April 29, 2026 – Capital Improvement Planning Committee – Video & Transcript
April 29, 2026 - Capital Improvement Planning Committee
Right. It's 6.30 p.m. on April 29th, and I'm going to call to order the meeting of the Capital Improvement Planning Committee.
We are in a hybrid meeting, so located in person in the select board meeting room and also on Zoom.
And I'm going to read the OML.
The meeting may be recorded, and if recorded, will be made available to the public on Wake PM as soon as possible after the meeting. Pursuant to Chapter 2 of the Acts of 2025, this meeting will be conducted in person and via remote access in accordance with applicable law.
You may attend in person in the select board meeting room or via the Zoom link on the town's website. When required by law or allowed by the chair, persons wishing to provide public comment or otherwise participate in the meeting may do so in the meeting location or on Zoom. Public comment should be limited to two minutes per person. Yay. And we're going to do, everybody is here in person, so I have John, Brian, Kelly, Liz, and Brad all here in the select board meeting room. And then let's review the agenda. So 6.30 p.m., call to order, review the agenda for public and announcements. 6.35, public comment and members' response. 6.40, review and finalize amendment to CIPC's Fiscal 2027 through Fiscal 31 report for inclusion. The committee's position on Article DD, Holiday Road. 6.55, discuss comparison of the five-year plan in the annual town meeting warrant versus CIPC's Fiscal 27 through Fiscal 31 report amended February 17, 2026. 7.10, discuss next steps to advance future CIPC report process improvements, including but not limited to those outlined in CIPC's Fiscal 27 through Fiscal 31 report amended February 17, 2026. 7.10, discuss next steps to advance future CIPC report process improvements, including but not limited to those outlined in CIPC's Fiscal 27 through Fiscal 31 report amended February 17, 2026. 7.10, discuss next steps to advance future CIPC report process improvements, including but not limited to those outlined in CIPC's Fiscal 27 through Fiscal 31 report amended February 17, 2026. Including, but not limited to, potential revisions to the current version of the Capital Improvement Plan CIP submission form and the CIPC project plan for the remainder of 2026. 8.10 is discuss succession planning, finance, and school committee designees. I left that on there just in case we had any follow-up, which I don't have any, but I wanted to leave it just in case. 8.20, review and vote to approve minutes of April 14th. 8.25, topics not reasonably anticipated by the chair, 40 hours prior to posting, and if any, and setting the time of the next meeting, and 8.30, adjourn. So from there, do we have, I don't have any announcements per se. I did get an email from a resident who was not going to be able to be here for public comment, though I just read it. So I don't know that I'm, I can kind of give up. As high level as I can, but I don't know that I'm ready to give a detail on it. But before I do that, is there anybody in public comment? No, of course not, right? Okay. So I did get an email, try to summarize it, and I can forward it to everybody as well. From Carol Plum.
Yes, it doesn't say that, but that is correct. She wanted to know if. Anyone from CTC had mentioned or brought to us an acquisition of 17 Gleason Lane, six acres that runs along the 25 Holiday Road parcel on the western border. It's up for sale and had a price drop, which suggested that it to somebody that perhaps it's not conducive to building a large house because of shape. I'm not going to go into all of this, but the point was that there's. Somebody is asking for $10,000 in CIPC fund or CPC, sorry. So CPC funds. And she was wondering how this fits into the CIPC process. So I'm going to not. I can comment on it now or later just because I watched. Yeah, why don't you comment on it when we're talking about the article DD, just because there's other things. Why don't we talk about it there, but I was going to say I don't. I don't have enough information to intelligently come in on it, but and I also wanted to convey Carol wanted us to know she thought we have done an amazing job this year, heavy lift on a compressed time frame, and so that in the minutes. Yeah. For tackling the issue. Amazing. Share that because I know it can feel like we're in a vacuum here doing this and not getting, you know, not sure. I don't want anybody appreciates it. So I appreciate Carol saying that I'll summarize what you just said for two sentences on your public comment. Yeah, that's fine. That's fine. And I can forward you the email just in case. All right. So the agenda for a minute here. Okay. All right. So Liz, I know you sent me something. I don't, I didn't forward it on. Did you send it to the whole group? No, just you. Okay. All right. So why don't we want sending that to everybody and I can try and log in and put it up on screen to Brian, if you want to give an update on the issue that Carol raised, Carol Plum raised.
Just for everybody's benefit, let's refer to this as Article 16, formerly known as Article DD.
So the property that Carol Plum mentioned through Kelly.
It came up in two different meetings for two different reasons. Where I first saw it come up was at the Community Preservation Committee meeting a week or so ago.
And one of the members who I believe is, has an interest in what's going on with the Holiday Road, Orchard Lane parcel.
Apparently, mentioned that this parcel on Gleason Lane, which I had trouble until I looked at the actual GIS map to see how it actually intersected, but this parcel at 17 Gleason Lane has a property line up budding with the 13 acres of the Orchard Lane property. And it's got a single residence house on it. It's got a very narrow driveway coming in off Gleason Lane, and then it opens up and the house is there. And at CPC, the primary, primary reason for bringing it up was to see if the committee would authorize spending $10,000 to get an appraisal done. And as described by the member who brought it up, he said, you know, it could be a total long shot, but maybe there's some value to the town of acquiring that parcel, given that it abuts with the 13 acres, and it might make the ultimate use of that 13 acres better, different. Exactly. And and so they had some conversation about that. At all points, CPC agreed to vote to spend $10,000 on appraisal and authorize the chair and the vice chair to speak with the broker to see if the individual would be patient enough to allow CPC to have an appraisal done. So that was that meeting. But there is no, there was nothing before that. committee about actually acquiring couldn't get done until either a special town meeting or the next annual town meeting and it would have to go through the normal cpc process where someone would make a proposal to acquire it for a particular purpose that fit within the cbc funding at that meeting susan weinstein the chair who's also on the housing trust that i served with mentioned that the housing trust had briefly discussed the property as well so i said i'll go watch that meeting and they had a 15 20 minute conversation two weeks before the cc discussion um and the chair of that committee mike stady who's a developer in town noted that he apparently had had it under contract develop it and had managed to get a contract price that was lower than the asking price and uh for whatever reason he decided to pass on and i'm not exactly sure what his idea was but in the course of that conversation um understanding that the housing trust doesn't need town meeting action if they want to buy a parcel um and then they don't pay anything more than the appraised value they have them and they have the money or they borrow they can just vote to do it and so they were looking at it for affordable housing purposes and and long story short blight uh not surprisingly suggested that the butters to that parcel lee's lane would be apparently new he suspected they would be somewhat resistant to you know affordable housing at least in anything more than a single unit or a couple units and so i think i reached out to the vice chair of the cpc and just said hey you might want a further discussion of trust because at one point the trust talked about buying a property up on reeves hill and having a conservation commission purchase a portion of it or fund to purchase a portion of it and the trust fund the portion of it for an affordable house or two and so none of that's before any committee other than if the trust decides to proceed which they can do on their own if it finds its way in front of the cpc and the purpose is conservation land it could end up having to come through here because that would be a town asset it goes to the trust it doesn't have to end up here so ultimately answering the question that carol was asking is is that something that would be part of our process and it would only be if somebody proposes that the town acquire some portion or all of it for town purpose yeah for a town purpose so it's something that falls under yeah that falls under cipc's um so i think you've answered it it's on the tape i can i can let carol know that we answered it and she can so it may come back at some point um exactly how it it affects um what we're about to talk about article 16. it's just that it came up in the context of some proposal that the vice chair of the cpc had laid up as to how that parcel might fit in it certainly could in the future it might not affect how we look how anything that what we're voting right now but it is context of there might be a layer-on piece at a later date right if the town decides if they if they go forward with their due diligence they get the vote for the money the town meeting they do their due diligence they decide that the use for it as a town use then yeah it would end up coming back here because they'd need money to do whatever the you know proposing to do beyond the due diligence so uh and it's good we talked about this i think the last meeting it's good to just when these things pop up just to understand what they are and there's nothing to do right now but yeah i think i think it's excellent to talk about it it's interesting that if it's been for sale that that didn't come up earlier just given if it's in a but if it's an abutting property well it was yeah i think i think i heard somebody say when it came on the market originally it was maybe two point something million and then the owner dropped the property i don't know if it's in the state or not the owner dropped the property about that price down and then when i heard mike say he had under contract for 1.3 million that it starts to get it into a ballpark where at least if you could build multiple affordable housing units and or just buy some conservation land it could make sense it's something it's probably tear down uh yeah i don't know anything about the house it's just i think it's it's enough for us right at this point we don't have to do anything right now i don't think it affects what we're about to do um but it's the context to have it could come up and then it's conceivable to come up with town meeting during the conversation on article 16 although i think it would be premature and it's not there's nothing about it that i think is needed for all the various and potential uses of the orchard lane property so that's what i can tell you okay thank you your resident wakeham viewer all right um i sent that file from liz to everybody and i'm going to go ahead brian and share it on here bigger but i can also because can you see that yeah you have better eyes than me um okay capital i like to okay start with the basics uh just the heading i think um i think it's fine i don't know if we want to say addendum addendum number two to the well i guess it's yeah i guess this is the best it gets it gets murky if you try to combine the amended report issued february 17th and then this is another amendment right kind of yeah i think people get the idea and then it's labeled number two
yeah and we've identified and you've got articles article 16. thank you for uh catching that that needed to be 16 instead of dd um so that's fine all right and then too many things on this yeah this is minor john wasn't here at the last meeting when we discussed and voted on this so if john you have any specific questions you should feel free to pop in yeah i read the through i mean nothing jumped out soon i mean
i don't know if you have any comments on the first section the summary i think that's
is that a is that no recommendation or is that a recommend against right uh well the motion to support failed or the motion to recommend failed yeah i think we can probably just end that last sentence at the 2-2 vote rather than add that resulting and no recommendation being made
are you making the updates real time or do you want to leave um i can because i'm in it right now and i'm not sure that everybody's okay with that a section i have highlighted yeah probably is appropriate to take that long or maybe i can't why are you not letting me do that because i can't get it from protective views it's like the risk of um making this discussion longer than you probably want it to be just because this has come up in other meetings it's not letting you in the past honestly we realized john wasn't here
says we need to revisit this and consider and revote it and in fact if we wanted to do that we'd have to vote first someone would have to propose to do a revote and that would have to be voted on and approved and then you would do a revote we used to do that on the fincom when we had to we maybe took a vote on the capital budget and as it changed and to give people the opportunity to change their positions potentially and then sometimes that vote to revote would fail vote stands and there's certainly plenty of select board votes that whoever's their votes and they typically won't revisit it unless there's new information um so i just again this is a matter of institutional education um that's a possibility of if people thought there were three people here that wanted to revisit the vote on so i'll i'll ask the question first of john john do you feel that you would like to vote on this because that's important to me if you want to not not not at this point now so what are i guess i mean i'm reading through the so where does it leave it at this point what is it basically we're just putting a page in the reports of two two things right first we took a vote as to whether or not we thought we needed to opine on this and we agreed we won so that's passed take a position on it um and then then we voted on what our position would be we voted to recommend right we did a vote to recommend and that failed because it was a tie where does that leave us is cipc doesn't recommend this being included what does that do somebody might ask a town meeting yeah somebody asked that um that would be the only right the only uh thing and if they were to ask right the rationale for that you know sort of two sides of rationale right as there is a many issues the rationale for not recommending it was um was that we those of us like at least i'll speak for my own my own opinion right well personally i think it's a good idea and i want to i think it's a good idea and i want to i think it's a good idea and i want to i think it's a good idea and i want to see the town look at more ways to get revenue um i didn't think it was fully baked in terms of how we were going to spend this money and whether or not it was enough and so that's a that's a recurring theme in the years that i've been on fincom and here of we approve projects that we don't have fully scoped and then we have to come back and get more later and i just i always think that if we one thing to have something overrun it's another thing to sort of not have planned for the full project that you're trying to do and so that was my opinion if anybody else wants to give theirs just a recap so with that being said with that i mean we don't know what someone will do but does that mean someone would actually take an action to then they wanted to push it forward add more detail i mean no different than the ball field i mean it's it's in the warrant it's going to get voted on right so this was really just cipc per the bylaw at least three of us thought for the bylaw and we're going to have to come back and get more detail about that but we're going to have to come back and we're going to have to come back and get more detail about that this project fit the description in the bylaw of what we're supposed to opine on so we're opining on it the town's going to vote on it um and via the article and if they want to know our opinion it will be it'll be in an addendum they could always ask at town meeting for somebody to get up and and speak to it and so you know it appears like it will likely get some amount of air time at town meeting and so the neighbors aren't too thrilled uh so assuming we agree with this tonight i'd be happy to like the other two documents get it posted on the town website and you know again it's possible somebody may stand up at town meeting and say what's the cipc's position on this if you're a butter you might say geez they didn't recommend it that's good for our site right select board supported it and the fincom supported it not that unanimously and said not yeah it's not unanimous so you forget yeah i think given that we were i think normally i would be like you know we voted on it if you don't feel strongly i mean the only time the reason i pause is because it was a tie vote and if i vote fails uh it's only because i wasn't here can you just leave it there if john's not that interested you know i wouldn't vote in favor of re-voting it if john were interested he'd probably then ask the question well how do you think he would vote it wouldn't affect the outcome um then it's not worth re-voting yeah i mean i think i mean from where i was before it's interesting but i agree i mean for 200 000 it should be like this is this is where we this is our minimum goal i think that would be my ask anyway so yeah and i think there was a long list of things right that that phil gave us of that what they'd want to do and i think where i struggled was i feel like it should have been phased what can you do what do you want to achieve and can you achieve with that amount of money you may not know exactly know that but what i'd hate to see happen is you do the three pieces you can do with the 200 you know three pieces of phases you want to do and you can do one and a half with what you've got are you going to do one and a half are you going to do one gate it and decide whether or not to spend any more money right i mean i guess adding the gleason sale then you'd probably want to know what's included in this study if you're going to do it right because imagine that has more better road access right yeah yeah yeah that's not anything i think the select board was you know focused on for the school committee yeah i don't mean i don't get the impression a re-vote will necessarily strengthen the cause more i don't think it'll really matter for the vote at the time so i don't have strong feelings to rebuild unless we did update my dark yeah and so my question is so i i appreciate this from a notes perspective but do we do we think for the purposes of the public our addition to our we need anything more than the summary um i didn't know what we wanted to do i looked at samples online and it's for a lot of contracts you know i can find one for committees specifically so i kind of had the summary in there and i kind of blew it out a little bit if we wanted to add additional detail and we could pick and choose keep them both delete one or the other i i like the summary because i think it gets to the basic like we voted against it and um we said briefly why so i don't know as long as the brief why is sufficient for people because it gives an indication as to of of the two no votes and why that was you know i agree that probably is all that's needed combined with what's in our minutes and if if you think the minutes are lacking um i think the minutes are lacking and so that's why i think the i think the sentence right members expressed concern about the adequacy of the estimate and lack of clearly defined end use while acknowledging potential value of early due diligence i think that that sentence sums up right our opinion because if we knew this when we were doing a report it would probably be it would be about a paragraph in the report so i think we could just do the summary and thanks thanks for all of the other words and did we put today's date on it or do you want to just leave it so that's it yeah you got to vote it first and then it'd be today's did it be today's date though great um okay so can i get a motion to approve the amendment as the addendum as amended so moved seconds okay um we don't need a roll call vote all in favor
