I do know they never spoke about funding anything with debt exclusion. So I'm not so sure that this should have been a surprise when the report came out on January 20th. Clearly, they only had three months. They did a year's worth of work, about three or four months. I think they need to be commended for that. And I do think we have to have adjust our expectations of what you can accomplish in three or four months. But I do think that one thing that I'm concerned that I heard was, well, the only major difference they made between the two budgets is the funding source. No, you also added in the two and a half million dollar field project as well. So that's it. So anyway, I think unless the board's okay with it, could we possibly just sort of let the finance committee come in and present? And then maybe we could have some questions after that as would we like to do it that way? Okay, thank you. So, okay, so we are on 7 p.m. Hey, right on time. Yay. Joint meeting with the finance committee. We would like to make a debt exclusion recommendation or presentation. Mr. Judici, do you need to call to order? Yes, I do. You want to actually do that? Yeah. So it is February 23rd, 2026. And I'd like to call the finance committee to order. I see Carl Barnes, Pam Roman, April Methot, and I thought, yeah, Rob Quimby. Are we, is anybody else also on the, Mr. Bill, is he, no, I don't see him. Okay. Are you, and Iris and Bill are not in attendance? Iris is not able to join us tonight. Bill, I think, is on the wrong Zoom link. So if Carl or someone could text him that he needs to be on the select board Zoom link, he should have gotten that. Putting me on the lookout for him to pop in. Okay. So your call to order, the floor is yours. You heard there was some requests before the select board to consider, well, in our opinion, we're considering two debt exclusions. So you might want to bring us up to date of whether we're considering one or two. And then you have some slides. Did you want to do share screen? I don't, I'm looking, I'm trying to figure out how to share screen on my side, but I did send the slides out. So everybody should have them.
Can you send them, Kelsey, can you send them to you and you can get them up or? Kelsey, they should be in your inbox from last Friday, 10 a.m. Oh, that's right.
Okay. So could you just sort of clarify for us what, when you say a debt exclusion right here and off the bat? Oh, you're looking for $2 million for the high school wastewater capital project. Yeah. So the select board or the finance committee met last, it's Monday, so last Wednesday. And it was their second meeting to consider various capital projects. And the two projects that were proposed by the town to fund with excluded debt, we decided to recommend the high school wastewater capital project be excluded with, be funded with excluded debt. It is a $2 million project. Kelsey, feel free to open the slides anytime you get them. But we're. Phil, sorry, I didn't want to interrupt you while you're talking. I never received those slides. So if you could re-forward them to me, I'll be happy to put them up on the screen. Carl, could you do that while I'm continuing to talk to you? Yes, I'll do it. Great. I'm glad you didn't ask me. I would have knocked the whole thing out. Thank you. So the proposed capital project is the high school wastewater solution. And as folks know, or we can recap, the original system failed more than a decade ago. It was a very high level treatment system with a limited septic field, and it may not have had enough flow to be able to run appropriately. Replacing that system with similar equipment was estimated cost about five and a half million dollars. Thank you. We're on page two. And since it has failed for the last decade or thereabouts, we have been hiring a licensed hauler to haul the wastewater to a suitable treatment facility at a cost of about $120,000 a year. And there's some risk of spillage there. So it's a solution that is not acceptable to the mass DEP, and they require the town to create a long-term solution. Enter Abby Charest, our new town, relatively new town engineer. She looked at the challenges and came up with a solution that instead of $5.5 million of capital investment, found a solution that could be a $2 million investment solution. And that is to replace the equipment with different types of equipment and then use an expanded septic field as a Title V septic field. She has worked this through with our Department of Health, our Board of Health, and Mass DEP, and all have signed on that this is a good idea as they have reviewed and approved it. It will cost approximately $2 million, $1.4 million is direct construction cost, 35% contingency has been put in place, and about $110,000 for construction administration. DPW will manage the project, and the project has been in the capital improvement plan for some time. Page three, yes. So debt exclusion versus override, they are both proposition two and a half questions in municipal finance language. The specific issue is debt issued as a debt exclusion is temporary. When the project has been paid off, that goes out of the levy, that goes out of the debt burden of the town. That's not the same for any two and a half overrides. They continue to be the base for the next year, and then it goes forward from there. The cost of financing debt under either exclusion or override is the same. So the principal and interest that we would pay isn't changed. It just enables us to have more flexibility regarding our project funding. And next page, Kelsey. Moody's investment encourages communities to utilize excluded debt so as to not be, to have flexibility. Whelan has issued excluded debt, and the appendix to the charts here show the history of excluded debt, as small as $1.3 million and as large as $11 million. And recently, residents did vote narrowly, and only a few members of the town showed up and voted, but moved DPW debt from levy debt to excluded debt. The Whelan's new financial policies and procedures manuals, which was reviewed and approved September 25, calls for large projects exceeding $5 million to be funded by excluded debt, but does not address projects costing less than that. So that serves some context. Excluded debt is only a funding source. As I said before, it doesn't change the debt service cost. As I understand, a ballot question must go forward and must be passed by the residents. Ballot approvals do not create the authorization for the project. It then needs to be authorized in a town meeting as an article. And as I said before, it provides a temporary increase in taxation related to a specific project. So the temporary versus permanent is the big factor there. Next slide. Our Whelan's financial position is strong, and we aim to keep it that way. We have a reasonable cash balance, free cash balance. We are AAA rated, one of 14 communities in Massachusetts that are. And continuing prudent financial management will be a good thing that we aim to continue. And the process, next page, for excluded debt is really the select board has the authority to place excluded debt on a ballot question. It will then require two-thirds vote of the select board to make that happen, or four of the five members. And then place it, and the residents then vote on the ballot, and then we proceed to town meeting to authorize the project should we be supportive of it. And then you can just flip through the last few pages that show the history of debt exclusions, the history of overrides, current Whelan tax limits and projected, and the Whelan Debt Service as the last slide just to have for your context. And with that, let me turn to the floor and ask any other FinCom members of any other points to make.
I'm hearing none.
Did you want to keep the slides up, or do you want to just- We can take the slides down, thank you. Okay, thank you. And then turn to the select board for any questions. And I appreciate, I think it was Bill who was asking, this seems like it's all happening at a very speedy pace right now. And we appreciate that, and we're living that too from a budgeting standpoint. And nonetheless, it seems like good practice, I think, is where we came out of it from the FinCom standpoint. And as indicated on the slides, FinCom voted 7-0-0 in support of this proposal. So, just, which we'll also notice, also in the packet right after the slides, is a copy of the select board's debt exclusion policy. I will tell you, I think it's from early 2000s here, early like 2, 3, 4, 5, somewhere on there. We do need to probably look at that and update it this summer. But that is the policy currently in place. So, just to recap, I'm looking for you, there you are. The Finance Committee did not recommend debt exclusion for the field project. But what is the status of the field project? Is that still in the capital plan? So, we had a number of questions for the high school field project. And we've asked the team to come back to the FinCom with answers to the questions. We, with more details about what exactly is involved in this project, we're hopeful that they can come back to us soon, maybe this week on Wednesday or maybe next week. And it may go into the capital plan, but we're not expecting to put that in as excluded debt. It was too unclear at the time for us to get comfortable with it and to put it together with this. So, town management did ask to put both projects in. We decided that this project, the high school wastewater, was ready to go. The high school athletic fields, we had more questions about. So, we weren't prepared to take a stand on that at that time. Okay. Thank you. So, now I'm going to go back to the... But there is one thing to note. There could be a good advantage to do both projects at the same time. It would mean one integrated project management, one integrated engineering team, one integrated use of this similar kinds of equipment for, you know, mobilizing and demobilizing earth moving equipment. They estimated that there may be $250,000 or $300,000 of savings by doing both projects at the same time. But we just weren't comfortable with the details on the athletic fields project to push it forward. And I do, just to be clear, we weren't comfortable to push it forward right now as excluded debt. However, there's a world where we would consider recommending it as levy debt if we get more information soon. Right? So, excuse me. I just want to recognize that Ms. Bill Hustis has joined us. And he probably wants to maybe change his name. But other than that, thank you. He has joined us. All right. So, I do also want to add, before I open it up to questions to the select board, that SIPSE had the same comment that if they had seen a site plan and it looked like the project dovetailed well, they would have also recommended that go forth. So, I think they had the same thought that you had. Recommend the athletic fields go forward. Right. Yeah, it has been a project that's been in consideration for a decade. And there are real problems with the athletic fields that we've been kind of enduring at the high school. So, work needs to be done. It's just a question of exactly what we're talking about on it. So, opening up to the select board, questions. Mr. Levine. Phil, Brian, or others, thank you for all of this detailed information. I think it's always good for us to be thinking proactively. And I'm grateful for Abby for doing the deep dive. My question is centered around the $120,000 a year that we're spending to transport, pumping and hauling the wastewater. Has that been a consistent number over the years? Is that what we've been paying for a decade? Is that what we are forecast to continue to pay? Or is that a changing target, that number? It is in the DPW budget. Brian, do you have the details on that? Or Michael? Yeah, I do. So, back, I want to say, five, six years ago, this is actually a school budget. It was in the school budget, not the town budget. And at the time when Louise was here, we agreed to take the cost of hauling out from the high school, from school facilities to town facilities. And at the time, it was $140,000. It's now $120,000. And we pretty much expend 95% of that every year. And is that anticipated to rise in the coming years? Or is that what we're forecasting is pretty consistent in the future, about $120,000 a year? Yeah, we didn't bring that number up in 27 because we've never had the need to, you know, get additional funding for that. It comes in a little less than that. So, to answer your question, no, I don't believe we need additional funding for that. To be clear, Doug, the constraint now is DEP has said you must create a long-term solution. We don't want you to be hauling wastewater. So, even if it was a better economic choice, it's not a viable choice. Got it. Thank you. If I could also, Madam Chair. So, you know, if you go back to early fall, we had been working on, you know, our regular annual budget and we had a capital budget. And SIPC came along. We also adopted new policies, which now impacted our budgets, you know, as we were well into the process. We're accommodating and we're not complaining about it. One of the issues as SIPC started meeting with some of our department heads, it was apparent through their conversations with facilities in DPW that they were not in favor of some of the things that were currently in the plan, and specifically some of the excluded debt that we were proposing for the town offices. So, when that was apparent that that was going to be coming out of their recommendations, the same time DEP was talking about us no longer being able to pump this as a solution. Now, the repair to the high school wastewater had been in the plan in the past, but for a different solution, a more costly solution. Similarly, the high school fields, it's my understanding, had been in back as far as 2007, 2017. But I believe the then superintendent took it out of the plan. Wreck wanted to bring it back in. So, when we took out the debt exclusion for the town and DEP informed DPW that we couldn't do this solution and Ms. Charest came up with this alternative proposal, this is how this came together in a rather quick fashion. It is then when it was brought up, if we're going to be tearing up those fields, should we resurrect the old plan to relocate and rehab the JV and varsity fields, which we currently cannot use because they've been in disrepair for quite some time. So, that's, you know, how this all came together as we were incorporating the new policies, the new committee, and the changes by taking out what was in the plan for excluded debt and now being faced with, we need to hurry up and come up with a solution for DEP because they no longer wanted us pumping. So, I'm going to go back to questions to the board, from the board, please.