if that was everyday right yes take a second motion i probably should have done it with the first motion but the move that we authorize a chair to submit the second addendum to the town manager
all in favor diet did you take my words and create a motion out of that aye or did i make the motion thank you Mindy motion you second i did is that what i did when i said so motion sorry kelly you send me a final version i'll trip it off with the minutes do you want me to send the final version or i could do it because it's just that one that's a simple enough edit okay i'll do it yeah i think you sent it sent the other two their initial report in the addendum i think you sent to a wider audience yeah send them to the same audience and you'll be copied on it and then you can do it to the we're doing that please welcome build our duty thank you for that sharing just as a follow-up on the holiday road as i understand it's a select board met on monday and they pick seven people to be on some sort of planning or feasibility advisory committee to study holiday road good level good of advisory committee around here um okay get that to the agenda okay so next item was discussion of the comparison of the five-year plan um in the warrant versus what was in our report which ryan you sent us your first stab at that right yep there you go uh what did you send i must have missed that 19th i think it was a 20 second oh 20 second i'm sorry yes yes it's i'm sorry everybody well so some of us haven't haven't had a chance to review it then but i i mean i read all the notes in the comments about what changed so i mean you can just
from all the other meetings yeah and i think there's two two things i mean the numbers are the numbers other than if i the number in the wrong place right tried to do some cross-checking and i went from i think kelly had asked for sort of more high-level comparisons which are the first two tabs and then i went with the setup that you were familiar with from our prior deliberation and just expanded it out to include the town managers recommended capital budget that's in the warrant and five-year plan and then a variance column and tied that back to the higher level sheets so that if if one wants to drill down from the higher level sheets any particular variance you can go to the detail and figure out what what were the items that created the variance and it's really most of them it's it's an exercise of i color-coded them without telling you what the color codes were but as we talked about last week anything that made its way into the fincom's recommended fiscal 27 capital budget assuming the town approves it that's a done deal now so the extent there's items in that that were not in our recommended fiscal 27 too bad for us right those those those will now be done and um anything that we had suggested should be in there that wasn't again the same thing but the real question is what do you know what do we what do we plan to do with this information i think last meeting we talked about okay as we start up the next cycle we need to understand the ground rules from once we step off for fiscal 28 through 31 what's our starting point is it our report to the town manager's five-year plan or is it some negotiated agreed upon starting point in discussions that we should have had could have had couldn't but didn't have time to have with the town manager from the finance director
i think that's where we left it and all i did was said okay here's the information assuming the numbers are accurately portrayed where do we go with this nation how do we how do we get to a new starting point i'll i'll let you guys stop first before maybe i just want to make sure i'm looking at the right thing so yeah i saw the recommendation when i was here for that and then i saw fincom and others suggested back down what is this is this comparing what is this comparing comparing to what now appears in the town meeting warrant so the fiscal 27 capital budget numbers that are showing here will be voted upon in an article for the omnibus budget and the fiscal 20 27 through 31 all five of them are included in the fincom report it's the five-year capital plan then the second tab showing the sourcing of the funds for five-year plan um and the fiscal 27 capital budget are also shown in the town meeting warrant so is this now agreed to by the fincom so fincom and town manager have aligned they're giving it to the town so i i think they're all aligned so whatever town manager originally proposed is sort of irrelevant at this point because it seemed like it moved into the middle there were four or five items that i think i'm pushed back on the town manager took their recommendations so the only thing that town will be voting on is fiscal 27 numbers it's part of the capital budget so like this is the number in the warrant now uh the town meeting column town manager column okay so that's not the original that's the current proposal it's the current they revised so tell me to revise based on feedback from uh so you don't so you don't see the two and a half million dollars for example for the field yeah that was in his original recommended capital budget so all i was doing was comparing what's in the warrant for each of those fiscal years to what was in our report those same fiscal years got it and showing what the difference dollar differences were and if all you have are those two tabs that would be interesting but not terribly helpful because you know there may be there may be some negotiation with ourselves that we could do to either agree or disagree amongst ourselves do we just accept certain items that the town manager proposed they get approved right i would imagine yeah it assumes it we're at the for the moment assume that the town approves 27 as is that may change or let's assume that whatever i would say whatever the town approves ultimately we come back and update this because that is what it is starting point yeah yeah and to the extent by the way to the extent there's anything they have they remove from 27 right so let's say on time meeting floor they take something out of the capital budget then we'll take it out but we'll also have to make a decision of like where does it go right if it does still happen does it happen in an out year yeah depending on the discussion it depends on the town meeting and why it was taken out yeah i'm trying not to i'll wait and give an opinion but i haven't i mean in the end i guess from again um feel free to let me know where i go wrong here because i haven't been here the last two meetings but my take is that the town votes and accepts it then that's a new baseline whether or not we agreed with it yeah 27 for 27 absolutely it just becomes i don't think we have a say at this point anymore in 27. that will be what town meeting is gonna do and certainly in our report we could report how how it differed right how what the town ultimately voted on differed from what we recommended and we might want to do that just from a like here's how different they ended up being but we're not affecting it it is what it is right just that one year jump right the other four years appear in the warrant but not in an article that gets voted on about our meeting they appear in the fincom report and again i wasn't able to find evidence that fish Canada actually voted uh to recommend that five year capital plan at least at their level usually they have in the past but nonetheless they put it in their report so de facto they're saying here's at a minimum they're saying here's the town manager's five-year capital plan so for fiscal 2031 that's what we're talking about once we correct sort of our numbers for what town meeting approves fiscal 27 we don't need to discuss with town managers we just i can just make those changes when the time comes and i highlighted those items in green i think um basically saying these are the things will have to get fixed assuming town meeting approves fiscal 27. i think i highlighted in kind of a brownish color anything else that we differed with the town managers by your capital plan and in most cases all you need to do is kind of scan across the line for a specific item and it's typically we eventually got to it or maybe we didn't because it fell off at the end but it's most of them it's just typically a timing difference that there are a handful that the numbers change and there's a number of items that the finance director which again i think if you look at it other than fiscal 27 i think for the most part the finance director who articulated that he really feels you need once you approve a five-year plan you should sort of stick with it if you look at also left in the prior five-year plan numbers for each fiscal year if you look you'll see most of his most town managers recommended amounts and years agree with what was in the five-year plan from last year whereas we move things around and a large part of why we move things around is because you know we were dealing with not knowing exactly what the funding sources was going to be and so we we have to kind of keep pushing things out um but there's things that i noticed when i did this that the um i'll attribute it mostly the finance director it's the town manager's recommendation the finance director did this workbook uh there's at least two or three items i didn't where they were in the five-year plan but the department had said we don't need that anymore when we met with them and and because it was in the five-year plan the finance director left it in so that'd be an example where if we want to share our information yeah if we and and finance director and the family just got a copy of this i sent it to all of cipc voting and non-voting members but assuming at some point i know we can talk about this later as to how one might go forward with trying to reconcile uh i can't imagine doing it in a in a meeting because there's just so many changes um i almost think there has to be one or two members that are volunteering to sit down with finance director and the town manager and literally go through unless we can knock out some of them themselves able to do it in writing right here's here's so let me back up here's how i think of it i think there's sort of in my mind it's three there's three pieces to this number one is for fiscal 28 and beyond are we in total similar dollar amount spending because we we spent a lot of time on trying to fit this into parameters i think they're pretty close to answer that question if you look at the first half answers that and they they're most close in total by year right so i don't immediately see a big concern there
the next is funding source you know that's another parameter were they similar funding sources or are they wildly different and it looks like there's the main differences are use of levy taxation versus free cash or where the big differences are and so i'd want to spend a little bit of time on okay what's driving that difference can we get comfortable with that and is there anything we think we should call out from a policy perspective right of of the differences there if there's nothing to call out from a policy perspective and we can get comfortable that that fits right what we think can be done okay fine um but i will point out if you look at tab two right and maybe just go to the end to the totals right levy taxation there's a two million dollar difference um you know we were two million dollars higher on levy taxation and then if you look at uh debt we were two million higher and free cash the town manager was four million dollars higher right and so that's where i'd want to spend a little bit of time on how does that work is that is that going to meet
the parameters we have and if if it isn't like is there anything we can point to right that might cause a difference so that's sort of my two high level and then it lines up nicely with your tabs right the third is on a detailed basis are there any projects so if we're okay on a total basis and we're um and we're okay on a funding source or we've reconciled our funding source issues then it's specific projects and so i think we do need to from my perspective take a look at the project differences and say hey that project you have in we were told wasn't needed anymore that seems like a place to get get consistent right understanding or hey there's a reason we pulled a particular project forward or we pushed a particular project back and we'd like to talk about that an example of that would be um we have a little less than two million dollars of roof related projects over four fiscal years which we got from mike fea the finance director slash town manager only picked up fiscal 27 piece of that and didn't put in any of the others and so that is probably a good chunk of the two million dollar difference in the levy debt yeah although they have two million dollars more in levy debt fiscal 27 related to the wastewater um facility at the school uh and that puts it at like six million of debt borrowing but their sideboard's intention is to pay the debt service for the two million dollars out of the cap stabilization fund but that would be an example of where we're talking about and the whole town building discussion you know it's not in either of our five-year plans it's kind of below the line but i think the finance director has just assumed it's going to be fiscal 28 we put it in the purgatory bucket saying we need more information but the roofs are the roofs i mean we we were told by the village i really need to progress along subject to if they make the decision yeah how many things that's worthy of another another discussion altogether like that project's so big those projects are so big it's worthy of a discussion we might not resolve that in our reconciliation but we might identify it as like this is a key a key issue we have to get resolved before the next town meeting because in the time that we were progressing through this right the select board voted to put together an advisory committee related to this building and that may change even though like oh let's progress on the roofs or not so but hopefully they'll get on with that right after town meetings on the side you all read the way on post i heard about this before i saw it on the post children's way which occupies a bunch of space down here is moving to happy hollow for next september so there's going to be a bunch of vacant space i don't know how much they actually have so that that's just an example that that now has to be factored into the whole building discussion but yeah that that this project but but in terms of understanding um when you look at the total picture how could this be but you literally have to look at each line and i and i i think we have to and i like the way you laid it out but i think that's the end goal for me is okay what are the things the the differences here that i want to call out and talk to the and and we can put the together a list right and i see is hey these are the things you included that we were told weren't needed are we sure they're needed right then there's things of hey a lot of question marks around this particular project right i don't know that we're going to come to a consensus right now but we'll put it on our list of things we have to get consensus on i.e the town building right the use of the town building the projects associated with the town building and then is there anything else right that maybe we can talk about that we didn't get told that we didn't need it but where there was a specific reason that we prioritize one project versus another it sounds like you're you're more inclined to basically start with the town managers five-year plan fiscal 20 to 31 and and offer reasons why we think there should be adjustments to that as opposed to literally saying we felt pretty good about what we recommended but we're advisory here's why and literally talk to them about all the items not sounding like what you yeah well i mean i don't know if it's six and one half dozen the other you can work in either direction um i still fully intend on looking at every project and making sure that personally that they i i'm good with it but there's some of them like it's six and one half dozen to me which way well another would be like an example just just a couple of pop-up things we all generally put fixing sidewalks at the low end of the priority scale compared to other things so we advance them things and we pushed off but because the plan structure tied into the prior five-year plan there were sidewalks slotted in all these earlier years so that's where they are and so that might be an example where if we said well you really didn't prioritize this you just used prior five year plan and you get an answer back well that's what you think is the right thing to do so i'm just trying to understand you know again i think we could probably do a lot of that ourselves which is i think what you're talking about and then just have a much more narrow focus and then if it's more narrow focused i guess you do it in writing and then invite them in or you just send up writing and said we need a response like in a week but we really need we discussed the last meeting we need to get we'll talk about later the project plan from now until october 15th we really need this starting point resolved pretty quickly
obviously the add-on here is the add-on here none of us know necessarily what's going to be there yeah i i guess your point brian right is if i start from town manager and make some tweaks to that then i'm giving up my prioritization yeah right yeah and that was something that even though it was rudimentary when i listened some of the fincom members they they asked that question of the town manager did you guys prioritize because they read our report looked at each thing and tried hard so as a concept i guess at least having a discussion about that concept because if town manager says yeah i hear you now that we have more time you know maybe you and i and financial director should town manager should you know we look at these things and decide our questions say you know we thought these things should be prioritized over these others why do you think the opposite right and and i but i still think we have to call out what those things are and i think sidewalks is a good one like you know we didn't we didn't think that should be prioritized over xyz help us understand why you think it should and they may say you know they may have good reasons for doing that but i think it's worthy of a discussion well especially so it doesn't happen again next year exactly that's the whole point they value it differently they're going to keep voting it differently let us know why we can build it into what our criteria are yeah we're still able if we hear that rationale to say i agree i don't agree like oh now that i have more information i can understand that versus okay i have that information i still don't understand it and i and in that case i wouldn't necessarily reconcile i would still have
yeah well i mean i think just like dpw we asked what are your priorities when we take that into account of hey i really need this first i mean no different from town manager what do you think you we need first as a town that's a weighted piece of it right we don't have to agree but i mean i like i think that's a good idea i mean it doesn't really matter what change it's just more of okay this changed what was the rationale and why to change a priority right i mean i think it's not simple but yeah i i still i guess i still can't let it rest that the answer is if the answer is i had i used what i used last year and i made some tweaks i i won't i won't be able to accept that that's what it is when you look at the numbers you will see that well that is a question in my mind is is the town manager going to be taking that position again that whatever i put in the five year plan is the five-year plan that's what we need to i guess we need to figure out some of those higher level philosophical issues because again otherwise we're going to be beating our heads against them but if he if he takes that position then it's kind of a meaningless conversation unless he's willing to change his mind yeah i think that's why let's ask the question and and see where i i don't want to automatically assume that we're not going to be able to come to some mutual agreement on this right in a legal term we took a de facto review of this stuff right whereas the finance director said hey i dealt with this last year i put together the five-year plan for the town manager i met with all the department heads these were their priorities other than they had a bunch of new projects coming into fiscal 27. um everything else i didn't hear anything to justify changing what was in the five-year plan and again you pretty much can match up all those numbers yeah but but i think had there been more time uh we would have someone had that conversation with the town manager and the finance director and said okay we came at this fresh remember we asked nelly at this outset should we be just locking in on what was already there or should we look at all this kind of fresh we looked at it fresh we prioritized and um and if that's not going forward if that's not what the town manager is expecting this committee to do then yeah i mean he has to tell us i i i don't know that that was so fundamental personally that's a fundamental issue with me for me to be on the committee and not that i'm saying but like if if it's always going to be we did what we did last year and we didn't right which works if you prioritize last year that will generally work because then you feed in and prioritize but um you can prioritize but if you prioritized and i've come up here for the first time now um yeah you're you're a bit ahead of you but um actually when we speak with the department heads we talk a lot about how they prioritized we're talking about them prioritized but they prioritize but if you never prioritized we're always going to buy heads and there could be good reasons you have to change or you're me but um yeah so i i just i i just don't think had to be made and he couldn't accommodate, he would make those decisions unilaterally. This is a much more democratic approach to that, right, differing opinions on priorities. Yeah, I think that's got to be self-reconciled. What I want to ask committee members to do is to go through the file that Brian, if you haven't already, go through the file that Brian put together because I think it's excellent. Format's perfect, Brian. Put together your questions that you think we need to resolve on the differences. Broad, high-level questions as well as individual project question. But I agree with you, Brian. I phrased the first or high-level, but you'll ultimately end up in the detail in order to answer them. Yes. At a minimum, you'll need examples. Right. Yeah. If you don't want to hit them with every single project, and at least get the conversation started. Yeah. For me, I plan to go through it year by year and just look at project by project. Okay. Can I live with that? Do I have a really strong feeling about why a particular project didn't belong in that year or should be prioritized later? Well, again, most of our, I think, part of the issue was even though we asked several times, we weren't privy to the exact amount of funding sources and types of funding sources. We knew and were tied into the FinCom funding parameters. But as an example, fiscal 27, we didn't know what the amount of surplus capital would be. It turned out there was half a million dollars surplus capital, which meant there was more revenue funding. There was more revenue source available in fiscal 27 than we thought was available, which meant we by default had to defer something, right, until a future year because we couldn't hit the parameters of FinCom. So surplus capital, you're probably only going to know for the upcoming fiscal year, but that needs to be done at an earlier date like at the start of our process. It might change by the time you get to, well, FinCom gets, but I mean, I have less heartburn over debt service change. I mean, we made a recommendation to fit the profile, but at the end of the day, that's the finance director's responsibility to appropriately do that. I mean, that's why we added the contingency projects and prioritized so that if it did change, it was. Yeah, I would say, right. I agree with you to some extent, John, but I think this is where having a tri board meeting with FinCom was like, what's your level of comfort for those categories we can do? You can do that first. You can do first. Hey, we can manage this much debt right in these many years and then work into that plan. You just give us your four steps at a general level. Yeah, I don't know about you, but I don't at my house, I don't do it as I'm going to do all these projects and then see if I can afford them later. Right. I first figure out what I can afford and then plan to plan the projects. So I don't think we should have to make that decision. But without information, in addition to what we've been given in policy, I've got policy if FinCom or somebody else wants to get like, hey, yeah, that's policy, but we plan to exceed policy in this year. Fine. I can do that. Well, that's that's a possible approach. I mean, I personally think the finance director could have been should have been involved, just as you always have on the front end of this. Working side by side with us. And we asked and it just didn't happen because he could have then basically guided us as to how much funding he felt should be available. Or he could review a draft form what we were doing and say, OK, I'm suggesting you instead of doing this on borrowing and this on free cash, you know, switch it around. And maybe that'll happen. But I think if if if he were involved, he would have a similar effective effect. And we've gotten that across the board. I think there's question asked is that the Washington Board has a survey over, you know, probably half a dozen people who have been awarded grants to fund the national debt relief program. And so has there been any sort of change in acceptance of that? It's, you know, it's it's not, it's not, I mean, you know, I think it's, you know, it's, you know, it's, you know, I think that's a, it's, you know, I think that it's something I would like to about what, fun, right? Because we'll see how much it changes. That's a whole nother problem. I would at least like to be like, yeah, I heard you. You did it because of this and we did it because of this. And we need to do that next month. We talked about last week having all these questions discussed before we do a tri-board meeting, select board, the FinCom town manager and the plaintiff's director, which we also discussed. We need to do that in May so we can be pairing in June to get the requests out for next fiscal year. So that sense of urgency when we ultimately deliver on behalf of the committee, whatever we're going to deliver, I don't think we're going to overwork what we're sending them. We just don't have enough time. And we just have to create a sense of urgency. And if the sense of urgency isn't there on the other side, it doesn't bode well for what comes next. I agree. Which we already expressed last week, there'd be challenges, you know, doing department head meetings and things throughout the summer. It is what it is. And I didn't, I mean, I assume I didn't miss any communications. I mean, there wasn't really any feedback from what we submitted other than thanks, right? I mean, it wasn't, we didn't get any detail back into what changed. No, we did it ourselves. And in fact, we gave it, you know, for FY27, I'm the one who looked at it and gave it to FinCom, right? What's the next step? I don't know what the detailed differences were. Okay. So no, we didn't. I didn't think so. I just don't know. Just make sure. No, I mean, the main difference, Brian's already said it a couple of times, was the finance director took his prior plan and that is what he used. And then he made some tweaks to it. Whereas we wholesale said, taken all the projects and I've ranked them in order and I fit them into the policy. So that's, that was two things. Two different approaches. So you're going to get two different answers. I mean, obviously the question becomes, if it's going to be just take what we had last year, there's really no point in this committee. I mean, that's kind of right. That's why I raised the question. I mean, if the finance director takes that position. Yeah. I don't want to assume that's going to happen, guys. Right. I think that's, that's why it's important to do this now. Right. Ask the questions now. Identify that. If, I don't think that's what's going to happen, but if that were, what? Happen, then I think there's an existential crisis, right? Like why are we here? I'm not, you know, there's five of us sitting, spending a lot of time going over this stuff. If, if where we're going to land at the end of the day is you're just going to do what you did before. And I don't, I don't know why we're here, except I will say the town manager recommendation is not right. Original recommendation is not what is going to town meeting. So there at least was some, right. The fact that our. Right. And I can pretty confidently say if we hadn't done our report, I don't know if that would have been the case. I think there would have been some pushback on it, particularly around the fields project, right. It's a big project, but I don't know that there would have been the same level of edits. So I do think it provided value. I just would prefer as I think you all would to be in a less frustrated position, right. As we're doing, as we're doing the next one. I would do propose in order to keep this moving along and be in a position to get something to the town management finance director. Why would you propose accumulating these individual high level and specific project related questions? Well, I think we can do it similar to consolidate similar. We could do it similar to what we did with the department managers, which was you guys all submitted your questions to me and I consolidated them. Right. And you'd have to give me a little bit of liberty. I'm going to go ahead and do that. Okay. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. So we do have to their funders who are up and running, there's this high demand, the high demand was, you know, high quite a high demand, but still to form the when that reach up, for us, you have to sell it to that bank. But yet we'reume anybody granted is FNY, right? Right. So it's not all in all. It's not something that have estimated manufacturing costs these for us for now more than somebody I don't think that everybody, it's, it came to us to our. One, exactly. So what I've been doing lately, I've been moving forward to a grant to come with all thehan畅l who look after��니ers if they do want them, but I think the goal system is the same. And this is a vision plan. We did. Right. Right. um we need a motion for that should we limit again just because there's there's lots of numbers so it'll take you all i've already been through that put it together but you know it'll take you a while to look at each one but you you may very quickly get in the flow saying i really don't care you know that one can say that you know so you know would it be helpful if we all said or would provide you with our top two or three high-level questions and our top five or six project related questions just so you don't end up getting great questions 30 questions from each of us and then you gotta still pretty confident i'm not gonna get 30 questions from each of us i know one of us maybe two of us um yeah that's i think that's a good guideline i don't think you have to strictly stick to that like if you have a burning question but i think but try to focus on those yeah i i again i'm going to start with the two first tabs and just step back as we just did and say philosophically here's my two or three things i think i'd like to get clarity on and then uh yeah i'll go through again the numbers myself and again they'll just be some that i know haven't been through it already that i'm gonna put down on a piece of paper just make sure everybody is focused on them again i tried to just put some random highlights and things that would inevitably be a question so i think you'll see two or three bright yellow things i think those are the items that the finance director included the department had said you know either they weren't requested again yeah the department has we didn't need them but they were in the prior five-year plan that's why i did that yeah so um well those those hopefully are the easy ones to resolve like yeah we'll take those out but you'll see uh you know you you'll get a sense of um i i color-coded some of the text projects just because there's some footnotes where i was trying to also explain away some of the variances based on what was in our report the tables that kelly put together so you see at the bottom of the detailed schedule there's excerpts from both kelly's report or our report that we did that um identified you know certain items that um heрен BOA planning you know um you know either weren't in the five-year plan at all and then there were other items that we were in purgatory and that explains you know some of the bigger variances right there yeah and then you'll see above that a couple other reconciliations that are information that we're in you know stuff that finance director provided and um so um um yeah there should be enough information there for you to what I was trying to do. And someone was just trying to cross-check all these numbers to add it up. Okay. Yeah, and I think back to the town building, right? I still, the key question for me, now that there's been some movement with the select board is, how much of the, we broke the projects up into pieces and then deferred, right? Put the rest in purgatory. But with the knowledge that they're going to study what to do with the building, how much of it, then I think you move to like, what of this absolutely has to be done and the rest of it has to go in purgatory. And I don't know that that was the context we were thinking about or had when we were, when we originally decided to break it up. Well, yeah, I mean, I think he only included portions of roof. Yeah, but we phased the whole roof in. We did the entire roof. But I think he prioritized it based on things he really knows kind of have to get done. Yeah. But I think, yeah, maybe there's some of those that wouldn't necessarily get done if they decide they're not going to. Yeah, I'm worried that we're putting work, you know, over the course of, it'll, God knows how long they'll take us to figure out what we're going to do with the building. By the time we're done, we'll put a whole new roof on it and then decide, you know, and especially without the children way here. I think that that's a pretty key difference, right? Because that's always been, at least in my mind, one of the big, hey, you could probably move the office space somewhere, but where are we going to put that program? Yeah, the school committee, I presume could find some space in the high school, one of the schools, but maybe not. I was surprised they're mentioning it. It's in the park, that school committee. I was surprised it was moving to Happy Hollow. I thought the building was full, but that's... Yeah, I think they, it sounds like the kindergarten, they're projecting the lower kindergarten enrollment. Yeah, we've done that before. It was surprising. I was like, are we studying to make more buildings? And that seems like a hard left. Yeah. We've also projected lower kindergarten enrollment and closed schools before and then had to reopen them. And it may move from Happy Hollow. That's what CPC was discussing. There was money, there was money appropriated. I guess I'll mention this while we're talking about it. It's in this detail. There was money appropriated last year's town meeting to redo the playground. I was like, which described the town meeting as the town building playground. By the way, Children's Way used it during the day and then it's available for the public. And then the announcement that they're moving took place at Happy Hollow. CPC discussed, well, you know, we'd like to maybe be able to use the funds for that, which was being held up over some other issue over at Happy Hollow or some of the other schools, if need be. And they're trying to figure out a way how to accomplish that. But if you need, you need to get town meeting approval. My understanding is they're gonna try to amend or try to include in their motion something that's not in the warrant, which is to amend the last year's vote to authorize use of $400,000 on that or any of the other, at any of the other schools. And so that'll come up at town meeting if it gets, if it's allowed by the moderator. And that might affect, you know, in the five-year plan, I think we had 400,000 for, Boker is in there. Yeah. Next up. And there's another school two years after that.