Tom. So, I have two or three questions. Either you, Michael, or you, Phil. Can you explain to me where the lease field is going to be located for this revision of the wastewater? I'll let Michael take that. It has been described to me, but I don't know the high school geography well enough to be able to describe it, but it is separate from the athletic fields. I do not have the ability to tell you exactly where it will lay. I believe it's not towards the high school field, is my understanding, is it would be closer to the hill at the back of the parking lot, but it will come close enough when they're renovating that it may have a significant impact on the varsity field. That is all I know from speaking with DPW and Mr. Holder. Mr. Fay? And there's no concern. Let me say this. Based on our exploration of a middle school site, there seems to be a connection with the leach field of the middle school groups and the PFAS levels at the old DPW site. And it's possible that that water has made its way to the deadly pond and made its way, therefore, down to the Happy Hollow wells. My question is this. Has there been exploration that the leach field will not be a problem for the Happy Hollow wells and that the products being used at the high school for cleaning will not be a contributing factor to PFAS levels in that area? I can't answer that specifically. I do know that when I got here and we started to have problems with PFAS, I did send to department heads and talk with incoming Mr. Fayah that we had to eliminate the use of PFAS-based products and cleaners in the town and clear out any inventory. So I can't say for certain whether, but it would be my understanding that we should not be using them. A lot of those types of products are no longer available. It's just whether they come in from outside of the country and they're not labeled appropriately. We have, to the best of my knowledge, I don't know that we've done any exploration for what's in the soil there. I do know, Tom and Michael, the question of the soils came up in the conversation at FinCom, and there was comfort, at least to me, that they have done test diggings and PERC tests to make sure that it's suitable for a septic field. So it's not just arm-waving, but the specific question about is there a PFAS and is there a potential PFAS to the wells problem as there is regarding the middle school? I don't know about that part, but it did give me some comfort that there has been a fair amount of sort of preliminary work that has been done so that we have a solution here that makes sense, that will work. My final question, Phil, is just so we're clear, the Finance Committee is recommending that our board proceed with this proposal. That is correct. We're recommending that Select Board proceeds with funding this project as excluded debt. Thank you. Yeah. Bill or Ann, questions? I think I just needed, because I was intrigued by Tom's question, a little bit more clarity on what Tom was thinking. Were you thinking that there might be contamination on the site that would impact the leach field or the opposite? No, my concern is the leach field might impact the happy hollow wells. Basically, what I'd like to see is some confirmation from Mike Fea's office that all the products being used at all the schools are not contributing to our PFAS problem. That's it, basically. I do think, Tom, from my recollection, and I worked on the middle school project last year and the possible refurbishment there, a lot of that seemed to have been tied, one, potentially to the use of the garage facility there that might have had stuff. And then the question was septic systems, unrelated to the town, just neighborhood septic systems as another possible source. But it wasn't clear that there was a clear point source of any specific clear determination. Thank you. I'll say it again. Yeah, that's a really important point. I agree. Mr. Whitney, you're on mute, sir.
You're still muted.
Sorry, I don't have a 14-year-old here giving me technical assistance. What is the extent and duration of disruption to the playing fields if the $2 million septic system construction was to go forward? It's my understanding right now. They are not using those fields. There was going to be an approximately $90,000 temporary fix to them to allow them to play, make them at least playable this year. To date, they have been playing all their games at away locations. So, it's my understanding, speaking to the school, they were going to make some minor repairs for this season. But shortly after the season's over, if the wastewater goes through, it will disrupt them again for next year.
Will the disruption be for the entirety of the subsequent year's season? It may. I don't have an exact answer. I think it depends upon how much of the field is impacted. And as I said, it was very close. I haven't seen a final drawing of where it will go. I guess, Michael, I'm trying to figure out whether this is a... Well, someone once told me the most expensive words in construction are while we're at it. And so, I'm trying to figure out if this is a project that we would otherwise do as a high priority, or is this something that we're doing while we're at it?
Having the teams play away seems like a bad idea, but there are lots of demands on the town's capital budget. And so, I'm just trying to understand the relative priority of the fields project to other competing uses. So, I had an answer to that, Bill, and I lost it. Well, one comment I'd make, Bill, is that the fields are not up for decision-making tonight. Right. The other thing about the fields, I will say this, is that when Mr. Holder presented before the SIPSE committee, he indicated that they, the funding gets approved until meeting, they intend to start this project, you know, as soon as possible, July 1 and sooner. In other words, in day construction. So, they might be done by November 1st, you know, for delays, or November 15th, so that they would be out of the way. So, I ask these... Yeah, go ahead. Phil, I ask these questions because perhaps before you joined us, Michael described the project as let's do the wastewater and then maybe there's an advantage to doing the fields as well and that's a total of 4.6 and 4.6 is almost 5 and close enough for government work and we can, you know, substantially comply with the policy of 5 million or over for excluded debt. But what we're talking about now is really 2 million. Understood. And our 5 million dollar policy, so... To be clear, our policy doesn't address less than 5 million dollar projects. It only addresses over 5 million dollar projects. So, it's completely up to select board discretion as to the ability to fund a 2 million dollar project. And as the backup pages showed, you know, the town has done that in the past as low as a million dollar project. But it's a, it's a judgment call. Yeah. I think those million dollar projects were in the early 2000s. So, you'd have to adjust for... Some. Some inflation. I also think there might have been operating overrides and this is a capital. If everyone has asked their questions, I'm going to hop in with a few points if I may and then we'll move on. In the presentation, I have seen this. It's not your fault, Phil, but I have seen this chart about six times. I believe it was created in November. It has not been updated. So, for next meeting, I would like to see this chart updated. It is carrying new growth at 400,000. We know the new growth is at nine. It's carrying all the money from the reclassification of the debt, the 703 in the operating budget. And yet, when we say, why can't we use some of these funds to fund the capital project here, that we're looking at the debt service for the capital project, we're told we can't. So, I would like to have this chart updated so we really understand what we're doing with that 700,000 that we asked the residents to give us. So, I really would like to hear that for next meeting if that's possible, Michael and Brian, just so we get a clear understanding as we go forward with this question. I don't know if I heard the answer incorrectly or not, but I thought I heard and I need someone to clarify that if we approve a debt exclusion for this and then the information comes forward for the budget, you have a way to fund the fields. So, my question is, how? How would you fund that $2.5 million outside of the debt exclusion? Or did I hear it incorrectly? Brian, why don't you, or Michael? I don't know that we made that suggestion. I think one of your members said that they would be okay with that, but not levy debt. I don't think we've discussed that yet. Okay. I haven't with Mr. Kemeny since I returned. Yeah, so I'm glad I asked because I did hear that earlier and I wouldn't want someone in the public to think that as well. Just to be clear though, the operating budget, the omnibus budget is still in flux with the healthcare costs just coming in last, whatever it was, Friday or thereabouts, you know, questions about what's going to be the remainder of expenditures needed for special ed, vocational, technical. And so, over these hopefully very few days, we may find that we have more levy capacity than we thought we did three weeks ago. And that's my thought at least, is if we do have more levy capacity and if it is an appropriate priority project for doing the ball fields at this time in conjunction with the high school wastewater, it might be worth considering doing that as operating levy debt. So you've made my argument, this chart here is from November. It has none of the adjustments that we do. I understand. I'd like to have it updated so we know exactly what we're talking about. And next week, I'm going to also ask if we don't, I really find that fascinating that we could fund two and a half million for a project for some other means, but we can't fund two million. But lastly, I would like to- It's not a question of- Excuse me, Phil. I just want to finish my questions. Okay, sure. Thank you. Lastly, I would like to understand why we need $490,000 of contingency on this project. Is it possible for us to take a good look at this two million and maybe in the next week and see if there is, it's maybe not a $2 million project. Also, what the 110 administrative fees, is that in-house engineering or is that our own service? I just think we need a little shoring up of some of the numbers here. I really do. So, all right. Mr. McCall, would you like to have the last word or Mr. Keveney?
I'm all set. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Brian, for coming and hang on. We can work with Mr. Holder and Ms. Charest to get some additional clarification on those numbers. Okay. And also, I'd like to see that chart, please. Thank you. And then I'll talk with Mr. Fay about Mr. Fay's questions as well. Thank you. Appreciate that. And Mr. Jitsi? We will recess as Finance Committee and then rejoin the Finance Committee on a separate call. Or do I need to get a motion to recess? In a journey to... No. I think we're just going back to the meeting. Yes. You're in your meeting now. You're just going to... Yes, you're going to leave us. Why don't you take a motion to leave?
Finance Committee, someone want to make a motion to recess this meeting? I move that we recess. Thank you, Pam. Second it? Second it. All in favor? Carl's up, Bill's up, Rob's up, April's up, Pam's up, and Phil's up. See you all later, Select Board. Thanks for having us. Thank you very much for coming in. We appreciate it. And we'll be in touch, I guess, right? Sounds good. Take care. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you. All right. So thank you, everyone. I know you probably had more questions, but I also am trying to stay on time because we have some distinguishing guests with us this evening. So this is now going to be a legislative update and discussion from the Waylands Legislative Delegation. So please let me allow to welcome Mr. Gentile, Mr. Eldridge, and Mr. Linsky. Thank you very much for joining us tonight. I will say this, that we had hoped to meet, you know, in person because it would certainly have been more exciting and fun and probably a little more interactive. This meeting, I did kind of squish you in here and meet on all these other exciting topics that we're dealing with because Mr. Eldridge had asked if you could come in and maybe in January or February and then sort of make the deadline, it was tonight. So here we are. And we didn't really have any questions because we thought you each would like to have, you know, a minute to say something. And then we have a list of home rule petitions that we are putting forth at the 2026 TEL meeting that we'd like to just, you know, mention to you because we will, once they pass TEL meeting, we're going to need some help, maybe getting those through so that we can, you know, make Wayland a more efficient place to run. So since Mr. Eldridge asked for this meeting, I'm going to let him start. Great.