That's just, you know, things move around. All right. So. We'll send those to you. Send those to me. Send them later. Yeah. I'd say like a week so that you can consolidate and get them out. So we're, we're suggesting you'll just consolidate and go ahead and send them to the town management. If everybody's comfortable with that. Yeah. And I imagine 90% of it will be similar themes. A few. Yeah. I imagine I'm pretty confident that when I consolidate them, there's going to be a lot of repeat. Teams. Spend a lot of time deliberating each item. So.
All right. Oh, capital CIP form. So Brad, I sent that to everybody last time, I believe.
Brad ,do you want to give an overview of your thinking and then we can sort of have a discussion? I'm embarrassed to say I forgot to. Oh wait. My fault. I am embarrassed to say I forgot to bring it with me. But let me pull it. So does everybody have it? Yes. Okay. What I did was I took the existing form. Tried to use some of the same information, but at the same time, I did. multiple other sources, including Millis. I know we talked about Millis, and I tried to combine what I thought made the most sense from the various forms, try to give certainly more detail than what was in the town form. So I think that if you go through the various headings like project identification, description, readiness, project schedule, I think a lot of these things are things that we talked about during the course of the year in terms of information we'd like to have, and that's sort of the genesis of the form. So I don't know if anybody had a chance to look at it, if they have any questions or thoughts on the form. So I did look at it, and I guess the only thing, and this comes back to some of the other last three conversations, is it goes through one through five, doesn't really do the long-term plan, five plus, whatever that is. Does it? I know we talked about maybe making that its own separate process, since this is a year term, but it's not long. Right. Yeah, I specifically did not do the six through 10, because I thought that the six through 10 years are, they're not going to be as precise, or I don't think they're capable as being precise, and that's more of a long-term planning as opposed to specifics that are what this form is sort of directed towards. Specifically, what do you need? Because I think from year six through 10, maybe people do know that they need, but I doubt it. It's more of a planning process. It tends to be more of a big picture. Right. And I always say it was like a big thing. We need a new school, or we need a new building. I think we talked about maybe adding a question, not looking for this level of detail, but a question saying, and maybe you put a dollar. If you have any large projects you foresee in year six through 15, or six through 10, whatever you pick. Michael Fay, I'd be like, yeah, I might need $600 to $900 million worth of school buildings, right? The public safety building is going to have to be $20 million spent on it, as an example. Who knows? But not get it down into specific long-term planning. Actually, I think it's a good exercise, but just start to get bigger things on the radar screen. We know this building is on the radar screen, and the school, long-term school buildings, those will dwarf pretty much anything else you said last week. That can certainly be added. It would be more of a broad-based question, I think, as I see it, and I'm thinking about it in terms of three years, six through 10, or even beyond, because I know they talk about going out 30 years, you know, what do you see on the horizon? Well, and I guess I would point to, you said the article about the group 20 parcel that they're considering, like, I don't know if that's like an example. It's not necessarily in five-plus years out, but maybe it is, so maybe just kind of couch it and do it. Yeah, no, that's a perfect example of like, hey, we'd like to do something with, we're not quite sure what we'd like to do, but we'd like to do something, where's that, what's the placeholder, right, that goes in, you know, and, you know, there are people of different opinions that might be like, oh, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't that might be like, no, I'd like that in the five-year plan, right, even though it's defined personally or anything that's not fully defined yet, I'm outside the five-year plan, but what is that? Is it $5 million? Is it $2 million? Like, those sorts of things, I think, slotting them somewhere, even if it's not slotting them, even if it's just knowledge that beyond the five-year time horizon, I have a list of wants, needs. And it consolidates. Right. In a consolidated spot, right, because that ultimately, we said we want that to be a section of a report of like, hey, these are the things, not necessarily purgatory, but maybe it's a combination of purgatory and long-term plan, like, these are the things out there on the horizon. It raises an interesting question. If you're talking about years six through beyond, and you're trying to frame a question, is it more, when we're trying to frame a question, what is that in your wish list? If you had unlimited funds or from year six beyond, what are you going to need? Not, so what are you going to need?
Other than normal replacements, you know, EG, new roadway, et cetera, et cetera. I think we're trying to narrow it down to things we just aren't aware of that folks may have talked about. It's everything that's applied. Like, roofs have 20 or 30 years. Vehicles have, like, in your cycle, those are probably easier because they're not going to be out, like, they're not, hey, let's redevelop through 20. It's in your project cycle, so it's a different bucket, right? And maybe the form is, like, zero to five or zero to three, because it obviously, we fill this out in the year zero for next year, it's going to be very different if we fill it out for year five. Like, when do they redo? That's something we should probably build into this of, hey. Yeah, and I think I'm not quite there yet on how to do this, but I was thinking about this as we were going through the capital plan previously. I think if you looked at the trend for any given department. Right? You can get a sense of what that's sort of normal. There's this many trucks that have to be replaced. You know, I don't know which truck it's going to be, but I know there's going to be X million dollars of trucks a year, X million dollars of roads, right? It's recurring. There's recurring stuff. We could probably, with the data we have, sort of guesstimate what that looks like. What I'm looking for is, what are the one-time big things that I wouldn't necessarily know, because you only do them every 20 years or every 30 years. I don't know how old any of these buildings are. So, right? It's those things. It's the big things on the horizon that I can't anticipate because I don't have enough knowledge. There shouldn't be that many. Well, I guess I would think about, you know, one-time big things that are coming up, or it could be things like change in technology. I don't know. Maybe there's some that DPW knows that there's going to be something coming down. The next 10 years about the way you do legislation, or the way you construct highways. There could be doing a lot of things that we wouldn't know, but DPW would know, or the fire department would know. I guess those sorts of things. Stormwater is a good example. We're seeing the tip of the iceberg, as I mentioned, at a meeting a long time ago in the fall. I still think there's millions of dollars that are going to end up having to be spent on infrastructure related to stormwater. And we have to do it within a certain time frame. And we need to get it done. We have to abide by it. To be able to get federal permits or whatever. And there's a deadline, and it's under the select board's purview. I think Kilmart heard that when we discussed it, and I believe it's brought it up at least at one select board meeting, that they're the owner of that. DPW executes, but they're not the owner of that issue. So that's one example. The Energy Committee, the Town Sustainability person, you know, the FinCon. It would be the finance director who showed FinCon a request for, I don't know, $12 million of zero-carbon stuff. I don't know where that is. It showed up on a piece of paper. It may still be out there. But it's those kinds of things where it may be 10% probability or really need to be done. But there's probably maybe five to 10 of those kinds of things. Now, there may be some. But no one knows about sitting here today that just comes up. But one of the things I was going to say is when you look at what went out to the employees, the one-page form, there's a set of instructions. And so I think it's going to be important on particularly a question like that, so they don't inordinately spend a lot of time on it, that we probably need to develop a set of instructions in that particular question. It would have to be pretty clear. We're not looking for, you know, really detail behind it. We're really just looking for big-picture items that you could conceive of in the next, you know, year 6 to 15. And, again, what you would expect to hear back, I'd say, well, you've got the long-term school projects. You've got the town built. But I just don't, you know, wear that list. My overarching comment, and it's not getting into the details. So there's a few things. I think from a couple of words, consistency, which I can help with, like project category, and we've got some categories here, some of them align with departments. I think we already know department. We've got some categories that we've used in the past that are in my big spreadsheet that I'd like to either stick with those or modify them. And it lets us sort of group things together, like I think it's grouped, you know, land improvement, infrastructure. Building repair, stuff like that. So we can debate that. I don't think we need to debate it right now. I think some sort of categorization is important. I don't think we need to debate it right this minute. My other comment I really would love is for this ultimately, and we're going to debate the details, but I would love this to be in a format that is easy to take the information and use it and pivot it, which word is? Not that. Excel is what it was in before, and I don't think necessarily everybody uses Excel very well, but it's my preference. I'm wondering if there's a better solution in terms of like, I'm thinking along the lines of like Google Forms, right? Like where they're filling it out, it's easy for them to fill it out in a pretty user-friendly fashion, and it's spitting it out into a spreadsheet, right? That we can then manipulate. I'm happy to take whatever feedback you guys can think about that, but I just would love to see this be user-friendly, as user-friendly as possible for the department managers, but also allow us to use it in a non-tedious way, right? To populate forward. So the hope was that the town, which was moving forward or had moved forward on a project management software package, that it would be capable of doing that. It would be capable of doing a front-end process too, in which case the employees would be interfacing with that system, and no one here would be having to manipulate an Excel spreadsheet. The town staff might have access to it, you know, read-only or whatever. And they could update it, but yeah. But I don't know if they've fully abandoned that. They sound like they tabled it. I don't know if they fully abandoned it, but they tabled it. And that's not going to happen. Even if they agreed and said, oh, that system will work, we'll resurrect that. Or we think there's another one out there. Because there are systems out there that, you know, project management type planning systems that probably do all this and can be tailored for our particular needs. Is there any forms that we know of anywhere in the town that we're using? I don't know if they're using it. I feel like they asked the IT director, right? It's just, for me... They're just having to copy and paste everything. It's just, I mean... Yeah. It's just, it's easy on both ends, right? Like, it's easy if you can set up a form. It's a lot easier in a Google form to just like, okay, I checked the things off I needed. And then you're spitting them out. That was my question. So I looked at the instructions for this form. There's a map that maps it to the Excel. Yeah, it's perfect now. And each field, you know, not all the fields are used for that. But, yeah. But that was the intention, right? Yeah, yeah. But the map is, it got broke, it broke. It was created before my time, but they, it's broken, so. And then the question is, you know, the only other question I have is optics. One page versus at the moment, they're called four pages. I mean, some of it's just formatted now. I think a lot of it. Yeah, that's formatting. I think we didn't, I think when you're formatting, it can be formatted to less. Um, so I wasn't overlooking it. I wasn't overly concerned with that. That's just sort of my overarching. I think we need to decide on, you know, content and then we can work on format and delivery method. And I had a question on item number six, um, which I have no issue with what we have in here. Um, and it seems like this would be asking the, uh, submitter to come up with their own rankings. It, it does, which is, I recognize this can be. Problematic. It'll be all, they're not honest. They're just going to say it's important, but all the highest parts, but I didn't know if you were in turn, um, or we thought that if we use this in this form, whether we in turn wanted to use this same kind of ranking for our own assessments. So that's one of the items is in our report is to look at a more detailed variety approach, which is something that I've pulled together a few other towns. I mentioned last meeting. I didn't circulate it yet. Um, some of them are way more extensive than you would be able to put in this thing. Um, so I just didn't know if this sort of philosophically is this, I think the old form had some sort of evaluation criteria. Well, you know, we use low, medium, high when this past year, which, so I thought that you could have five as opposed to just three, something is important. I think aligning it. I think that's what you're getting at. Brian. Aligning it with whatever our rating is going to be is ideal, right? They should, it should be tightly aligned. Are we going to have a problem with everybody giving, you know, five maybe. Um, but I think it depends, you know, it's hard to say like project requirements, like if it's required or mandated, it's hard for everybody to say everything is required. Right. The instruction could say, if you give off all for the highest. I think there was, we talked about, there's two components to the ranking, right? You can write the project, go ahead. But then I still want, I still want them to rank in a given department, right? Given submitter rank your projects, one to one to 10. Right. Cause I still think you can do this. This is sort of one way of ranking, but there's also the, at least within your own department, put them in order. Yep. And then we've still got to do. I'll do the across departments, but at least if I know within a given department, what the order is from the perspective of the person submitting that, that is good context. Right. But do we, I mean, do we just tell them section six, well, for your department, we're going to rack and stack and you have, you can't, you know, they have to be prioritized. If you have to pick their ratings based on that. I mean, we all know how that's going to look, but at least, you know, cause then we can take this and send it back and say, Hey, all right, here's your section. They're all 25. Like you can give me all 25. You're still going to have to put them in it. Right. I'm just wondering if we make them again, cause if you know that this is, but that's the outcome, maybe in year one, it'll be a mess. Right. But if in year two, you know, that we're going to send this back to you. Cause you've ranked them all the same ranking. We're going to say, go tweak your scale. So you can probably, none of them can be the same. Yeah, we can do that. I just, we you're right. First year will probably be a mess and we'd have to go back, but like, it's kind of like the, you know, the professor who has yourself score yourself, like, or, you know, if you're ready to work, if you all give yourself the highest rating, right. I'm going to knock it down. Like that's yeah. Be, be objective. I just, I don't think you can answer all of these five on every project and good conscience. I mean, urgency, definitely. You can't get five. It's a baseball field. Right. Interior. Maybe, maybe, maybe the right person. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The question is failure to proceed with the project in the next fiscal year. Right. Impact. Right. And we're asking very specific questions. I don't think you can say for every single project. Right. That if we don't do it in the next, next fiscal year, it's going to have an imminent impact. Yeah. So like sidewalks would be, which is how we are, you know, we need a new transfer station garage.
We don't do that the whole, the whole. Set up, there's going to fall apart. Then, then the credibility of that is shot. So I, again, I, I don't, I don't think that's, I think I'm more focused. I mean, Taylor, your idea of just rank your projects, rank order them, that would have to go in here somewhere. Um, um, but you know, we just, just need to make sure that whatever we're putting here and these looked fine to me, um, um, it kind of. Covered our low, medium, high concept. Well, that was the idea. It just added two additional levels.
And theoretically tell you what you were saying, uh, have it on a department basis, theoretically, I mean, whatever their priority range total is the bottom number they should, those numbers should correspond with in theory, in theory, they should, unless they're all right. Maybe that's the solutions. Like you, you give. Your rankings, but if your stuff all comes with the same score, I'm going to send it back to you and tell you to give me an order, which is why I actually, I like your idea of having them have the department heads actually rank it. I mean, it should theoretically be similar to this ranking, but individual projects is important information for me as a member. I like, I need to know if, if a regulation says I have to have it and I have to have it this year, that changes my outlook, right. Or if it's an immediate. Immediate safety issue. Um, I think where you get, you know, the value question is the one that's the hard for me, one of the ones that's hard to, I mean, it seems to me that this is where, and, and I don't know, they've been overly consistent. I think mostly we get these forms for the upcoming fiscal year. Only hope is we can get these forms for every fiscal year and to me, when we then meet with the department, it's the first. Place I would suggest we probably go with that chart because we're likely going to need some elaboration on either why are all your scores the same, or these, you know, you have limited funds, you know, either you've given us ranking one to the 1500 projects, or they've worked out this way and you elaborate on your ranking on this particular item. We don't, we don't fully appreciate that. And that then would, you know, same conversation we had that this past cycle. But it'd be a bit more, you know, focused, I think, and allow us to focus in specifically because something that's, you know, life safety, I don't know, we're gonna spend a whole lot of time other than if someone questions the amount of, you know, where'd you get the number for the new fire truck. I have one more question. This is more of a nip than anything else, but when we identify the source of funds, if I remember correctly, didn't the previous departments not fill that out? Yeah. Yeah. I was gonna, that was my next on it. So I'm, I'm gonna advocate that we take the funding source out, but I do think we need something it's, they usually don't fill it out, but one of the things that has, I've always kind of grants and things to be grants, like it really is, are there sources of funding available outside of the town? Right. So, and that's a grant state funding now. Yeah. Are there any other funds or like, I just identified you need town funds versus get it from someone else? CTA funds. Is this project eligible for gifts, grants, other, you know. CTA funds I would include. State funding. Yeah. Federal funding I guess. Federal funding. Right. And then again, the town employees have been pretty darn good going after grants. Yeah. The other thing I want to make sure we include. include in the instructions, is that the project cost should be the total project cost, including any other funds, right? Because what we've experienced, Brian, I know you have too, is we get a request for a piece of a project, there's funds somewhere else, and they've netted it out already. And this has happened a couple times to me, and it was like, something happened where they were counting all their funds, they didn't come in, or they didn't get everything, and then they came back for a supplemental request. So I want the request to be the full cost of the project, right? And then I think on the table, there's been a source of confusion on number five, in the way it is a current form, and I think it may continue here, of the difference between staggered request amounts, and the way it is a current form, and I think it may continue here, of the difference between and the way it is a current form, and I think it may continue here, of the difference between expenditure. So depending on who fills it out, right? Are you requesting amounts for approval in various years? Are you requesting an amount for approval that you're then going to spend over a period of time, which most capital projects don't get spent all at once? I don't know how much I care, and you guys can feel free to how it's spent, because usually, if you're doing a project, you need to secure from the town approval, to pay for the project. The only reason I care about when it's like, okay, you're doing a project, you've asked for a project, when are you going to be done so that we can be checking in as to whether or not there's surplus funds, or you're over, right? I don't know if I need to just to make it easier for them, like, do we need to know expenditure year by year by year? I mean, we do for the budget, depending on how the project's structured, right? I mean, not necessarily, so that was, that's what I'm getting at. It's not located. If you, are you spoken for, right? Yeah, when, when we approve something at town meeting, we're not approving when it's going to get spent, necessarily. We're approving that it can be spent. Wouldn't that affect our funding sources? If you only need to have two million this year and two million next year, then they wouldn't necessarily, they wouldn't pull levy, they wouldn't pull debt next, this year, would they? A little four at the beginning. We don't get to make it. A financial, financial structure will, it varies. I mean, like on the council and agency building, they borrowed a year before they started spending money. Yeah. This thing got delayed. It depends. Other things, they put them off, and then in the next borrowance cycle, we borrow them. But I think at least this form asked for a, the upper right corner under four in the project schedule. I don't think that was on the old form. Which one? What are you looking for? On the draft form project schedule. So it has estimated dates. So at least we would start to get a sense of their expectation on completion. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm good with that. I want that. It's more like, do I need, I'm trying to figure out how, how do we streamline this? Least amount of information that would give us the better. Perfect. Make it easier. Instead of estimated expenditures in five, although we have both, but you know, are we really getting at, you know, you know, year of appropriation?
How much do you need? When do you need it to be appropriated? That's really the question. When, when, when we think it'll be before town meeting. I'm just saying later, Tom, let's just talk about the roofs, right? We put everything else in hold, but the roofs have multi-year. How would we want that put in the future? That's a good question, right? No, it's done on an appropriation basis. So we take that by, you know, if we want that as a, that could be a series of projects, new projects, or it'd be one line item, town building roofs. And I, they need appropriations or I'm asking for appropriations over these five fiscal years. Well, I think it's like road maintenance and sidewalks. It's like 200,000, 200,000, 200,000 with the ass versus, and that's one where I can use break out here versus I'm asking for 600 all in one. Yeah, I guess that, yeah, that's right. I guess I'm trying to figure out how you put that in a form because you're right. There are some recurring items that are not total costs that they're just recurring items and there are other items that are, yeah, I want the total cost of the project. Two different things. Maybe it's a different checkbox. Hey, if it's a reoccurring expense like roads, then estimate your next five years. Maybe that's just a different section of the form you get to use if it's a reoccurring project. Right. I mean, I know. I think that's possibility, right? You have a question up in the first section, Brad, right? Is this part of a multi-year project? And I'm, again, I'm back in Google forms, right? And I've got two paths going. One is, you know, is this a one-time project? Is this a multi-year project? Is this a project that's going to be requested for appropriation in parts? Or is this a recurring project, i.e. roads, right, that's going to get appropriated? Like it's just going to go on for, you know, roads are going to go on for the, you know, forever. Again, take the roads. You know, right now, when a holder submits, he submits an Excel spreadsheet that has five line items. Well, a single line item for roads, but he puts a number for each of these. Yeah. Appropriations for each of the years. So is that what you would expect him to do here? And he'd have an amount in each year as an appropriation for roads for that, an appropriation for that year. He certainly is not going to spend it in those years. Versus you don't want five forms for one for each fiscal year because it's not a multi-year project. Yeah. I think we can tailor this so that it's sort of a two-term. It's your own adventure, right? You pick the, you pick the category. It's a one-time project. It's a multi-year project, right? With multiple appropriations. It's a recurring project like roads going to happen every year. And depending on what you pick, right? The question about cost is going to come up differently. If it's a one-time, it's going to be one box. If it's multi-year, you're going to see the multi-year. So a multi-year example would be, you know, five years. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. phase one, two, and three. And phase three is what we were doing with the field. That would be one submission, multi-year project. Multi-year appropriation. We want to do phase one, and therefore we need the money appropriated in fiscal 27. And phase three is out here in fiscal 29, and that's when we need to have one chief. I think that would work better than what we're doing right now. It's, well, first of all, we're only doing it for one year, right? I would love to see them connected projects be connected. Even things like the JT, I mean, all the joint, the radios, all that. You can see that whole schedule, right? Because then we wouldn't have to say, hey, this capital project seven versus 15 next year would all be part of the same form. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a good idea. I think it would be a lot faster, right, for Tom Holder. I don't want him to have to fill it out five times. It's the same roads of the same project. Fill it out once and just put the five numbers on. So in addition to instructions, I'm just wondering, assuming we're going to try to roll this out for plus or minus a July 1 dissemination, I assume it still comes from the town manager, so that's got to be discussed with the town manager. I almost think you probably need to do a meeting with those that will be submitting. Walk them through the particular changes and what we're expecting, just so they don't end up reading the instructions, not really getting it, filling it out where you want it. It's pretty frustrating.
But again, that's the most we know.
If you're trying to give me anxiety, you succeeded like an hour ago, Brad. I just want to be a realist. Are we going to be able to successfully get this into a format that we all agree upon for the upcoming cycle, or is this a continuing work in progress and we maybe look at this and tweak it slightly for the upcoming cycle, just to see what happens? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Listen, I think we can do something better than what we have, and we might break this into like, okay, my wish list, right? We can get it better than it is today, but we've got some things we'd like to do. We'll save them for the future.