Well, thank you, Madam Chairwoman. And thanks to the Wayland Select Board and Time Manager Michael McCall for having us tonight. And to what Carol just said, you know, certainly, you know, I think often the best part of these meetings is just the opportunity to answer any questions. I don't have too much to update, but I can say a few things on the budget. But first, I just want to say, given that I'm, you know, we're here with Rep. Sam Carmine Gentile is I just wanted to thank him for his excellent service as a state representative, including for part of Wayland over the past few years. And because, as I'm sure you know, Carmen's announced that he'll be retiring at the end of his term. So glad to be serving with him the rest of this year, but greatly appreciate our partnership on multiple issues. And of course, great to be here with Rep. Sivlinski as well. And I think what I would just say on the budget front is that, you know, I know there's been lots of advocacy by the MMA, and I know Michael's been in touch with me about, you know, making sure that the unrestricted general government aid, UGA, is seeing a solid increase. The governor's budget is a pretty modest increase. So I'd like to think the legislature can do better. The Senate budget will come out later this spring. The House goes first, but I'd like to see that be more than what the governor proposed on the education aid, which is obviously such a significant part of Whalen and the Whalen schools budget. Was really pleased to advocate, you know, with the delegation for the $150 per student aid that was in the budget last year, which really helped a community like Whalen that, as we know, doesn't get a lot of state aid. So I would hope we could at least continue that. I'd like to say we can do better, but not sure because obviously it's a bit of a challenging fiscal environment. I serve as the Senate chair of the Revenue Committee, and so we just heard the bill from Governor Healy that would actually delay parts of the federal OB-3 tax law that could ensure that approximately $450 million in expected budget cuts from the federal government would not happen this year. And so I do think that's critical if we're talking about increasing local aid and education aid. So that's something the committee is reviewing. And I would just say that state revenues continue to be solid. I wouldn't say they're amazing, but they continue to be solid. So I'm hoping that we'll see at worst level funding for a lot of social services and housing and other programs. I don't think you'll see much of an increase in those areas, but I would hope we could at least level fund. And the Revenue Committee also heard a few weeks ago part of the Municipal Empowerment Act, which is part of the way to provide more tools in the toolkit for cities and towns, including some local options, taxes for cities and towns, including for a meals tax that a town or city could adopt and a 5% levy on the excise fee that's collected at the local level. So those are being considered by the Revenue Committee as well. And I think I would just close that on the funding front, really appreciate how responsive Michael has been in requesting, you know, earmarks and other ways that the legislative delegation can support Whalen. So I know, you know, he's already sent some my way, so I would hope we could do some earmarks in the budget and certainly, you know, while I'm not certain, you know, all the different requests that come in, but would certainly hope I could do something for Whalen and obviously any other area on state funding we're here to advocate. So thanks so much for having us and I'll hand it off to my house colleagues and thanks again for the time. Thank you. Who would like to go next? I'm going to defer to my retiring friend. Thank you. My Broomstones partner. Oh, I didn't know that and congratulations to Broomstones and their recent successes. And we were awesome. Absolutely. And Olympia. I do say so myself. You fall down, which was excellent. Go ahead. You're on the floor. Well, thank you. And thank you, Jamie. And thank you, Madam Chair. Yeah. And Michael, thank you for sending over those three those three requests for earmarks. And I note that we're going to talk about things coming out of the town meeting that we'll try to get through the legislature. I do note that the House did pass the Weyland the Millennial Fund for the library. And once that clears the Senate I'm sure the governor will, hopefully the governor should sign it. No reason she shouldn't. Um, unfortunately at the end of January the, both the Weyland bill and the statewide bill for, uh, municipalities for, for towns really, for towns to have remote town meeting uh, was, uh sent to study by the municipalities and regional government uh, committee. That was, uh not surprising but, uh, but, uh well, it would have been it would have been good if it went the other way. Um, so earlier, early this afternoon uh, the governor spoke it was around 4.40 she had a meeting with all with legislators about the storm that we had today that, uh, that's winding up now and, um I mean the good news is that our area wasn't hit so bad I mean if the people on, in the the south coast and the cake really got walloped and lost power so, uh um but, uh as far as funding is concerned one of the municipalities that I represent reached out to me about, gee you know we're spending a ton of money for snow and ice in this storm and in this season so is there any available help from the state and, uh the governor today and before today uh talked about applying to the federal government for disaster relief and the bar is somewhat high but we're actually not we may actually not be far when we actually it's possible that we may actually meet the bar it has to do with with the current storm being pretty much like you know like the biggest storm in a long time and, you know bigger than other storms and, uh we might reach the bar we'll have to see every county it's a different um there's there's a different uh I believe but, uh you know the local civil defense I mean each town will be putting in its numbers and we'll see um and then of course the other the other part of the equation is that uh even if we if we don't get federal funding to help and this I imagine this was a big cost this is this year's unlike the previous few years we really didn't get much snow the last few years um you know it is possible that if we if we don't get federal funding it's possible that we might get something in a supplemental budget because I'm sure there's been some extreme expenses by a lot of towns for what's just happened in this storm um so I'm looking forward to the rest of the session um you know I just echo what what Jamie said um you know we're always we're dealing with a lot of uncertainty with a really good degree of uncertainty with regard to the federal government we do know we have been given a heads up that that the federal government is going to slash medicaid mass health funding so that fully 300,000 of our uh citizens of the commonwealth will be losing their mass health which I think is just which is just an overwhelming um problem um so that's really you know that's one really that's probably the biggest nut for us to crack um but yeah no so you know if you have any questions I'm happy um otherwise you know really great to see you all tonight and I I can't wait to get back to Broomstones I wanted to go this weekend you know we had we had someone visiting us from out of state I was going to I tried to convince them I we were within a mile I said you know we could we could go over here now and take in a game you know but no I have to get there another time it was wonderful though so I think um I have to be honest and say Bianca kept asking me now what are we talking about and what's the topics and I thought boy that's a hint so I'm gonna get some so I put together like a little list of the items we're going to put forth on not the tell meeting like I said their home rule partitions that we're going to need some help with and then of course didn't look so great I sent it to Abby Michael's executive assistant and of course she made it this fabulous looking thing in our packet and she made copies for me so we could give them to you so you could follow along then now you
I think I don't know if I've spoken with you David but I know I spoke to both Jamie and Carmine about the first two and a good thing is that Waylon has had some
so fast and on the same vein we're also going to adopt the language to be able to convert beer and wines to all alcohol but that one you don't have to worry about because that language already exists we
let's get his thoughts on any topics I'm sorry no problem it's really hard having so many people on the screen I'm sorry let me speak for just a minute here thank you very much for having us and I want to say a special thank you to my retiring running mate Carmine for all other good service that he we're going to miss him and he's going to be hard to replace let me just Jamie talked a little bit about the budget and one aspect that we are considering Jamie is the Senate chair of the revenue committee and I'm the house vice chair of that same committee so we work together on that and what he was referring to was in the so-called big beautiful bill there were a number of federal tax changes as you know and the way that much of Massachusetts tax laws are written is that they're tied to the federal tax provisions well because of that the Massachusetts state taxes mostly corporate taxes would actually be reduced by almost 500 million dollars that we're going to have to make up for in the budget unless we uncouple the Massachusetts tax code from those changes that were in the big beautiful bill so we're going to have to make that decision sometime in the next month or so the house is going to take up the budget in
in terms of the money that Massachusetts will be receiving in fiscal 27 based on the governor's recommendations and these are her recommendations so what I always tell towns when you put together your budgets base them on the governor's recommendations because historically the house and the senate won't do any worse than these numbers and hopefully we
which is the most important number for really is the governor gives you about a $200,000 increase chapter 90 basically remains the same as it was the year before but the good news is from fiscal 25 to 26 we almost doubled your chapter 90 so the current plan
continue that good solid boost that you got and then there's a small increase in the unrestricted government aid it's about a 3% increase as Jamie said hopefully we can do a little better on all of these
public education accounts but we also quite frankly have to pay very close attention to the accounts that fund health care and fund quite frankly food services because there's been massive federal cuts in both of those areas and we need to make sure that people are healthy and have food to eat so we're going to see what we can do I'm also chair as many of you know of what's known as the METCO caucus and Waylon has been a very strong supporter of the METCO program one of the biggest programs in all of greater Boston and so I'll be advocating for an increase in the METCO line items again this year and that's money that really comes back to the cities and towns on a per pupil basis so if I can get that that's going to be some good news for Waylon I wish that we could be in person tonight but obviously we had a little bit of a snowstorm today Carmine seems to think that we weren't hit too badly so Carmine if
but in any event you know this has been a tough winter and so anytime you want to get us in person I'm happy to drive up 27 on a Monday night this is not a big deal for me anytime I'm happy to talk also about any of the home room petition town meeting articles that you
know assuming you pass them in the spring town meeting I'm just going to give you a little warning unless it is completely time critical my plan would be to file those in December for next year's legislative session I think that you know given the fact that we'll be out of formal sessions July 31st I think it would be very hard to try to get those done this year unless there's something very time critical I'll say so I would probably plan
that and I think I would rather have Michael opine later or which ones are the time sensitive because he's running the town he and Kelsey are running us but in my opinion and I think the board would agree we really would like to get liquor liquor licenses sooner sooner sooner than later because I don't want to jinx us but we've had requests for them we had three or four and now we've gone through them quickly so I'm happy to do that one the one request I would ask for the town on those one too because I'm the one who's probably going to have to file is number one make
frequently there's a disparity between a town and the ABC sees records and if the ABC says no you don't need this because you have two extras to give that you don't know about then I can't get these bills through so make sure that everybody that the ABC is on board with what Waylon wants to do and then secondly when town meeting dissolves you've got a great town clerk up there in Waylon but make sure that the town clerk's office processes those papers immediately so I can get them filed here at the state house we will take care of that madam chair and we have been in communication with the ABCC to make sure our quotas are up to date and we have our
I'm going to go down these and just discuss them unless somebody wants to hop in so we can then get to the individual questions for the legislators the second one we have is we would like to have the ability for the select board to authorize a green burial versus then having to go to town meeting it's just too long of a time frame we had a situation I think I've spoken to a couple of you about this really heartbreaking you know we had a situation we weren't able to do anything we have to wait for town meeting and they were gracious they didn't ask for a special town meeting and it just was so it's not how Waylon envisions itself so we really hope to you know put that through obviously this we're still on praying and hoping we have those joining us now on the remote participation and you know Carmine you've done and I'm sure Tom or Doug's probably going to speak up here but you've done a lot for us on this did one of you want to address that yeah I'll pipe in briefly first a big thanks to Rep Gentile for your more than 10 years of service in the legislature and we're very sorry to see you go you were always so accessible to us you're always so visible in Wayland as one of multiple towns that you represented over the years so thank you Carmine on the remote voting first we want to thank you I know over several sessions now you've introduced home rule petitions on behalf of Wayland you've introduced remote participation statewide legislation you've you and Ravi have been instrumental in connecting our team with a number of legislators and their staff over the years I guess you can appreciate our frustration that we're just feeling stymied after so many sessions of attempting to even move it as what we would call this pilot program with just a few municipalities and we're really looking for guidance from any of the three of you on the best way to proceed obviously folks have been in touch with Dave Bernstein who's been helping lead the charge here as chair of our electronic voting implementation subcommittee but we're really at a loss of how to proceed we feel like we've checked every box that we've been asked to check and we really want to know strategy wise what is the best move to hopefully take this forward because it's very important to not only a number of folks in our town who've been trying to lead the charge but in other municipalities that we've connected with as well and so we look to you for some guidance here I expect that I'll be filing that bill for you when it comes to our town meeting again the one thing that I would ask would be it would be helpful if the MMA could give us a low backing on this thing they just seem to have not taken a position on this at all the more towns that are looking to do this the more helpful it is I will say if we're going to get this done there was some discussion and I've talked to various people in Wayland about this in getting ready about I guess Concord looked at it I guess Weston looked at it but nobody else has come up with a request to if we could get a little it's more helpful I will say if other towns would be looking to do the same thing yeah and I know and I know that our team has been in touch and I know that we've also been in touch a couple of times and Ravi has helped us engage with the MMA as well I don't know that they were taking a formal position but we do I feel like at this stage after several years at this effort have a number of towns in our corner what would be helpful in communicating that and to whom do we need to communicate it within the legislature to show this growing groundswell of support yeah I mean it it makes it it makes our job easier Doug if there are two or three or four or ten towns with home rule petitions looking to do the same thing so it's you know and then I can do this on a colleague to colleague basis much it's a much easier lift that way than if only one town out of 351 looking to do it yeah and I think we have several and I know several have or have sought to introduce home rule petitions does it make a difference if we have
and this is how we did on civil service reform and then is the idea to try to convince leadership at this stage well that you've got to leave that to Jamie and myself and whoever Carmine successor is at that point but let's see what the landscape is it's not going to happen this
but I just wanted to thank Senator Eldridge and Representative Gentile and Representative Linsky for their support and guidance in trying to get this legislation through it's not high priority for leadership I understand that and this leadership generally has helped getting a lot of things done for whatever reason so I'm not shocked but we
MMA may have endorsed 2274 that they helped compose that bill's language which was about open town meaning remote voting so that's something that's the Senate bill for statewide local option I assume that's the house bill that I filed oh 22 yeah I didn't get the number right no problem okay we'll circle back with the offline all right so the next item we have on the list is and she did such a great job you could click right on the item it was fabulously done allow print free digital legal notices for the town so it's a home rule allow print free legal notices you know and actually that's happened another town has been able to do that yeah so that's I