But I don't actually think this is, as long as they have the technology, which is a big if, I don't think this is that hard to create.
I don't know Google for me. terms. I guess my concern is that they have to fill it out 30 times, one for each project, but if you're just clicking through something, that's a lot easier. It's a lot easier. I just don't see how that's going to happen between now and July 1st. Well, in past years, they have to fill out one for each project, right? Yeah, but they only did it for the first year. So the other thing is, as much as I want them to fill it out for all the years, the idea that we're going to get it rolled out and they're going to do it for five years, like that's a fight that we've been having for... Well, I think that's right. I think we need to prioritize what is it we're most interested in? Are we most interested in the immediate future, getting better clarity on five years? That's a good point. And therefore, do we tweak the existing form because they know they're used to it, but we say, by the way, we're going to need to meet with you in the summer, so that's going to be not great, right? And we need you to get this information that you just got on. July 1st and get it back to us within two or three weeks. And oh, by the way, we need, if it's a priority for us, we need you to make sure you're filling one of these out for five years worth of projects in the summer. It's just not going to happen. And if you then say, and by the way, we have a new form, which ultimately I'm saying we need to get a new form, right? But you could advertise to them, we're working on a new form, but we decided in the interest of time and getting this... Moving forward on the right project schedule, we're going to do it in steps. And who's delivering that message? Is that the town manager message? It's his employees. Ultimately, we can ask, but we can't direct. That's my opinion of town employees. So to your point, Brian, what I would say are the things that aren't on that form, right, or that haven't been filled out that I think are most important. Right. Are a categorization of the project, right? Because I make them up as I put them in my spreadsheet and used to put them in the warrant. I think the project schedule is key because it helps figure out project schedule slash project readiness. Because I think that's one of the things we've, it's in our, I think it's in the bylaw or the policy, right? That we're supposed to be... Prioritizing based on readiness. And that's not on that form anywhere, right? I think you could take the ranking system that you have in DRAP and substitute it for the ranking system that's on the existing form.
Like I said, we don't really need cash. We could take out some of the... Make some room for some of these other items. We have a soft copy of the existing form. Is it like a... Yeah, we have Excel. They send it to us in Excel, I'm pretty sure.
That's what you could send out. It's an Excel workbook.
I think they were PDFs when we got them. Yeah, I have, I mean, I printed it off the Excel version. I'll resend that. Yeah, right? No, if it's, you don't, it's in my email. You don't have to resend that. I have the form. I'm not sure I have the instructions that they use. Is it on the same... Another tab in it. Yeah, there's another tab. Okay, I'll find it. Yeah. I mean, I guess if we, if our goal is to say, I mean, I think this is what sessions we want to add. And then we just kind of stuff it into here without remaking the entire form of comments you were saying. I think for this cycle would be advertised like that. But we're working on something that's going to be, you know, a little bit different for the future. But I just worry there's not enough time because we're dependent on, if it was just us doing it, I understand we have to do things in public meetings. But it's just, everything takes time. But I'm saying you want me to take the existing form and try to add some of the stuff we've talked about tonight. A few of the things that Kelly was mentioning, you know, maybe, you know, again, remove a couple things that maybe we don't think we need and substitute in a couple things you have in your form.
Again, if you're okay working with Excel, then you can just do them right in the... I'm terrible with Excel, but I'll... I'd say don't worry about pretty. I'd say worry about sections that even if it gets messed up, we can format it. That's, that's, any of us can help with that. I think that's easy.
We don't, you know, at the moment, we're not planning to meet for two weeks. So again, we need to see this again.
And then ultimately, it's got to be visited with the account manager and finance director. Ultimately, they're, I think they're the ones that... We still have to deal with our ads and distribute it. Yeah, maybe the... I think it's making the list of, you know, maybe, yeah, because I think others can help with Excel, including myself. But what do we want to add to it? Right? What are the things that we think are critically missing? What are the things we think can come off? And if we have those two succinct lists, right, I think we can, we can dispense with it and get it over to Tim. Yeah, sure. So should we mark up what he has here just to say, add this, don't add this? Is this our best way? Yeah, that's... I mean... Yeah, you could just say... I mean... We're ultimately moving to a different looking form with more information that we think will be helpful. But for now, we want this form you're familiar with, except we've changed these three areas of the form. But we're sitting here a minute. It sounded like, Kelly, the things you indicated are things we seem to ask about. And I like the ranking you had versus the one that's in here. You talked about not necessarily needing specific sourcing, just are these kind of things available? So that maybe is more of a question.
All right, Brian, can you send out the blank form? Because I think the one that I have that's in Excel, it's filled out properly. It doesn't have any instructions. I think that's the one I have. But it's like all the... Different departments filled out all of them. I don't think we have like... I'll circulate where I printed this from when I get home from work.
So you have it.
Yeah, well, I was looking through and I was like... When you showed the instructions, I was like, I don't remember seeing those. But it doesn't mean I just didn't miss it. But yeah, going through... And there's some things that are, again, a little bit dated and it weren't updated fully. But it's what went out. I mean, they're doing this in Excel. So, I mean, one page is artificial. I just want to make, right? Most people did this in Excel-ish. Yeah, I mean... But it's not a page. But, I mean, that's only because we printed it. Yeah, it converts into more than one page just because some of these boxes are... Yeah, but we... I mean, I think we just want to make sure we're not trying to shove it into one page just because we printed it. Like, if it's two pages, our front and back, then what... Yeah, I think we probably can fit it in there. But... Well, I'm just thinking, like, the multi-year could be the second tab or the second page because... The only problem... If it's two tabs, is that then it makes it a pain in the butt to put all of the CIPs in one file. Like, each of them fill one out and then Brian consolidates... I meant from just printing standpoint. Yeah. We had a... Yeah, no. The bottom page two, which is just further down, is your multi-year schedule, which only gets used on four submissions. So, that doesn't need to be in the... I just don't want to try and just, like, shove it all in. It's, like, it should be in order of what you really, really need, right? But if anything, we change them, you know... The term would require changes in the mapping, although you're saying the mapping's not working. What mapped that? The mapping was in the Excel spreadsheet, and then the instructions are there as well. I mean, we can change it. I'm not... I mean, I'll happily do that just to change it. Yeah, no one's using... This isn't even in, like, do you have your warrant? I don't think this is in the warrant. Like, this is a map to what's going to go in the warrant, and I don't even think there's... I thought it was a macro that, like, spit it out into a nice, pretty... No, no. Data file that you would spit it out. I thought that's where it was. I was thinking... Dropdown. I'm pretty sure it's where it's... It used to be with... I thought that's where these forms were coming from. It's just been created down at the bottom. There's a little box, and it's pulling data. This is where that information came from. It used to be. And now it's manual? It's mostly manual because they don't... I mean, some of it's... The actual thing doesn't work anymore. So that thing was at least initially intended to... Yes. Some macro broke. No, no. It didn't have a macro. I built a macro for it, but then that's when I built a macro, and then so many of the things weren't being filled out or don't pull over correctly that the macro didn't work. So what I ended up doing was... I filled them in. I pull off what I can, but I fill in the rest manually. If you go back... I didn't do it this year. They did it this year. So is it clear what you need to do? Mud. I need to do... Next time, go with me. You just... I'll give you... If you just put the things that we talked about in the bottom of the file, I will reformat it and put it in Excel the way that it... I will draft the minutes quickly as I can, and hopefully... Do the Excel fixing. Don't worry about it. Hopefully, I will capture what I thought I heard. These are the three or four potential changes to that.
I'm not worried about this, but... Again, I'm not going to stop, all right? So to me, I think we're saying stuff that's in item one, I think we're good. We want to make sure those elements exist, right? Most of them are in the form. Yeah, they're already here. But I think the multi-year project, prior CIP, or at least the way we're presenting it, right? If it's a reoccurring project, we said... Yeah, I think those three options, like one-time project, multi-year appropriation, right? Recurring appropriation. We can probably give some examples. The categories we want to take from... Do you want to take from our current assessment? Is that what we're saying? Like the second half of two?
Kelly, you said you want to make the categories consistent with what we currently have, I think. Yes. I can do that if you just write project category out for what I have consistently.
Project category, yes. Yeah, the one... So when I'm looking down what's on here, right?
The project description and justification. Can get combined.
Because they almost always either say the same thing or they only throw one of them out.
The evaluation criteria that's on here, no one has ever done in a way that makes sense. They all do it in consistently. And I think that's where the ranking that we have... The substantive... What do you say? The substantive... Yeah, I was going to say... Yeah. There we go. Yeah.
You're saying financing, we're not going to... We're going to eliminate other than the grants, funds, CIP... Yeah, funds or state or federal, like additional funding sources or something that'll swim that section down. Yeah, that's... The funding sources can go. It's just a question of... Right, exactly. And the rest of five, the multi-year schedule, we're saying only fill that out if you have a reoccurring or multi-year project. Yep. And I don't even know if you need... Like, I don't think anybody ever fills out the planning and design, land, construction, equipment, and all that. Make it one. I think it's just... You just make it one. And then what we've had to do, right? Like, if you've got an estimate of cost, provide that estimate. I don't think filling out this has been helpful. I don't think most people do it. Number five and number four. Four is project scheduling. Kelly, you said you thought that was number four. So, number... If you have number four, I think you were suggesting you don't need number five. I think what you're saying on number five means... I need five. I think this is down to just what are the amounts... Total cost. A year. Yeah. But again, it's a year for project. A year of appropriation. A year of appropriation. You don't need to know their schedule of expenditures. I agree with that completely.
And then... We did have something in the existing form that had a prior year column, which, you know, an example of that was one of the IT projects this year. They had gotten that... It's filled out wrong, though. But the intention was to... Highlight for our benefit, viewers' benefit, something that previously was like station two, had three different appropriations. I think it's a different question, though, than the way it's presented here, because I've never seen it done correctly. Maybe just a question. Did this project get any prior appropriation? If so, how much per year and amount? Yeah. That's one question. It's a one question, not... That prior year to date column, I've never seen filled out correctly. And then... Yeah, so it might be like design. Yeah, we got $50,000 in design money two years ago. Yeah. The operational budget impact that's on here, I don't like... That's also rarely filled out correctly. I actually liked what you had better.
See where it goes.
Yeah, it's much more specific about what you're answering.
Yeah, this is... The ones that are on here almost... So seven is good. Yeah, I like seven and said, what's on here? I mean, section nine... I almost feel like you could just add those questions into the justification if these are in there and note it versus making them separate questions. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, I think eight and nine, you could probably leave out or just have as anything else you want to add, right? Any other things you want to add, but I think that should... It can be a description and justification. Like if it's got... I would expect that anybody who's doing an energy efficiency sustainability project is going to put that in the justification box. Yeah. Maybe that's like one of the notes that says, in this justification, here's the different things you should consider. I don't know. We're going to get to that right this year, but I agree that's a possible improvement. So I would stop... The only other thing I was thinking that we might want to add, I mean, I assume we know, but is there a committee working on that? Right? Like the town building. We don't always know that there's... I mean, maybe we do. You do, but for those of us that aren't... Deeply embedded... Yeah, that's... I mean, the interdepartmental... You've got it here, Brad, right? Interdepartmental or regional coordination. It's not quite that, but it's like, what committees or departments, other than your own, are stakeholders in the project? Something like that. It's not so much like the school and DPW, like who's doing the work. This is more of, is there a committee that's assigned... Again, they go back to the town building, they're going to assign a committee. Well, or there's already a committee, right? Because there's Board of Public Works, so I think that's... That might be up at the top, right? You've got department. You might have... Committee... Committee... Yeah.
Committee of State... Because we've got a proving body vote, but I think there's not always... When these come over, they usually haven't been voted on yet, right? They usually get voted on later in the project, and it's not necessarily always a committee that's voting on it versus a committee who's... A stakeholder involved in it. So I think you can probably swap that out. Okay. Why don't we start there? Okay. Good. And then we can take another look at the next meeting. And then I don't think our stuff goes on the form, like down the bottom. I think we will ultimately opine on them, but I don't think it goes on the form. Right. Okay. Or the signatures or the reviews.
I think that's a good start. All right. Let me get that back to you.
Okay.
I apologize. I still haven't adjusted to the time, and I'm starting to turn into a pumpkin.
We noted for a minute. At 8.30 p.m., Callie turned into a pumpkin. I'm really well going over there. Coming back, I'm not doing well. That's just the reality of coming back. Yeah, I think so. I think when you're excited, right, it's easier to adjust when you're on vacation. I'm like that. Sunday. Yeah, so it's been a few days. I should be fine, and I'm not.
Okay. We don't have anything else on succession planning, as I mentioned earlier.
Let's move on to minutes.
Any comments on the minutes? I have a question for you, Kelly. Do you think I generally covered the project plan points, timings properly? Yeah, I did have. I had some thoughts on that, but I've forgotten what they were, so they couldn't have been not burning. You want to put the project plan on the next agenda and correct? Yeah, I'll put it on the next agenda, and then I'll send it out. Yeah, we can correct it. That's fine. Okay. Anything else?
Can I get a motion to approve the minutes? Motion to approve. On the second? Second. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Okay. Good. And topic's not reasonably anticipated. I don't have any. Next meeting is two weeks from now, and we are moving, starting with the next meeting, to the former Council on Aging room, which is called, is that Wayland Community Room? Wayland Commons. Thank you. Okay.
So, the big room, when you come in from the back of the building. That's the 13th. What do you think, 27th? The 13th, yes. Yeah, there's 30. 630. They're setting up hybrid over there? Yep. It has hybrid, right, Robbie? Yes. We have audio-visual, like a screen like this.
Yeah, there's the owl over there. Yeah, and it has a screen. Does it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So, the meeting, we have one on the 27th of May as well, right? We do. And I believe 630 would be the same location. Right.
And then, we are supposed to, every two weeks, we're supposed to have a meeting on June 10th. I will not be able to do anything that week, at an event on Saturday. Sure, you're up. I'm ready for it, so. For the 10th? Yeah. So, Brad, you're going to have to chair that meeting, okay?
And as soon as Tom meetings over here, I'm going to, I will send an email before that, but try and get coordinated for a meeting with FinCom and select board for the end of May, but we may have to, we may have to move that meeting. So, just FYI, I may be reaching out to you if we have to shift the 27th, although that will be a tough week. Yeah, I mean, my personal preference would be it not be done as an agenda item on the select board, at a select board meeting, just because, you know, 20 minutes, 25 minutes, and, you know. Yeah, do it as a separate meeting, you mean? Just have people make another night out, and select board and FinCom. I'll see what I can do. Yeah, as for that matter, I mean, if we have to do two meetings, accommodate, whatever we're trying to get accomplished, to be able to get, you know, get something out, start collecting information, that is the enemy of progress, and it's the pace at which you hold meetings and do them in public, et cetera. That is the downside of opening a meeting. It is transparent. It takes a long time. Okay.
I don't have anything else, so if I can get a motion to adjourn. Motion to adjourn. Second. Second. Thank you. All in favor to adjourn? Aye. Aye. We are adjourned at 8.37.
The meeting may be recorded, and if recorded, will be made available to the public on Wake PM as soon as possible after the meeting. Pursuant to Chapter 2 of the Acts of 2025, this meeting will be conducted in person and via remote access in accordance with applicable law.
You may attend in person in the select board meeting room or via the Zoom link on the town's website. When required by law or allowed by the chair, persons wishing to provide public comment or otherwise participate in the meeting may do so in the meeting location or on Zoom. Public comment should be limited to two minutes per person. Yay. And we're going to do, everybody is here in person, so I have John, Brian, Kelly, Liz, and Brad all here in the select board meeting room. And then let's review the agenda. So 6.30 p.m., call to order, review the agenda for public and announcements. 6.35, public comment and members' response. 6.40, review and finalize amendment to CIPC's Fiscal 2027 through Fiscal 31 report for inclusion. The committee's position on Article DD, Holiday Road. 6.55, discuss comparison of the five-year plan in the annual town meeting warrant versus CIPC's Fiscal 27 through Fiscal 31 report amended February 17, 2026. 7.10, discuss next steps to advance future CIPC report process improvements, including but not limited to those outlined in CIPC's Fiscal 27 through Fiscal 31 report amended February 17, 2026. 7.10, discuss next steps to advance future CIPC report process improvements, including but not limited to those outlined in CIPC's Fiscal 27 through Fiscal 31 report amended February 17, 2026. 7.10, discuss next steps to advance future CIPC report process improvements, including but not limited to those outlined in CIPC's Fiscal 27 through Fiscal 31 report amended February 17, 2026. Including, but not limited to, potential revisions to the current version of the Capital Improvement Plan CIP submission form and the CIPC project plan for the remainder of 2026. 8.10 is discuss succession planning, finance, and school committee designees. I left that on there just in case we had any follow-up, which I don't have any, but I wanted to leave it just in case. 8.20, review and vote to approve minutes of April 14th. 8.25, topics not reasonably anticipated by the chair, 40 hours prior to posting, and if any, and setting the time of the next meeting, and 8.30, adjourn. So from there, do we have, I don't have any announcements per se. I did get an email from a resident who was not going to be able to be here for public comment, though I just read it. So I don't know that I'm, I can kind of give up. As high level as I can, but I don't know that I'm ready to give a detail on it. But before I do that, is there anybody in public comment? No, of course not, right? Okay. So I did get an email, try to summarize it, and I can forward it to everybody as well. From Carol Plum.
Yes, it doesn't say that, but that is correct. She wanted to know if. Anyone from CTC had mentioned or brought to us an acquisition of 17 Gleason Lane, six acres that runs along the 25 Holiday Road parcel on the western border. It's up for sale and had a price drop, which suggested that it to somebody that perhaps it's not conducive to building a large house because of shape. I'm not going to go into all of this, but the point was that there's. Somebody is asking for $10,000 in CIPC fund or CPC, sorry. So CPC funds. And she was wondering how this fits into the CIPC process. So I'm going to not. I can comment on it now or later just because I watched. Yeah, why don't you comment on it when we're talking about the article DD, just because there's other things. Why don't we talk about it there, but I was going to say I don't. I don't have enough information to intelligently come in on it, but and I also wanted to convey Carol wanted us to know she thought we have done an amazing job this year, heavy lift on a compressed time frame, and so that in the minutes. Yeah. For tackling the issue. Amazing. Share that because I know it can feel like we're in a vacuum here doing this and not getting, you know, not sure. I don't want anybody appreciates it. So I appreciate Carol saying that I'll summarize what you just said for two sentences on your public comment. Yeah, that's fine. That's fine. And I can forward you the email just in case. All right. So the agenda for a minute here. Okay. All right. So Liz, I know you sent me something. I don't, I didn't forward it on. Did you send it to the whole group? No, just you. Okay. All right. So why don't we want sending that to everybody and I can try and log in and put it up on screen to Brian, if you want to give an update on the issue that Carol raised, Carol Plum raised.
Just for everybody's benefit, let's refer to this as Article 16, formerly known as Article DD.
So the property that Carol Plum mentioned through Kelly.
It came up in two different meetings for two different reasons. Where I first saw it come up was at the Community Preservation Committee meeting a week or so ago.
And one of the members who I believe is, has an interest in what's going on with the Holiday Road, Orchard Lane parcel.
Apparently, mentioned that this parcel on Gleason Lane, which I had trouble until I looked at the actual GIS map to see how it actually intersected, but this parcel at 17 Gleason Lane has a property line up budding with the 13 acres of the Orchard Lane property. And it's got a single residence house on it. It's got a very narrow driveway coming in off Gleason Lane, and then it opens up and the house is there. And at CPC, the primary, primary reason for bringing it up was to see if the committee would authorize spending $10,000 to get an appraisal done. And as described by the member who brought it up, he said, you know, it could be a total long shot, but maybe there's some value to the town of acquiring that parcel, given that it abuts with the 13 acres, and it might make the ultimate use of that 13 acres better, different. Exactly. And and so they had some conversation about that. At all points, CPC agreed to vote to spend $10,000 on appraisal and authorize the chair and the vice chair to speak with the broker to see if the individual would be patient enough to allow CPC to have an appraisal done. So that was that meeting. But there is no, there was nothing before that. committee about actually acquiring couldn't get done until either a special town meeting or the next annual town meeting and it would have to go through the normal cpc process where someone would make a proposal to acquire it for a particular purpose that fit within the cbc funding at that meeting susan weinstein the chair who's also on the housing trust that i served with mentioned that the housing trust had briefly discussed the property as well so i said i'll go watch that meeting and they had a 15 20 minute conversation two weeks before the cc discussion um and the chair of that committee mike stady who's a developer in town noted that he apparently had had it under contract develop it and had managed to get a contract price that was lower than the asking price and uh for whatever reason he decided to pass on and i'm not exactly sure what his idea was but in the course of that conversation um understanding that the housing trust doesn't need town meeting action if they want to buy a parcel um and then they don't pay anything more than the appraised value they have them and they have the money or they borrow they can just vote to do it and so they were looking at it for affordable housing purposes and and long story short blight uh not surprisingly suggested that the butters to that parcel lee's lane would be apparently new he suspected they would be somewhat resistant to you know affordable housing at least in anything more than a single unit or a couple units and so i think i reached out to the vice chair of the cpc and just said hey you might want a further discussion of trust because at one point the trust talked about buying a property up on reeves hill and having a conservation commission purchase a portion of it or fund to purchase a portion of it and the trust fund the portion of it for an affordable house or two and so none of that's before any committee other than if the trust decides to proceed which they can do on their own if it finds its way in front of the cpc and the purpose is conservation land it could end up having to come through here because that would be a town asset it goes to the trust it doesn't have to end up here so ultimately answering the question that carol was asking is is that something that would be part of our process and it would only be if somebody proposes that the town acquire some portion or all of it for town purpose yeah for a town purpose so it's something that falls under yeah that falls under cipc's um so i think you've answered it it's on the tape i can i can let carol know that we answered it and she can so it may come back at some point um exactly how it it affects um what we're about to talk about article 16. it's just that it came up in the context of some proposal that the vice chair of the cpc had laid up as to how that parcel might fit in it certainly could in the future it might not affect how we look how anything that what we're voting right now but it is context of there might be a layer-on piece at a later date right if the town decides if they if they go forward with their due diligence they get the vote for the money the town meeting they do their due diligence they decide that the use for it as a town use then yeah it would end up coming back here because they'd need money to do whatever the you know proposing to do beyond the due diligence so uh and it's good we talked about this i think the last meeting it's good to just when these things pop up just to understand what they are and there's nothing to do right now but yeah i think i think it's excellent to talk about it it's interesting that if it's been for sale that that didn't come up earlier just given if it's in a but if it's an abutting property well it was yeah i think i think i heard somebody say when it came on the market originally it was maybe two point something million and then the owner dropped the property i don't know if it's in the state or not the owner dropped the property about that price down and then when i heard mike say he had under contract for 1.3 million that it starts to get it into a ballpark where at least if you could build multiple affordable housing units and or just buy some conservation land it could make sense it's something it's probably tear down uh yeah i don't know anything about the house it's just i think it's it's enough for us right at this point we don't have to do anything right now i don't think it affects what we're about to do um but it's the context to have it could come up and then it's conceivable to come up with town meeting during the conversation on article 16 although i think it would be premature and it's not there's nothing about it that i think is needed for all the various and potential uses of the orchard lane property so that's what i can tell you okay thank you your resident wakeham viewer all right um i sent that file from liz to everybody and i'm going to go ahead brian and share it on here bigger but i can also because can you see that yeah you have better eyes than me um okay capital i like to okay start with the basics uh just the heading i think um i think it's fine i don't know if we want to say addendum addendum number two to the well i guess it's yeah i guess this is the best it gets it gets murky if you try to combine the amended report issued february 17th and then this is another amendment right kind of yeah i think people get the idea and then it's labeled number two
yeah and we've identified and you've got articles article 16. thank you for uh catching that that needed to be 16 instead of dd um so that's fine all right and then too many things on this yeah this is minor john wasn't here at the last meeting when we discussed and voted on this so if john you have any specific questions you should feel free to pop in yeah i read the through i mean nothing jumped out soon i mean
i don't know if you have any comments on the first section the summary i think that's
is that a is that no recommendation or is that a recommend against right uh well the motion to support failed or the motion to recommend failed yeah i think we can probably just end that last sentence at the 2-2 vote rather than add that resulting and no recommendation being made
are you making the updates real time or do you want to leave um i can because i'm in it right now and i'm not sure that everybody's okay with that a section i have highlighted yeah probably is appropriate to take that long or maybe i can't why are you not letting me do that because i can't get it from protective views it's like the risk of um making this discussion longer than you probably want it to be just because this has come up in other meetings it's not letting you in the past honestly we realized john wasn't here