do it after this was discussed and put forth we now do have a bi-weekly newspaper Kelsey was very instrumental you know in putting this forth and bringing it to the board's attention and of course we're supporting it but you know it's also cost savings and quite frankly if you live in Whalen you may not be reading the online patch or maybe even the
notices so we think this is a good move and we'll want to put that one through as well and then we have one other I have on my list it's
and when we took our vote we felt very strongly that we needed to explain to the voters very clearly what this vote was and we looked up the language and it said oh you know you can put down a yes vote means this and a no vote and we can send out a note to the homes and we thought okay that's good and so off we went and we voted and then unfortunately we were advised by the town manager and probably through town council that we needed to adopt and it's going to be right here for me chapter 53 section 18b in order to communicate with our residents so we're going to put this through but I think I'm probably not speaking out of turn when I say for the board I think really this might be something you want to look at in general I think it's not an unusual thing for a board to want to communicate with the residents about something so important for this we felt really really hopeless is not the right word but we were really uncomfortable I said that to each other that's why he's laughing so how could this be really uncomfortable because this is our job to make these recommendations and we should be able to clearly explain our thinking or what happens if you agree with us with this recommendation or what happens if you disagree with us when you go to the polls so we obviously are going to do this it is
I think I'm saying this on behalf of the town here I think you might want to take it under advisement to just change that and let people all have that ability to talk with the residents about these important votes so having said that I want to open it
might start with either Ann or Bill is that okay all by all means well I'd just
there means a lot so thank you all thank you I ditto what Bill said I think just having resources to come to and have you guys all show up was really helpful and that's really all we can ask for so you know some guidance and I think we're pretty organized town just based on some of the questions that were previously asked so just continued guidance is appreciated and thank you so much for coming I defer to town I like to echo Bill Whitney's comments about your support on issues we've dealt with here in town appreciate that very much on a different topic in 2024 in the statewide election way on voters voted overwhelmingly to approve auditing legislature I think we had 70% aware on voters vote in favor of us 72% I think statewide it was 72 but only 70 and I just think that checks and balances are important in every organization transparency is important I think that's why a prior legislature voted to pass the opening law which affects municipalities which is a good law and it screams for transparency and it's been pretty effective but we do live in a one-party state and so checks and balances are critical and not to permit a basic tool of an audit I think is somewhat embarrassing so just to be here Tom every year the House and the Senate are audited by an independent auditor which is which is from a list of auditors that the federal government gives to the states so that they may have their legislatures audited this happens every year the auditor the state auditor who was a state representative had a bad experience as a staff staffer before she became a state rep and then became a state senator and now is our auditor really and you know I think this was this was really instrumental in getting her elected you know this thing this this topic about auditing the legislature legislature the executive branch and the legislative branch and the judicial branch we're all separate we're all separate we can't tell the judges how they do their business we can't tell the governor how how she does her business and aside from financial audits which are done every year you can go online right now and see every dollar spent every dollar appropriated and spent by the legislature what the state auditor wants to do is say oh well let's see you have a committee now how is that committee deliberating what evidence you're taking how do you structure things well that's none of her business that's none of the executive branch's business and you know personally I like the state auditor very much and she has a beautiful voice I've heard her sing a number of times whenever she sings it's very politically oriented so this business of audit you know you can put a ballot question out there to the public and you know on the face of it it sounds well gee this makes sense this is reasonable of course of course the legislature should be audited you know companies audited they have themselves audited to make sure everything's the way it should be and why not audit the legislature well the reality is that financially we are audited we're audited every year we're audited by auditors that the federal government has said look you should be auditing yourselves here's a list that we're telling you use these auditors to audit yourselves to have yourselves audited and the state auditor is doing thing on her part she's got a can I say grudge you know against house leadership and this is you know how it got her elected you know so the state attorney general has refused has declined to do anything about this because constitutionally I will I would bet my life savings the supreme judicial court if the supreme judicial court ever gets this question they're going to rule unanimously that what the state auditor wants to do is unconstitutional under our state constitution period end of story I just think if that's the case Carmine that the leadership should encourage the attorney general to hire a separate counsel to bring that case so that SJC can make that ruling and put this issue behind us well you know the runner up for attorney general would like to take the case and we'll see how that plays out she said that person is a very able attorney thank you that's all I so I have just a couple little things you know as you do these jobs and you go along you say this makes our life more difficult than it should and Carmine knows because he's already met with me in my little folder in
special town meeting so when we have town meeting we have to have the warrant has to close on January 15th and we can hold town meeting any time after that March April May June whatever you do it's a much bigger proposition I grant you that a special town meeting where from the time those signatures are certified we have 45 days we
two weeks before it's literally we don't do anything else because it's all hands on deck the last time we had one of these years ago there's Bill and I out in the hall folding up the full postcards and put this people everybody in the town building is not doing the work the regular work they're getting the stickers on these things so we can get them
90 or 120 days so we have time to process this because this issue that has arisen is very important to a group of residents it should probably not be the only business that gets conducted over the next 45 days so I really hope you
to another bill we're trying to get through the Mass Municipal Association if we get the Mass Municipal Association behind it you know I mean it's always a team effort and you know more numbers lighten the load get things through no I mean it makes a lot sense and Carol if you could send me an email with the chapter and section you just referenced and what would need to be changed we are likely to take up at least a portion of the governor's Municipal Empowerment Act this spring this would be an appropriate amendment to the bill on the floor okay if you can send that to me let me see if I could get that worked in my other one is a much larger problem it's the language of the basically the language as written you know in the code states how influx there's no strategy no language for outflow it even states in one little paragraph sentence phrase we that says you know if you meet your obligations for year and then you have surplus it stays right in the OPEV trust fund so I think I'd like to have a comment maybe I'll have a sit down with you David about that one as well sure so I'm good so this so before we close out and we let you go which we are thank you for so graciously coming to join us I will have Abby send you this flyer and before I recognize Mr. Levine again I would like to ask Mr. McCall and Ms. Powers Perlet But if they would like to add anything to this discussion of things that are on their mind. Thank you, Madam Chair. I just want to thank the members of the delegation for coming in this evening. I correspond with them quite regularly. And I also like the fact that it's not only email. Most of them take the time to give me a call every now and then to see what's going on in Weyland. They've been very helpful when we've had issues. And, you know, we'll miss having Representative Gentile as our representative. I know one of the candidates who's running for a seat and someone who's been also very good to the town of Weyland. So I'm sure we'll be in good hands going forward. But again, I thank them for everything. And they know on a regular basis what our needs are because of the great communication we have. So, Ms. Powers-Perlet, would you like to add something? I have nothing to add, but I do echo Michael's comments. Thank you. And, Ms. Levine, you can have the final word. Thank you. I would be remiss if I didn't ask about a piece of legislation that we're anxiously hoping that the House will take up. And that's regarding the statewide bell-to-bell cell phone ban in public schools. Dave or Carmine, do you know where that might stand if it may happen in this session? Oh, that has a lot of support. That has a lot of support. Well, we've had – we've been – yeah, we've been – it's come up. And I think we're going to do it. I think it's more likely than not that's going to happen this session. Yeah. You know, a lot of school districts have done this in the Commonwealth and in states across the country. And in my district, you know, I mean, in the Marlboro, that charter school in Marlboro that gets all kinds of awards, you know, they implemented it like a year or more ago. You know, and I would tell you, I mean, we had a – it's two years – I think it's two years ago now, we had a professor from Stanford University come and talk, you know, in Lincoln Sudbury High School. I think I was the only grandparent in the audience. They're all parents. And – but she had, you know, that professor, she's – her expertise is social media effect on children. She has two or three teenagers herself, and she told us – and the rule in her house is when a child is able to get their driver's license, then they can have a smartphone. But for the world, you know, to be – to say something – to get through something that, you know, really works is – she said, well, really 16. Before age 16, a child should not have a smartphone because it's deleterious to their health, to their physical and mental health, period. And, you know, two hours – the kids are spending two hours during a school day on these phones. Two hours during the school day, they're on those phones instead of listening to the teacher or whatever. And then at night, you know, check the phone. Once you're 16 and you have the phone, you're still in your parents' house, check the phone downstairs in the kitchen before – don't take it to your bedroom because it'll keep you up another hour or two rather than going to sleep. So they're really – it's really a hazard. And I think – I think a majority of people in the legislature realize this, and we've discussed it, and it has some momentum. I'm thinking, knock on wood, we'll get this done. That would be great. I know it passed the Senate a number of months ago, so we've been following closely. Mm-hmm. Dog, it's on the list for the Sprint. Awesome. Thank you. All right. So thank you very much, everyone. We'll all be in touch. Wonderful discussion. And we are now going to return our attention to annual tell-meeting articles. Thank you very much. Thank you. Good to see you all. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Okay. So we are number nine. So what we have done up to date is we have had the different sponsors of the articles come in and talk about their articles. And I believe we've had all the boards come in who are sponsoring articles. Now, tonight and then next week, I want to have the petitioners come in and talk about their articles. And then we'll have heard from everybody as we're processing articles. So the first thing I would like to do on this item is to recognize Carol Plum, if we could pull her over. Her article should be in the packet. It's XX. And somebody who's more paying attention than I am can tell me what page it's on. Hi, Carol. I recognize you. Sorry. They're unmuted. Okay. I'm recognizing you. Let me take my earphones out and hope that works better. Okay. Okay.
Does anybody find it? Yeah. Page 53. Thank you. I'm scrolling and scrolling. No, you can't hear me. We can hear you. We can hear you. Now you're on mute again.
Carol, you're on mute. There you go. There you go. I'm going to have to go. All right. So, Ms. Plum, if you would just identify yourself. So, I don't know. You just heard me say that. You were going to speak with you. You are the petitioner of Article XX, Long-Term Facilities. It was called planning. I think we've changed it to inventory now, correct? Yes. Okay. So, Carol Plum, Bald Rock Road.
So, this article is just to inform residents about, I can't do this with these earphones in. Sorry. You're going to turn it off. Okay. How does one do that?
All right. Thank you, Bob.
All right. So, sorry. Well, while you're getting organized. So, what happened was, Carol, I'm the liaison for this article, as is Carl Barnes from the Finance Committee. And we had a brilliant idea, if I do say so myself, and all three of us did a Zoom together so we could understand and hear what Carol was trying to accomplish and what have you. So, she had already met with town council, which is allowed, and had had a consultation with her, and the article was not deemed repugnant, what have you, blah, blah, blah. So, it can go forward as far as legally. And during that conversation, we decided that, really, this wasn't a planning function, but more of an inventory. So, can you hear me, Carol? Yeah, no, I can hear you fine. I just, it sounds really weird with the headphones in. Okay. So, it's not what she, I just kind of teed it up, but we've done so far. Yep. And so, then she made edits, and then off we go. So, you've got the floor. Okay. So, this is really for residents to be able to improve their decision-making at town meeting. And to do that, you need to be able to assess the scope of whatever repairs or maintenance or whatever needs to be due to basically the assets the town owns. And this way, when you're actually being asked to vote on the annual budget or the warrant articles, you'd be able to figure out, is the town properly investing in its assets. So, we end up with a year-round, publicly posted, updated facilities inventory. And as you're aware, in Massachusetts, town officials are not required to create any record that does not already exist. So, this will be a clearly specified facilities inventory, which identifies what will be recorded, and there'll be a permanent record. So, it doesn't matter who's on the select board or who's the town manager or the facilities director. There'll be a record that can be asked for by name, and you can always put in a public request if you had to. So, the other part of this is there's a bare minimum for the select board to review the facility's inventory in a public meeting before setting its goals. And that if there's going to be changes, they just have to inform the public by having a public meeting where people can make comments. Under Section 8A, Chapter 33 of the Acts of 2022, which is the Town Manager Act, he is responsible, or the town manager is responsible for the town property. And it says, maintain an inventory of all town-owned, real, and personal property. That's the quote. But it doesn't say what is to be reported on the inventory, what's the time frame, and when it'll be updated, and when it'll be made with the public. So, that's part of the reason for doing this. The other one is, if you look at the CIPC, it's supposed to study non-reoccurring tangible projects and assets. That's the quote. But the bylaw is not clear on what they reported on the list or how it's supposed to originate under 20-4. The CIP gives a recommendation to the town manager by October 15th and files the capital plan report. But it's not an inventory, and it doesn't have a specific deadline. So, again, this is really allowing the residents to be able to see the full scope of what the town assets are and make better decisions. All right. Also, I forgot to ask Ms. Plummer to state her address. So, perhaps we can... I did. I did. I'll do it again. Oh, you did. Thank you. Great. All right. I want to open this up to questions from the board.
So, while we're waiting for questions, do you want to also tell what town council said about this? Because one of the questions I had was, and I think Carol just cited that part of this is covered by the Town Managers Act. And... Nope. It just says he's responsible. It doesn't say anything about creating a record. Right. Theoretically, depending on who's the town manager, I have big faith in Mr. McCall and Mike Fea, and in the CIPC. But there's no clear statement. This is the inventory, and this is what's in the inventory. I think that the town council did say, though, that some of this was covered in the Town Managers Act. However, if we wanted to, you know, have a firmer bylaw, we could add these deadlines in. Does that sound about correct to what she said?
Yes. And again, it's an inventory. It's not the actual... I think her objections was to it being a planning document with deadlines on that. Okay. Anybody else have any questions here?
Bill, do you have some? You look like you're ready. No one? No one? All right. Thank you. Doug, go ahead. Was there any discussion, Carol, either Carol, among folks to potentially amend the charge of CIPC to incorporate this instead of having this separate article? Is that a possible way to thread the needle? Yeah, but I don't want to lose the part where the select board actually has to review the list before they set their goals. That's in there. Mm-hmm. Say that again, Carol. There's a piece in there that says the select board will review the inventory list before setting their goals for the new year. Oh, yeah. Okay. Where was that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't have that part open.
It's under annual public review, maybe? The select board shall review the facility's inventory in one or more public meetings prior to adopting its annual goals. Section three. I see it. But then it also says, Carol, in no event later than March 31 of East Fisca Year, we do our goals in July.
No, that's for the... It was to review it. You know what? That date got moved. I mean, when we edited it, we didn't pick that part back up. What should it be?
You know what? I think it originally was in there as, like, June 1st, because it would have been after town meeting and before you guys actually had to start doing anything. I'm willing to make that... That would make more sense. I'm sorry.
I'm willing to change that date if it needs to be changed to a later date. So that would make more sense, because otherwise, I think, under this language, to select what has to meet twice, we'd have to do it before March 31, and then we'd meet in July for the goals, right? Right. But also in there, it says if you make a big change, you still have to come out and present it to people, but it's not before your goals. So different. Yes. Carol, Martin, I know we had the Weyland Real Estate Asset Planning Committee, which was RAP, and I don't think they meet anymore, but I feel like what Carol Plum is asking for is similar to what that committee was trying to accomplish. So I'm just trying to see if maybe there's a reason that committee no longer meets and whether maybe doing some of this is a little bit more work than it might seem, especially if you look at the fact that the assets can include historic assets, land use and natural resources, house stock and affordable housing, business, personal property, commercial and industrial properties that the town might have. So I'm just wondering if maybe there's some connection as to how that worked and what might not have worked there that we want to make sure we don't repeat. And where are you reading that list from?
Top of my head.
It's just assets. It's the kind of assets that we have. We have all those assets. We have, I mean, that's just a kind of a breakdown of business, municipal assets. Right. I guess I was thinking more at one point that Ben Keefe had counted all the buildings and we have like, and I could be wrong. I thought he said something like 282 buildings that he was supposed to be looking after and then throw in a bunch of fields. I do not know what exactly you're thinking of in terms of natural resources, because that's not really a facility. That's not a building. Right. And it's not a field. Um, and so that's why I was asking about what you were thinking of.
Um, so Carol, do you remember RAP? Me? Yes. I do, but I'm going to ask Mr. Faye, because I think I was on the, um, uh, the finance committee then. And were you on select board then? I don't think so. I think it was completed in 2017. I may be mistaken. It was a RAP report. Yes. RAP report, um, it's, it's available online. It's a, a great resource. I use it. Uh, I think, I know the time manager uses it. I think others use it. Um, for example, I've used it extensively on the, um, the visioning committee of the South Landfill. It's very helpful.
I'm sure that doesn't answer your question, Ann, but I think the idea was that they were doing a real estate, basically making us all aware of the real estate. Who owns the real estate in town? What? Let me read. Town owned real estate. Also in there, I think it lists, because Michael mentioned this and then Doug and I went back and we're looking at something there. Uh, also land that's owned by the state. Um, and maybe the federal government in Weyland is also in that listing. I think. I don't think so. I mean, part of the other reason that they went through and did. Okay. Wrong report. Sorry. Yeah. The other reason that they put it together was to clear out what all the deeds were. So you knew literally like what was available on the basis of the deed. After we had that whole thing with the library and not being able to break the trust with the library or again, like the orchard ring slash holiday road. Parcel. Right. Madam Chair, you're thinking of the list that we created about parcels, probably not being taxed recently. We brought that up. And that has sustained. As soon as someone's Kelsey shook her head, I knew I was on the wrong bus. So anyway, um, so one of the, I understand what Carol's trying to accomplish here, which is, you know, they're kind of, we, I think we've got information in a couple of places and we need to kind of pull it together a little more, a little more structure to it. Um, one of the things that did concern me about the, what the facilities inventory and the Carl and I discussed with Carol was this planning level, annual cost ranges. I think that's a, I'm not, I think that could be a very labor intensive, um, exercise. And I don't know how, what that means in terms of, are we doing it in house with our best estimates or do we have to engage someone to, um, to get these estimates? So this was, um, I did try to talk to Mike Faya and then I was going to come to Mr. McCall's office hours and put in the question to him as well, but that obviously was a snow storm did not work. So, um, I did ask again, this is, this is all for scoping. If you're going to go in and vote on a, on an article, I mean, on a budget, a town meeting, you'd like to know all the other things that are hanging out there. And it shouldn't be that hard to say, we have a school that's like X many years, we expect it's going to last this long. And right now it costs this much to replace it. I'm not trying to make this any more complicated or more difficult than it needs to be. Um, and again, once you've got the list and we sort of have the list because we did the, uh, on-site insight, no. Yeah. On-site insight. So once it's there, you just sort of look at it every year and it shouldn't be that hard to update it. And then like, I would assume, you know, uh, that every five years you'd go through and really take a good look at it because Ben Keefe did do one of these at Louise Miller's request.
So that is also the other concern that it's, we have not, we did not fund that capital request for the insight on-site report. I believe Michael got a grant from the Collins Center. No, no. It was the, um, when I first got here, I was told there was money put aside in, um, a prior town meeting that was not spent. So it was unused. We used that. But the point is that if we have to do it every five years, this, we now are agreeing to a capital project every five years. That's that. I just want to make sure we know what we're talking about here. I'm not throwing conning here. I'm just. As a capital project, because the last insight on-site, I believe in, um, Kelsey may check my numbers again, or the numbers I heard was that it's somewhere in like a hundred thousand dollars and change. Right. So does that make it a capital project? I guess. I thought a capital project had to be over. 25. 25. I've been over, I've been reading too many of these. Join the club. It's over 25, Carol. So we'd have to go in the club. Okay. Yeah, it is. It is. Every five years. So that is, that was a concern. So one thing to do an inventory. It's another now we have to, um, we're, we're voting to basically spend, I don't know, Kelsey will tell us a hundred thousand every five years on this. I don't know. Anyway, anyway, does anyone else have any other questions here? Actually, you know, I think the actual five year thing is still in there during fiscal year. So, so, so the schools did there's a few years in 2018, because I was the person who said, so under this policy, we would now have to do theirs next year, uh, in order to be current, because it's over five years. Um, you know what? I don't see the five years still being in there. Okay. It says we have to update them. All right. It just says update it. And the other part is you notice it says anticipating sequences where known. There's a lot of wiggle room in this. The idea is that we have the expectation that there will be a list and everybody knows what's on the list and what's coming and when it needs to be replaced. It's not, I'm not trying to like make some super detailed inventory. It's an inventory that says, here's what we've got. And here's where we need to go forward from. And then one last one that Carla and I asked. So Carol's already knows the answer, her answer to this, which is, how is this not something that would be done by the SIPC group? Because they're going to put together items we need. Oops. They're putting together a report and then they're prior to prioritizing whatever they're getting off of. What are we given to them from the town staff? They're not putting together the inventory.
No, but they're putting together a long-term plan. It'll encapsulate things like. And they can reference the inventory, which they did not have while they were trying to do it this year. Okay. Right? Yeah. No, I'm just asking all the questions that Carla and I asked so the board gets a flavor for what was discussed. And off we go. Anybody else have any other questions? No, we're all set. Carol, do you want to have any last couple sentences here? No, other than, again, this is for the residents so that they can look at things. This isn't for the committees or the boards. I mean, the Capital Improvement Committee can look, you can use it, but it's really based for the residents. And I'm sorry that I did not know how to use my headphones. Not to worry. Being remote is challenging because it just is. So anyway, thank you for coming tonight and thank you for waiting. And we appreciate that. And I think Carla and I will be in touch once we get going on the write-up, which we need to get doing. So now that you've been before us, so all right. Thank you so much. Thanks, Carol. Thank you, Carol. So the next item is going to be what we have in the packet is, and also the supplemental packet is a number of articles. I have to give a shout out to Mr. Fay, who has a gangbuster legal and I got, I think, all his articles done. May I mention that? I want to say one thing, which on an aside, so he doesn't hear it, but you all did. I did that one year in finance committee and guess what happened? Oh, can you help everybody else?
But I appreciated it as the chair. Thank you. So I think I want to just go through these. Now, most, what I really like to do on these is, and some of them we discussed before, shore up the write-up, make sure everything is in the way that's got to be, and then we're going to take a vote, particularly on the negligible financial impact articles so that those can then be sent to the town manager's office as final articles, and also so that we can get going on some of our positions, and we only have 49 articles to do. So the first one, I think, in the packet is going to be I.I. Is that you, Tom? That's correct. So this is an article. Hang on, just tell me what page we're on, everybody, so everybody who's following along can find us. 26. Go ahead. Fire away. This is an article that's sort of proposed by the town clerk basically to, I would say, create greater transparency for residents of individuals who might want to sell things and run their businesses on a door-to-door basis, just so individuals in town, residents know who, whether the companies, et cetera, are legitimate and properly okayed prior to doing their work.
Does anybody have any questions on this, any comments on the write-ups? So I think I did happen to realize one. In the proposer's comments, we don't normally mention specific names, so we probably should just say this update was reviewed with the former police chief and the current acting police chief. Okay. Or something to that language. Does that make sense? Yeah. And then before we submit them, we need to get rid of some of these directions. Under article description where it says, final language to be provided by the town council. Yeah. Just get rid of that. And Kelsey, you should chime in here on the form, because the more we clean up before we get them to you, so if I'm missing anything here, if I'm not pulling out enough stuff, let me know. So I think I think I'm sorry. I think at the meeting last week, we had a working session while Michael was gone, Kelsey, Jalen, Abby, and myself about the town meeting, what have you. And we were thinking, correct me if I'm wrong here, Kelsey, that it's sort of odd when you have the ones where they don't have the pros and the cons, where the finance committee vote language is. Because it's the proposal's comments, which let's say it's us, right? Then it's the finance committee's comments. Then it says we vote. Then it says the finance committee takes no position. So I think we were thinking about moving the finance committee vote right up under theirs and saying the finance committee takes no position as article right after that phrase. It even could be the next sentence or something, so the flow. Does this sound about, am I saying it right, Kelsey, what we voted? That sounds about right? That's what I remember, yes. Yeah. So because it seems out of order to me. I don't know if it does to anyone else, but it seemed out of order. So we'll move that up there, and that also eliminates the line, and off we go. All right. All right. So just procedurally, Kelsey, did you want me to make these changes, or did you want to make them and put it in the packet as the chair recommended for further review by the board? No, I didn't make them. Sorry. I was going to say I'd rather that you make them, Mr. Faye, and send them back to me. I think it would just be better. Okay. And so your third point is to put where, where, Carol, you want the comments after the recommendation? No. Go ahead.
So if I may, it would have the vote, the select board vote come right after the comments, right next to the finance committee's vote to either not have no position on the article. They would be, like, right next to each other, as opposed to separately, as they have appeared in the past. Well. At the end of the committee comments, the next one will be the finance committee takes no position on this article, and that's the vote. Right in that same paragraph, right, Kelsey? Yes.
And then below that, it'll say select board recommends. Yeah. Okay. All right. Gotcha. Okay. Because it's weird, because it's like, it's back and forth. Anyway, we'll try this. As we go along and we're poofing in the warm and it doesn't look good, we'll whatever. But anyway. All right. Did you want to make a motion? Well, you want a motion to support, Madam Chair? Is that what you're looking for? Yeah. So we already inserted this, right? We did. Right. So I'll move that this board votes to support article I. I as amended.
All right. Do I have a second? Okay. Any further discussion? Otherwise, I'm going right to the vote. Anne? Yes. Bill? Yes. Doug? Yes. Tom? Yes. Carol? Yes. Motion passes. Five-zero. We're on a roll. Well, article JJ is the Accept Gifts of Lands. We've already voted to pull that one out, right? Right. So the next article is going to be SS. I believe this is Tom's as well. This is an article that pretty much mirrors and recognizes the state statute requiring that structures have numbers on them, and I think legally, don't quote me, but if it becomes a bylaw, it's a suggestion that it's somehow easy to enforce, and I'm not really understanding that because if it's a state statute, you can enforce a state statute, but be there as it may, town clerk felt it was important for us to have this in our own part of our bylaws, and therefore, if there's, looking at the article, I think the, I will make the switch that you recommended, you and Kelsey, Madam Chair, at the bottom, so the recommendation of the Finance Committee, or the fact we take no positions, is within their comments, and below that will be the select board vote. Is that how you want it? Sounds right, right? All right. With that change, I move. Wait a second. Also, we have to eliminate the bullets. We don't have any bullets, so get ready to make a sentence out of that. This bylaw will improve, don't just make a sentence. Okay. We don't use bullets because they use extra spaces. Okay. All right? With that, with those changes, I move that this board vote to support Article FF entitled Visible House Numbers. Second. Thank you. If there's no further discussion, we'll take a vote. Bill? Yes. Yes. Ann? Yes. Tom? Yes. Doug? Yes. Carol, yes. Motion passes, 5-0. The next one is FF. I think this one is in the supplemental. Should we just stay in here for now and then go to the supplemental so we don't go back and forth? Yeah. So that means the next one is P. Excuse me for one second, I'll be right. So article P has been revised and it's in the supplemental packet and the revisions are simply that we took out, pursuant to the guidelines of the Tomlin articles, the arguments in favor and arguments against. Otherwise, it's the same. Same proposer's comments, the background? That's correct. Okay. Okay. Okay. And so with that in mind, I, and given the, and also I will revise this consistent with the chair and Kelsey's suggestions of the select board, both being below the finance committee's lack of vote, um, um, I move that this board vote to support article P entitled Reaffirmed Remote Participation in a Time Meeting. Second. So in discussion, I'm going to say, Tom, well, this is terrific. I mean, this really is a simplified article now. Appreciate that work you did on it. Um, this one needs to add in there. The finance committee vote. And I don't know if they've taken a vote yet. So you may have to consult with your liaison. Is there any financial impact? Is there any financial impact, Carol? No, they've, we've got the phrase there, but I don't think they've taken a vote yet. So we have to go back to them to put their vote in. So we, so who is the liaison on this? Well, it's my article. But who's the finance committee liaison? My P it's Mr. Huss. Okay. So you just need to tell them this is ready. Select boards voted. Please advise me about the FinCon votes before we submit it in. Okay. That's what we're doing. Yeah. Sounds good. All right. So let's take a vote. Tom. Yes. Doug. Yes. Bill. Yes. Anne. Yes. Carol. Yes. Five zero. Q.
Is. Mine. Yeah. Correct. And this bill, I would call a housekeeping bill suggested by Brian Keveny. And that is to. Deem. Monies of less than $25,000. Is actually paid taxes. In order to reduce. The administrative expense of trying to collect those monies. It's just a. What I'll call a business decision. It kind of makes sense. Given the. Given the.
Given the comments of Madam Chair and Kelsey. I'll do the switch. Relative to the recommendation of the finance committee. And. And the select board vote. At the bottom of the article. Otherwise I move to. This board and have it support article Q. Entitled. Acceptance of. Masters of General. Chapter 60. Section 2. Colon and bait up to $25. On past due tax bills. Second. Tax. Thank you. Actually on all of these. Why don't we just have Tom do the motion. And Doug do the second. That's easier for the minute taker. As well. All right. If there's no further discussion. Then. All those in favor. Doug. Yes. Tom. Yes. Ann. Yes. Bill. Yes. And Carol. Yes. Motion passes. Five zero. The next item we have is R. This one I think is yours Doug. It is. So you weren't here. But I put it in for you anyway. Because I just knew you wanted it in. How do you know me so well? So. I'm hoping we can have a quick. Chit chat on this. And then vote this one. Go ahead. Yeah. This is the one that we just spoke with. The delegation about. And this is so we don't find ourselves in a similar situation. That we just were in a few months ago. Where we couldn't really give any substantive explanation to the voters about information regarding a ballot question. Which I think was challenging for all of us. And ended up creating a lot of confusion. So this is to accept the provision of the general laws to allow us to be able to provide that clarity and substance to the voters. All right. Any comments?
Doug, the arguments in favor and the arguments opposed on this come out. Yeah. It's the short. Yeah. And you're all set. All right. So do we have a motion on this one then? I move that the board vote to support Article R. Acceptance of Mass General Laws. Chapter 53. Section 18B. Provide information regarding ballot questions. Thank you. Thank you. Uh-oh. You did it backwards on me. Whoops. I got it. All right. All those in favor. Doug. Yes. Tom. Yes. Ann. Yes. Bill. Yes. And Carol. Yes. So the next one is Article S. This is Bill's. And while he was busy enjoying White Sands, as he's explained to me, I put this one in him too. Would you like to talk about this? Well, it was 78 degrees. Not in the article. Oh, on the article. The article, yeah.
Fairly straightforward. This would, adoption of MGL Chapter 38, Section 12D would enable the select board to, upon the request of the holder of a wine and malt license to convert it to a liquor license. Perfect. And would you like to make a motion?
Sure. I don't want to mess you up. Oh, yeah. Go ahead. Let's get these other guys to do it. Can we have a motion, please? Happy to move that this board support article has been titled, Acceptance of MGL Chapter 138, Section 12D, Conversion of Wine and Maltic licenses. Second. Thank you. There's no further discussion. Let's take a roll call vote. Bill? Yes. Ann? Yes. Tom? Yes. Doug? Yes. Carol, yes. Motion passes. Now we have T, and I think this is also Mr. Whitney's. That's correct. As discussed with the delegation, this would, as a home rule petition, seeking approval by the ABCC to enable the town to issue 10 additional liquor licenses. Terrific. So, unless there's any questions, we'll have a motion, please. I move the fifth board to support article T, entitled Home Rule, Allow Additional liquor license. Second. Okay. By the way, Bill, in discussion, on the very bottom, it says arguments in favor of this blank and arguments opposed. Those have to come out. We're not using those headers on this. Okay. That's perfect. Okay. Let's vote. Bill? Yes. Ann? Yes. Tom? Yes. Yes. And Carol, yes. Okay. Article U? Me. Okay, great. This is the one that we also just discussed with our state legislative delegation, allowing us to hopefully save some money and be able to reach voters who may not be reading certain publications. And I think the language is pretty self-explanatory. Sorry. I know I need to take out certain subheadings there, Carol.
Yeah. Is this more than 150 words under the background information? Yeah, it might be. So, it has to be 150. Okay. Let's cut that down a little bit. And unless there's any other questions on this one. I'm happy to move this board vote to support article U, as amended. I'm entitled Home Rule, Allow Print-Free Digital Legal Notice. Second. Okay. Let's have a roll call vote. Tom? Yes. Doug? Yes. Bill? Yes. Ann? Yes. Carol, yes. Motion passes 5-0. How about article B? That is mine. Okay. I would seek to amend the bylaw to prohibit cryptocurrency machines in the town of Wayland. So, there's two comments in here that came from the FinCon liaison on this. Do you see them on the side here? Yeah. So, just want to fix those sentences up for her? Yeah. All right. Happy to move, then, that this article B be supported by the select board entitled, Amend General Bylaw, Prohibition of Cryptocurrency Machines. Second. Thank you. Okay. Roll call vote. Bill? Yes. Ann? Yes. Doug? Yes. Tom? Yes. Harold? Yes. Motion passes 5-0. BB? I have a revised version of this article. Kelsey, sorry to put you on the spot. Is there any way you can share your screen? Because I have it on my computer, but I'm on this video on the iPad, and I'm not sure how to do that. I emailed it to you toward the beginning of this meeting. It's BB. Okay. So, I basically just changed the background. Oh, I see it. Yep. I'll share the screen. Hold on just a moment. I gave a little bit of background of what a green burial is, so people are aware. Um, there's a pretty clear definition on the Mass.gov website, and I had this information when we worked on the article last year. Still keeping it with us. 50 words, though, Carol. Is it? 150? Yeah. Um, hopefully this passes without too much consternation. From us or in general? No, in general, at town meeting. Um, I'm going to be right back. You can take over for me for a minute, please. Here.
This is, um, what we talked about with our delegation about not having to go to town meeting in the future so that it can be an approval through the select board, um, and the board of health, which would hold the public hearing. And there are the two paragraphs that I wrote up under background, if you want to take a quick look. Well, I think you just switched off, Kelsey. It's over at your email, but you had the doc up briefly.
There it is. Thank you.
And anyone can let me know if they have any questions.
That's good. I'm glad we're getting this one done so we don't have to have a repeat of last year's article. I think that that's a tough burden to place on families to have to go through the town meeting process for your own burial. So your family, we'll wait for Carol to get back there to take the vote.
I'm here, but I'm reading. Okay. Take your time. Anybody have any questions or comments on the language? But thank you.
Happy to move this board to support article BB entitled Home Rule, Authorization of Green Barrels in the Town of Wayland. Second. Any further discussion? Everybody read it? Everybody's good? All right. I just want to also ask Kelsey, or did you read it as well? Are you good with that? Because you're really good at writing these. Yes. It looks good to me. Looks good to you? It's good to me? All right. Let's have a vote then. Tom? Yes. Anne? Yes. Doug? Yes. Bill? Yes. And Carol? Yes. So that gives us five zero. Thanks, Kelsey. Thanks, everybody. The next one is CC. This is actually mine.
And I'm going to add in that the Finance Committee did vote already seven zero on this. So I'll add this into the write-up. But other than that, this is the one we talked about, another housekeeping item, giving ourselves a little more flexibility in setting the town meeting date so that, you know, maybe we find dates that have a little less overlap and conflict to setting the date. Unless anybody has any questions, we'll have a motion, please. Move that this board wants to support our official amend town code chapter 36-1 town meeting. Second. Thank you. And let's have a roll call vote. Anne? Yes. Bill? Yes. Doug? Yes. Tom? Yes. Carol, yes. Motion passes five zero. Now, I think I have G in here in this packet, which is surface water quality. So let's go to that one as well. This is a standard article. We've cut a little more down. And quite frankly, I think I'm going to cut that last sentence or so on the first arguments in favor. It was put in there years ago when we first did this. So if we went into a problem, Tom, I'm going to get up and say it. But I think we're good. So standard article, budget's the same, $30,000. Unless anyone has a question or something, I'll take a motion. Happy to move this board to vote to support article G, titled Surface Water Quality Budget. Thank you. Thank you. And we'll call vote. So we'll have Bill? Yes. Ann? Yes. Tom? Yes. Yes. Josh? Thank you. And Carol, yes. Motion passes five zero. The next one in the packet is HH. I wasn't going to tell you this part, but Michael mentioned it earlier. There might be some changes in this because the article talks about having a loan, a zero cent loan from the state revolving fund. And there's also a couple that are left. So I will hold on to this one and then we'll come back. Okay. Then I think we have done all the ones in this packet and we can go to the supplemental packet.
Sorry, Carol. What were the, what are the changes that we need to make to this one? No, there aren't any. I'm pulling it for, I'm going to come back with it because. I see. Okay. As Michael mentioned, there might be some, we didn't, did you want to say your sentence you said before, Michael, about this financing, so I don't want to say the wrong thing. So it's my understanding. I spoke to Tom Holder late today, right before the meeting. And I guess he advised the Board of Public Works that we got word late Friday or over the weekend that our application was not approved for the state revolving fund zero interest loans for the MWRA. He indicated we will be appealing and he's going to have a call with someone. And so we're going to touch base more tomorrow on this, but it's kind of a surprise to all involved because we were assured because this was a PFAS based project and how we should have been rated that there's an evaluation as to where your project should stand for the financing that we were in a very good position. And we were very surprised to learn that we were passed over. So it all hope is not lost. I mean, there's still an appeal process, but it was not good news. So this will require some discussion, probably a revisit and a rediscussion. I'm actually going to the Board of Public Works meeting tomorrow night. So I'll see what they say. And then I'll have a conversation with Michael later in the week. And then we'll bring this article back next week. I hope next week. Does that sound okay? Great. Sure. Okay. So now we're in the supplemental packet. The first one up is going to be FF, which is Tom. The CPC article, the first article, sets forth monies for community housing, historic resources, open space, fairly straightforward, and move that this Board vote to support article FF entitled Community Preservation Committee Set Asides and Transference. Exactly. Thank you. It's a pretty standard article. We see it every year. So all those in favor, Doug? Yes. Bill? Yes. Ann? Yes. Tom? Yes. Carol? Yes. Five-zero. And Gigi is also Tom's. You see a little pat in here? So this is also a CPC article that also deals with specific projects at Herd Pond, Cow Common, and other various conservation properties. They moved this Board vote to support article Gigi titled Community Preservation Committee. Recommended Project Appropriations. Thank you. Thank you. Anybody have any comments on this? I will say this. I said it before. This is a terrific job. Normally, we'd have four or five articles here. We've got one very well done, a lot of information in here, and I think it really reads clear. So the only edit I think we have to make, and the first page at least, is no bolding. We don't have bolding in one of our styles. See when the first paragraph of Finance Committee comments? Yes. Good. Yep. Yeah. No bolds. All right. Other than that, all those in favor say aye. That's going to be Tom. Yes. Doug. Yes. Bill. Yes. Ann. Yes. And Carol. Yes. That's five-zero. Well, I think we've got, okay, the last one is on page 12. Oh, Tom, this is where your revised P was in here, the supplemental, yeah. Yeah, he directed us there. Yeah, yeah. Well, we did the other one. Okay, but we're good. Article Y, this is Tom's article, and he talked to us before, and we had some questions, so he's probably going to give us all the answers now. Well, I forget what the questions were, but I have to answer them, but this is basically an article aimed at giving the select board authorization to deal with temporary and permanent easements so that the rail trail can be constructed during the next two years. The only permanent easement really has to do with property now owned by the owner of town center. So this part of the article gives authority for the select board to enter an agreement for them to secure the permanent easement, and then another part of the article would grant the select board authority to grant the permanent easement to the state so they can use that for their, for the rail trail. The article will have multiple dependencies so that people can understand where the parcels are located and they're set forth within the body of the, of the motion. I'm happy to answer any questions people have.
I think the last time we talked about this, I'm just going to refresh the memory on the questions. There was something about when Miss, uh, attorney Klein joined us about, uh, the state wanted us to make the arrangements for the private easements. And I think you had some concerns and then you were going to go back and work with her. And then you were, I think that's where we left off. Right. So that's addressed in the third paragraph of the, of the article and the state did ask us to deal with the legal issues and the appraisal issues for various parcels in Whelan, but not owned or controlled by Whelan. And we were very hesitant in agreeing to that and basically said, we, we don't even consider it if the state promises to pay us back. So that's what article paragraph three is all about. So, um, it gives us like more discretion if this article passes to do just that. If the select board is satisfied, the state has agreed to pay us back for that work and will pay us back for that work or pay us money at a time. So that may, uh, that may, may, may, may not happen. The state doesn't work quickly. Um, it may not happen before a town meeting, uh, where they promise in writing to reimburse us. Um, but even if they do, it's still a point of discussion for the board as to whether we would, we would do that. It's their project. It's not the town's project, the state's project, the benefit to the town, but, um, apparently has to do with their own staffing issues. It's relatively complicated. There are a lot of, there are a lot of easements here. So now that I've refreshed everybody's memory on that, is there any questions about that? Cause that was the one paragraph that Tom took pause with and then, uh, was, that's where we are. So, so hearing nothing else, I'll move then to this board vote to insert and support article Y entitled acquisition of permanent temporary easements and conveyance of temporary easements at O'Neill Whalen Town Center for the Mass Central Rail Trip. Exactly. Okay. But I have some comments or questions first, if I may. Yep. This has proposals comments and then it has finance committee comments with arguments in favor. So it's one or the other. So I think just check that in the proposals comments, every item that you want in there is in the finance committee comments and get them incorporated into their comments. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Do you just basically say, Carol, take the, take the arguments in favor and oppose and put it in finance? No, no. See where it says proposals comments? Oh, yes. Those, it's either proposals comments or a long finance committee comments. They've given a full report here. Because they have arguments in favor and opposed. So what makes sure everything that's in your proposals comments that you relevant facts are in those finance committee comments and get rid of that paragraph. Okay. So I'll work with the finance committee. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's it. And then did we want to talk about exhibits here? This was another one I know that had exhibits. It has appendices and I'm working with Kelsey to give her a sum, but we want to walk through it. So we're both on the same page. Okay. So yeah, because one of the problems we've had in the past, the exhibits coming in late. So I just want to make sure Kelsey's happy with the, where that is. You're good. Okay. So just so you're taking out arguments in favor and arguments opposed. No, no. Those are staying. Those are staying. It's proposals comments. Just put them in finance. I understood. Yeah. Whatever you want out of that, make sure it's in the other one and off we go. All right. If anybody else have any questions, comments on that one, otherwise we're going to vote now. So Mr. Faye. Yes. Mr. Levine. Yes. Mr. Whitney. Yes. Ms. Brinsley. Yes. And Ms. Martin. Motion passes. Yes. Motion passes 5-0. I think we have one article left to look at tonight, and this is going to be article EE. That's me. That we know. The planning board appeals amending count code. Is it section? Is that the right thing? Section 198. Correct. That we discussed with the planning board last week. So we're going to take, if you look on the agenda, we're going to take two actions on this. We're going to discuss this. We're going to vote that we're happy with what we have to insert. If you want to do that. And then we are going to take a vote to refer to the planning board because we need a report under, somebody's going to find the page for me, under Chapter 48, Section 5. You refer it for a public hearing, which then results in a report. If I've said it correctly, have I got it, Michael? Yes. Okay, good. Well, I got a little tongue-died at the end here, so everybody help me out. Doug, you have the floor. He has put in track changes and a clean copy, correct? Correct. So based on our discussion with the planning board, I thought it made a lot of sense to not necessarily require a developer come and present a concept to the select board if our land use group among the staff is already aware of this. We could save the developer that step and just have the land use group or a representative or two from that group come and present to the select board as soon as they become aware of a project. I think it made sense to shift that responsibility away from a developer in town to not create any additional hurdle. And so I kept only the main meat of the second part of it, which is moving the appeal timeline up. Um, so as we had spoken about on a couple of times, not having to wait until a building permit issues to be able, uh, to file an appeal from site plan approval, and then also amended it to narrow, um, that appeal, earlier appeal action to these larger projects in town. Now, I haven't really gotten any definitive feedback from the sources that I've reached out to about square footage for a structure and square footage for a site. So I put those two numbers in there. Um, Bill, I, I'd love to hear your thoughts if I'm off the mark as I'm, I'm open to changing those to whatever people think makes the most sense. Um, I did 10,000 and 20,000. Right, right. So what constitutes alteration of a site? I think that we're intentionally leaving that somewhat vague, um, cause we did discuss this, um, the last time, um, with the planning board that we wanted to keep that reference in, this was suggested by town council, um, because sometimes they're, for instance, cutting trees, clear cutting, and then moving earth, bringing soil in, taking soil out. And so we wanted to encompass as much as possible. Obviously we don't have a definitions section here. Um, but that's why it wasn't intentionally drafted to be somewhat all encompassing and vague by town council.
I just not sure on the numbers. I'm, I'm really struggling. I thought, I thought originally, this was before site plan approval, right? And now it's after site plan approval. No, if the timing is always the same, what I had originally was this whole section about having to present to the select board. And so we pulled all that out. So developer doesn't need to do that anymore. This appeal timing is the same so that instead of waiting, however many weeks or months it takes to get the building permit, that this appeal process can play out during the time in between site plan approval and the building permit. So it's happening before construction starts, which to me seems to make a lot more sense based on what is happening with at least one of our Dover amendment projects this year, this past year. I guess my only other thought, Doug, is that it struck me that 12, 15 years ago, there was a town meeting discussion of, of some, of a proposed amendment to the code that had to do with earthwork and how much the quantity of soil that could be moved or something like that. Peter Gossels was the moderator at the time. So this is, this is a quite some time ago. So I don't know if anyone's had the opportunity to research whether, in fact, that's the case and whether this is consistent with that, should it have been adopted? Um, maybe, I don't, Carol, you, you pay attention to these things. Uh, do you, do you recall, uh, such a discussion at the town meeting? No, I'm sorry. I don't. That's a, well, anyway, I can do, I can do some research in, cause I'm looking at the documents from telling me that they have online for links and it goes back to 2011. Do you think it would be before that, Bill, or that would be a good place to start?
I would guess.
Peter Gossels was still moderator then. Uh, I am hard pressed to remember when I, my first term was on the slate board, so. Well, do I remember when your third term's going to be? Um, I can do a little research on that. I'm, I'm in my third term, Carol. Mm-hmm. Yep.
Seeking a fourth. Just, just want to make sure my pension eligibility. You, you vested. Yep, that's it. I think you're, you're working your way up to a hundred percent vested here. Yeah, right. Uh, what, so what are we thinking here? Um. We can put it on hold until next week. We can. Oh, but we want to. I want to tell you something. Yeah, I want to. You want to refer to the planning board so they can start. Well, the timeline is, is already tight, which is why I said to Doug, when he's calling me from Disneyland, I said, we're going to put this on because of the timeline. Um, we have to send this to the planning, if we vote, then they don't get that information to them until they have the next meeting. I don't know when it is. Let's, then they have to set a date for hearing. It has to be advertised for a couple weeks, and then they have the hearing, and then they have, I think, 45 days to do, you know, the report. Up, up to 45. Up to 45. But let's go, let's go with 10 and 20. So, do we need, I mean, we could always, that was going to be my sentence, we could always put something in there and then be amenable, uh, to any, um, um. Yeah, if they come back with a report that says. 30 and 90 or something or what else. Yeah. We'll, we'll opine then. I'm just trying to think about, I think we're kind of tight on the time here. Yeah. Um, now you mentioned something earlier that caught my attention here, and I'll throw this out back to you, Bill. Do we need to put a definition section in here on this code?
When you talked about the alteration or whatever you, there isn't a definition section?
You know, I think we'd rather let this be a broad rather than specific, uh, the difficulty and, you know, talking about enumerating what constitutes alteration. You might leave something out that would be important or you might, you know, there might be a proposed activity that would be objectionable that wasn't captured by that. So I, you know, again, it's subject to, uh, the planning board's, uh, hearing and report. And if they have other views, then I'm sure the board would be happy to consider them. Um, so I want to throw this out to Tom and Anne, do you have any comments on this? I do not. Yeah, I, I would like the planning board's, um, feedback on it. I think there's, I mean, I've come across this where you can appeal early. It's just discouraging for developers sometimes, um, because they could be, you know, they could, they could have the right to do something and then, uh, appealing something could just be used as leverage. Um, so I don't love it, but I get that there's people within the town that, that based on what's going on right now may want to see this happen. So I definitely want to give them the opportunity to see it, but let's, uh, let's get planning board just to give them a little feedback. I'm good. So it does say they have to file within 20 days, right? So the site plan is approved by the plan. That's the same time period where they have to file. It's just moving it up from after the building permit issues to after site plan approval. But they, but they only have the 20 days to appeal. Correct. The developer would know within, they got the approval and then within the 20 days, they know whether there's an appeal or not. Correct. Does the board of appeal have, uh, uh, a timeline, uh, within which they must approve something or, or they must act that they get, they get an appeal or are they obliged to, uh, rule on the appeal one way or another within a certain timeframe? I think the answer to that is yes. I don't know the number. I have to look at the code. Yeah. Oh, sorry. Maybe the kind of argument, Anne, is that, you know, before somebody goes and does, uh, working drawings that they know, uh, that there's an appeal and they would potentially hold off. I don't know. I know it disrupts the normal flow of these types of projects, but at the same time, um, maybe, maybe that's okay. I haven't seen many towns do it. So I think it would just be good to get some additional feedback. So I have to also say, I think 10,000 is small because it would really, I mean, think about houses are, everybody else is in this area except me, but houses can be five or 6,000 square feet. And then if you have an outbuilding on the property, okay. You're not going to have another five or 6,000 square feet outbuilding though. Oh, you have no idea what I'm going to build. Just keep in mind that the reason building permit tends to be the time period is a lot of, a lot of things get filled figured out between site plan and building. And so if I've just gotten an appeal because somebody doesn't like something basic, that's a legal process. So if I'm a neighbor and I'm just upset because, you know, my neighbor is doing a duplex and I know I can hold it up. I'm holding it up in two different, what could be two different sections of time. It could really screw with people just trying to do basic development. The site plan approval just tends to be, okay, you're following every rule. You've put together the plans, but then the building permit is way more, it's for one thing, it's way more expensive. And then so you know that they're really going to do it. And then two, it's way more detailed. You have to get everybody to sign off on it. And so it feels premature, but when I looked it up, there were some towns that have it this way. So the question is, why do they have it that way? And what are their communities like? Because what I don't want to do is discourage development, but I also am one voice. Yeah. And I know this depth, this cuts both ways. And to me, it almost seemed nonsensical for this appeal to be playing out once construction had already started, that they had issue with the site plan approval, nothing with the building permit itself, but they wanted to take issue and have an appeal with how site plan approval was granted. Yet their hands were tied and they couldn't file an appeal for some six months. Then construction starts. And now, if you stop construction, one side is aggrieved because you stop construction, but you allow construction to continue and the other side is aggrieved. So to me, it just seemed to make so much more sense to allow it to play out before construction started. But I hear you, like it definitely can cut, it cuts both ways. Yeah. And I think it's also just keep in mind what site plan, they're likely, we got to look it up. We got to find out because I would assume that you're more likely to lose that legal argument. You're more likely to hold it up, but lose the argument at site plan than building permit.
I don't know, Anne, if you were a developer and you had site plan approval, and then you proceeded to complete your working drawings, line up a contractor, get your financing, go to a closing, get your building permit, and then you're stopped. Yeah. Or, or, or you're, or you're having to proceed at risk. Now, how does the lender feel about that? I don't know. Um, but there, there's more, I mean, I, I would assume that I would, I would have a higher case of winning if you tried to stop me at site plan than building permit, but maybe I'm wrong. It would be good to get that input. Let's talk to planning. Yeah. Um, um, um, section 607.2.1, we have approving, approving. 607.2.1. Yep. Got it. Pick what you want. So just to clarify anybody. Um, we took the beginning out with, uh, someone having to give the report to the select board, uh, because we're going to rely on the staff land use, um, department to tell us when there's large projects. Is that what we're doing, Doug? Say that again. Originally, we were going to say, we had a requirement that the select board needed to be notified by the developer, but now it's not going to be part of the article. I think that we should just make it practice. To have policy. That's good. Yeah. Well, practice is a better one than the policy because then we have to write a policy and we don't want to write a policy. Yeah. Okay. So that takes care of all of the questions. I think Tom, you all, you're good. You don't have any more questions on this? Good. Okay. If it's all bets down, then I think my point is we need two votes. One is to insert because we have not inserted this, right? How about one vote? I do both, right? Like I did with the, uh, can we do both on this? I don't know because we're sending to the planning board. So I know, should we do two? Somebody, what do you think, Michael? Do I need two votes here or one? I think I would do a separate vote and it's under chapter 40, a section. Yeah. Uh, how do you like that? I did it. I outdid you guys on a legal one. Good job, counsel. What'd you say? Good job, counselor. Oh, that'll be the last time that happens. Okay. So I think we need the two votes. I'm just trying to find something I want them to do. I'll move that this board vote to insert article EES amended and title and commend town code section 198 planning board appeals. Okay. Okay. Thank you. As there were no more of the discussion on this, we'll have a roll call votes. We'll start with, uh, Bill. Yes. Ann? Yes. Doug? Yes. And Tom? Yes. And Carol? Yes. Five zero. So now we need a vote, a motion, somebody maybe, uh, to refer to the planning board. So pursuant to Massachusetts General Laws chapter 48, section five, we need to vote to refer the article planning board for a public hearing. So moved. Thank you. Second. All right. Any discussion on that? All right. Let's take the vote. Ann? Yes. Bill? Yes. Uh, Doug? Yes. And Tom? Yes. And Carol? Five zero zero. Okay. So we will, um, I'll have Abby notify, um, wait a minute. I've got to consult with Michael here. Do I have Abby send that over there we've referred to or do I have to have you do it? Because don't we have to authorize Michael to do that? I've done it because it was December. Go ahead. The last few times, Madam Clerk, I've sent the email the following day to the planning board chair and Mr. Hummel. So Madam Clerk says, I think we need to redo the vote. Uh, are we, are we all set or just have Michael do it? Uh, what's the question? We don't have to revote, do we? To authorize Michael to send it over? I don't think so. Okay. Yeah. When we did it in December, we were doing it ahead of schedule. So I think we're all set. I don't want this coming back. I'll resend it tomorrow. Great. Thank you. So I'd like to go back. Just one last thing here in the rate in the packet here. And just let's look at, uh, the, uh, the chart of the articles so we can just see, you know, page, what page is out on like four or five or six or something just to see where we are. And, um, so next, first of all, I want to say thank you very much. We've done about 20 some articles and it's going to be about, I think we're down somewhere around 47, 46. So we're, we're, we're doing a really, really good job. So we have a big nut to crack here. So, um, let's just kind of go down these and see which ones you think you could have ready for the next meeting on the second. And then I'll put those on the agenda. So we have recognized citizens. I don't know how, what's the status of that one. Is that coming? That's coming, but not there yet. Okay. How about paid previous fiscal year, unpaid bills and how's that coming? Good. I think I have them all except for one. Okay. So could you get that one and get it to us by Thursday to Abby so we can get it in the packet for next week? Yep. That'd be great. We don't know about the coming year transfers. I think we're going to be waiting for that one. OPEB funding. Do we have the number for that? Does he giving you the numbers? Can we get that one in? I think so. I think, uh, it was just being overlooked one more time. Okay, great. Uh, enterprise fund budgets. Just, yeah, I think I have all of them except for the, um, the transfer one or which one is it? Hold on. Yeah. The transfer station one, water and transfer station is the one that I'm weighing up. All the others I think are being confirmed. Probably could do capital stabilization fund, choose offices and hear reports. Could you get those in? Those are kind of standard ones. Yeah, that'd be great. Um, let's see. O is in process. We're going to have a conversation next week with the, um, personnel, um, director of HR and the personnel board chair about some salary survey they've had that may impact that article. It may not. So we'll wait till we see that. That brings us down to where am I? Uh, I think the transfer to the general station will say that actually took that out tonight. He's in which we've done. All right. Let's see. Holiday Road. We're not ready on that yet, are we, Bill? Well, um, I think the only open question there is, uh, the, uh, suggestion from the school committee that they would ask that, uh, the, uh, uses to be studied include schools. And I think it would, uh, be well to have a discussion with the school committee about that. Um, they are meeting
on Wednesday where they're going to get a presentation from their consultant on their, um, long-term plan. Um, uh, but, uh, I think it, it does bear some discussion. I, I could request some time, uh, on their agenda, but, um, Carol, you've spoken to their chair most recently. I actually had a, um, communication with the chair earlier today, and they had some suggested language that they were going to send over to Carol either tonight or tomorrow. So be on the lookout for that. And then you can get it to Bill, Carol. And I'll give it to you, Bill, share it with you because Bill and I, so are you thinking that we should, well, let's see the language and then let's talk offline. If we need to schedule them, get them in to a board meeting or what we want to do next. Yep. Okay. That sounds good. Um, that's D. But I'd also like, uh, the board to, you know, if, if that can't be arranged in the near future, I'd like to have a discussion, uh, with the board about that suggestion. So, um, I'll put D.D. on the, on the agenda for next Monday then. Is that what you're saying? Yeah. Uh, assuming we get some language, uh, that could be included in the packet and then we could have that conversation. Okay. We'll do that. Um, let's see, where am I? H.H. I'm going to have to come back to you on that. K.K. I, um, this article is still not quite formalized, finalized. Um, and I have given them a deadline to be done, um, by next, early next week, or we're going to have to not, um, insert that one. So we'll see what happens. Um, so on the planning articles, we have to wait, Michael, now for the report to come back before we take a position on these, because we have talked to the planning board. Well, they have to, my recollection is they have to give a report to town meeting as well. Right. I'm not sure if the, the board has to wait for that as well to take a position or not. Maybe we can find out about that. And then maybe I can put those in because we've had the conversation with them already, right, on those. And then maybe we can get those write-ups done, um, for next week. And then next week, we're going to meet with the other two, two petitioners on the last petitioner articles so that we can hear what those are about.
So, all right. The idea, of course, is that we want to get these done. Um, I believe the deadline we're supposed to, I think the deadline has been moved to March 17th, which is the Tuesday, which allows us to meet, um, Monday night on the 16th to finalize anything and get them in. Um, so we only have like three weeks left, but I think we're going to do it. So anyway, anybody have any last comments they want to mention? Otherwise, oh, Bill, we did a bunch of the rest. We did all the rest of the items while you, while we weren't here. So we will now take a motion to adjourn at 9 38. So moved. Oh, I didn't do reports and concerns. Sorry. Does anybody have any reports and concerns? Yes, Mr. Fay. Three things. Um, I paid my water bill over the weekend. I thought, you know what, I might pay it electronically. So I went to do that. It would cost me $10 to pay my $325. And I thought to myself, that's pretty expensive. I can just pay for a check. It cost me about 40 cents, $10. But, but electronic payment is, is here. It's not the wave of the future. It's here. I'm wondering whether at the town we can find more efficient and effective ways for residents to pay bills, um, um, in the future. Second thing is the EDC, um, I believe is going to meet with us on March 2nd, which I'm glad about that they have some ideas to inform residents on, um, you know, some of the
property value issues and, and that we've, that we're facing in, in, in town. And I'm really talking about his tax revenue. And, and, uh, I think that the EDC would be an effective committee to help educate people on that. Uh, I do think it, it, it, it does impact, um, residents who live near these
Dover amendment projects. And the next item is, uh, I'm wondering whether our board might want to consider a public forum that one of our meetings concerning the holiday road article to answer questions and, um, listen to comments that might help, uh, clarify some things. Could you repeat that public forum on what articles? The holiday road. Yeah. Oh, I thought we already agreed to that. Great. If we did, super. That's all I have. Thank you. Okay. Um, Doug and Bill. I'm good. Okay. I have two. One is, I think somebody asked, um, first of all, we need to have a timeline for the legal review. So Kelsey and I've put our heads together after we get, you know, the warrant out and to the homes, then we'll send out an RFP. The plan will be that we'll get those back sometime in May, June. We'll look at that. Um, and see if we can't make a decision when we get that. So that's that we're in the works. The other question I think was somebody raised was because we had the, um, I know that our fee was increasing to, I think it was 207 per hour. Um, it is for, I forgot what you told me, Kelsey, what kind of legal work it's for. I'm going blanket. Yeah. Madam chair, it's for the tax title for, uh, work with the treasurer. So it's tax title, a fee has increased. And we think it was about in the one 90, one 95 range, and it's now going to the 207. Someone had asked that. So I want to just report that. And then finally, I want to say that, um, and it's funny that Tom mentioned, like the EDC wants to come in. We're very popular and a lot of people want to come in and see us. And then a lot of people, they'll seem to think they can either go to the town clerk, or they can go almost anybody. And also they will be in on our meeting, like the next Monday. We're also having difficulty with some times there's, um, they may end up have to fit somebody in and it results in issuing a revised agenda. I hate to do that to the staff. That's extra work. So Abby and I are going to put together, I just want to make sure the board was comfortable with us, a little memo about to try to eliminate some of the frustration on those who want to get, come to meet before us. And then, oh, those of us who are trying to put the agendas together, you know, maybe a little communication of, you know, did you have to speak to Abby or the chair before you just decide to book yourself in or something like that. So what this food for thought that will probably go on in the next couple of weeks, try to help smooth things over. All right. And with that, we'll have a motion to adjourn at 942. So moved. Second. All right. All those in favor, Tom? Yes. Doug? Yes. Ann? Yes. Bill? Yes. And Carol, motion. Terry's 5-0. Thank you so much, everybody.