says we need to revisit this and consider and revote it and in fact if we wanted to do that we'd have to vote first someone would have to propose to do a revote and that would have to be voted on and approved and then you would do a revote we used to do that on the fincom when we had to we maybe took a vote on the capital budget and as it changed and to give people the opportunity to change their positions potentially and then sometimes that vote to revote would fail vote stands and there's certainly plenty of select board votes that whoever's their votes and they typically won't revisit it unless there's new information um so i just again this is a matter of institutional education um that's a possibility of if people thought there were three people here that wanted to revisit the vote on so i'll i'll ask the question first of john john do you feel that you would like to vote on this because that's important to me if you want to not not not at this point now so what are i guess i mean i'm reading through the so where does it leave it at this point what is it basically we're just putting a page in the reports of two two things right first we took a vote as to whether or not we thought we needed to opine on this and we agreed we won so that's passed take a position on it um and then then we voted on what our position would be we voted to recommend right we did a vote to recommend and that failed because it was a tie where does that leave us is cipc doesn't recommend this being included what does that do somebody might ask a town meeting yeah somebody asked that um that would be the only right the only uh thing and if they were to ask right the rationale for that you know sort of two sides of rationale right as there is a many issues the rationale for not recommending it was um was that we those of us like at least i'll speak for my own my own opinion right well personally i think it's a good idea and i want to i think it's a good idea and i want to i think it's a good idea and i want to i think it's a good idea and i want to see the town look at more ways to get revenue um i didn't think it was fully baked in terms of how we were going to spend this money and whether or not it was enough and so that's a that's a recurring theme in the years that i've been on fincom and here of we approve projects that we don't have fully scoped and then we have to come back and get more later and i just i always think that if we one thing to have something overrun it's another thing to sort of not have planned for the full project that you're trying to do and so that was my opinion if anybody else wants to give theirs just a recap so with that being said with that i mean we don't know what someone will do but does that mean someone would actually take an action to then they wanted to push it forward add more detail i mean no different than the ball field i mean it's it's in the warrant it's going to get voted on right so this was really just cipc per the bylaw at least three of us thought for the bylaw and we're going to have to come back and get more detail about that but we're going to have to come back and we're going to have to come back and get more detail about that this project fit the description in the bylaw of what we're supposed to opine on so we're opining on it the town's going to vote on it um and via the article and if they want to know our opinion it will be it'll be in an addendum they could always ask at town meeting for somebody to get up and and speak to it and so you know it appears like it will likely get some amount of air time at town meeting and so the neighbors aren't too thrilled uh so assuming we agree with this tonight i'd be happy to like the other two documents get it posted on the town website and you know again it's possible somebody may stand up at town meeting and say what's the cipc's position on this if you're a butter you might say geez they didn't recommend it that's good for our site right select board supported it and the fincom supported it not that unanimously and said not yeah it's not unanimous so you forget yeah i think given that we were i think normally i would be like you know we voted on it if you don't feel strongly i mean the only time the reason i pause is because it was a tie vote and if i vote fails uh it's only because i wasn't here can you just leave it there if john's not that interested you know i wouldn't vote in favor of re-voting it if john were interested he'd probably then ask the question well how do you think he would vote it wouldn't affect the outcome um then it's not worth re-voting yeah i mean i think i mean from where i was before it's interesting but i agree i mean for 200 000 it should be like this is this is where we this is our minimum goal i think that would be my ask anyway so yeah and i think there was a long list of things right that that phil gave us of that what they'd want to do and i think where i struggled was i feel like it should have been phased what can you do what do you want to achieve and can you achieve with that amount of money you may not know exactly know that but what i'd hate to see happen is you do the three pieces you can do with the 200 you know three pieces of phases you want to do and you can do one and a half with what you've got are you going to do one and a half are you going to do one gate it and decide whether or not to spend any more money right i mean i guess adding the gleason sale then you'd probably want to know what's included in this study if you're going to do it right because imagine that has more better road access right yeah yeah yeah that's not anything i think the select board was you know focused on for the school committee yeah i don't mean i don't get the impression a re-vote will necessarily strengthen the cause more i don't think it'll really matter for the vote at the time so i don't have strong feelings to rebuild unless we did update my dark yeah and so my question is so i i appreciate this from a notes perspective but do we do we think for the purposes of the public our addition to our we need anything more than the summary um i didn't know what we wanted to do i looked at samples online and it's for a lot of contracts you know i can find one for committees specifically so i kind of had the summary in there and i kind of blew it out a little bit if we wanted to add additional detail and we could pick and choose keep them both delete one or the other i i like the summary because i think it gets to the basic like we voted against it and um we said briefly why so i don't know as long as the brief why is sufficient for people because it gives an indication as to of of the two no votes and why that was you know i agree that probably is all that's needed combined with what's in our minutes and if if you think the minutes are lacking um i think the minutes are lacking and so that's why i think the i think the sentence right members expressed concern about the adequacy of the estimate and lack of clearly defined end use while acknowledging potential value of early due diligence i think that that sentence sums up right our opinion because if we knew this when we were doing a report it would probably be it would be about a paragraph in the report so i think we could just do the summary and thanks thanks for all of the other words and did we put today's date on it or do you want to just leave it so that's it yeah you got to vote it first and then it'd be today's did it be today's date though great um okay so can i get a motion to approve the amendment as the addendum as amended so moved seconds okay um we don't need a roll call vote all in favor
if that was everyday right yes take a second motion i probably should have done it with the first motion but the move that we authorize a chair to submit the second addendum to the town manager
all in favor diet did you take my words and create a motion out of that aye or did i make the motion thank you Mindy motion you second i did is that what i did when i said so motion sorry kelly you send me a final version i'll trip it off with the minutes do you want me to send the final version or i could do it because it's just that one that's a simple enough edit okay i'll do it yeah i think you sent it sent the other two their initial report in the addendum i think you sent to a wider audience yeah send them to the same audience and you'll be copied on it and then you can do it to the we're doing that please welcome build our duty thank you for that sharing just as a follow-up on the holiday road as i understand it's a select board met on monday and they pick seven people to be on some sort of planning or feasibility advisory committee to study holiday road good level good of advisory committee around here um okay get that to the agenda okay so next item was discussion of the comparison of the five-year plan um in the warrant versus what was in our report which ryan you sent us your first stab at that right yep there you go uh what did you send i must have missed that 19th i think it was a 20 second oh 20 second i'm sorry yes yes it's i'm sorry everybody well so some of us haven't haven't had a chance to review it then but i i mean i read all the notes in the comments about what changed so i mean you can just
from all the other meetings yeah and i think there's two two things i mean the numbers are the numbers other than if i the number in the wrong place right tried to do some cross-checking and i went from i think kelly had asked for sort of more high-level comparisons which are the first two tabs and then i went with the setup that you were familiar with from our prior deliberation and just expanded it out to include the town managers recommended capital budget that's in the warrant and five-year plan and then a variance column and tied that back to the higher level sheets so that if if one wants to drill down from the higher level sheets any particular variance you can go to the detail and figure out what what were the items that created the variance and it's really most of them it's it's an exercise of i color-coded them without telling you what the color codes were but as we talked about last week anything that made its way into the fincom's recommended fiscal 27 capital budget assuming the town approves it that's a done deal now so the extent there's items in that that were not in our recommended fiscal 27 too bad for us right those those those will now be done and um anything that we had suggested should be in there that wasn't again the same thing but the real question is what do you know what do we what do we plan to do with this information i think last meeting we talked about okay as we start up the next cycle we need to understand the ground rules from once we step off for fiscal 28 through 31 what's our starting point is it our report to the town manager's five-year plan or is it some negotiated agreed upon starting point in discussions that we should have had could have had couldn't but didn't have time to have with the town manager from the finance director
i think that's where we left it and all i did was said okay here's the information assuming the numbers are accurately portrayed where do we go with this nation how do we how do we get to a new starting point i'll i'll let you guys stop first before maybe i just want to make sure i'm looking at the right thing so yeah i saw the recommendation when i was here for that and then i saw fincom and others suggested back down what is this is this comparing what is this comparing comparing to what now appears in the town meeting warrant so the fiscal 27 capital budget numbers that are showing here will be voted upon in an article for the omnibus budget and the fiscal 20 27 through 31 all five of them are included in the fincom report it's the five-year capital plan then the second tab showing the sourcing of the funds for five-year plan um and the fiscal 27 capital budget are also shown in the town meeting warrant so is this now agreed to by the fincom so fincom and town manager have aligned they're giving it to the town so i i think they're all aligned so whatever town manager originally proposed is sort of irrelevant at this point because it seemed like it moved into the middle there were four or five items that i think i'm pushed back on the town manager took their recommendations so the only thing that town will be voting on is fiscal 27 numbers it's part of the capital budget so like this is the number in the warrant now uh the town meeting column town manager column okay so that's not the original that's the current proposal it's the current they revised so tell me to revise based on feedback from uh so you don't so you don't see the two and a half million dollars for example for the field yeah that was in his original recommended capital budget so all i was doing was comparing what's in the warrant for each of those fiscal years to what was in our report those same fiscal years got it and showing what the difference dollar differences were and if all you have are those two tabs that would be interesting but not terribly helpful because you know there may be there may be some negotiation with ourselves that we could do to either agree or disagree amongst ourselves do we just accept certain items that the town manager proposed they get approved right i would imagine yeah it assumes it we're at the for the moment assume that the town approves 27 as is that may change or let's assume that whatever i would say whatever the town approves ultimately we come back and update this because that is what it is starting point yeah yeah and to the extent by the way to the extent there's anything they have they remove from 27 right so let's say on time meeting floor they take something out of the capital budget then we'll take it out but we'll also have to make a decision of like where does it go right if it does still happen does it happen in an out year yeah depending on the discussion it depends on the town meeting and why it was taken out yeah i'm trying not to i'll wait and give an opinion but i haven't i mean in the end i guess from again um feel free to let me know where i go wrong here because i haven't been here the last two meetings but my take is that the town votes and accepts it then that's a new baseline whether or not we agreed with it yeah 27 for 27 absolutely it just becomes i don't think we have a say at this point anymore in 27. that will be what town meeting is gonna do and certainly in our report we could report how how it differed right how what the town ultimately voted on differed from what we recommended and we might want to do that just from a like here's how different they ended up being but we're not affecting it it is what it is right just that one year jump right the other four years appear in the warrant but not in an article that gets voted on about our meeting they appear in the fincom report and again i wasn't able to find evidence that fish Canada actually voted uh to recommend that five year capital plan at least at their level usually they have in the past but nonetheless they put it in their report so de facto they're saying here's at a minimum they're saying here's the town manager's five-year capital plan so for fiscal 2031 that's what we're talking about once we correct sort of our numbers for what town meeting approves fiscal 27 we don't need to discuss with town managers we just i can just make those changes when the time comes and i highlighted those items in green i think um basically saying these are the things will have to get fixed assuming town meeting approves fiscal 27. i think i highlighted in kind of a brownish color anything else that we differed with the town managers by your capital plan and in most cases all you need to do is kind of scan across the line for a specific item and it's typically we eventually got to it or maybe we didn't because it fell off at the end but it's most of them it's just typically a timing difference that there are a handful that the numbers change and there's a number of items that the finance director which again i think if you look at it other than fiscal 27 i think for the most part the finance director who articulated that he really feels you need once you approve a five-year plan you should sort of stick with it if you look at also left in the prior five-year plan numbers for each fiscal year if you look you'll see most of his most town managers recommended amounts and years agree with what was in the five-year plan from last year whereas we move things around and a large part of why we move things around is because you know we were dealing with not knowing exactly what the funding sources was going to be and so we we have to kind of keep pushing things out um but there's things that i noticed when i did this that the um i'll attribute it mostly the finance director it's the town manager's recommendation the finance director did this workbook uh there's at least two or three items i didn't where they were in the five-year plan but the department had said we don't need that anymore when we met with them and and because it was in the five-year plan the finance director left it in so that'd be an example where if we want to share our information yeah if we and and finance director and the family just got a copy of this i sent it to all of cipc voting and non-voting members but assuming at some point i know we can talk about this later as to how one might go forward with trying to reconcile uh i can't imagine doing it in a in a meeting because there's just so many changes um i almost think there has to be one or two members that are volunteering to sit down with finance director and the town manager and literally go through unless we can knock out some of them themselves able to do it in writing right here's here's so let me back up here's how i think of it i think there's sort of in my mind it's three there's three pieces to this number one is for fiscal 28 and beyond are we in total similar dollar amount spending because we we spent a lot of time on trying to fit this into parameters i think they're pretty close to answer that question if you look at the first half answers that and they they're most close in total by year right so i don't immediately see a big concern there
the next is funding source you know that's another parameter were they similar funding sources or are they wildly different and it looks like there's the main differences are use of levy taxation versus free cash or where the big differences are and so i'd want to spend a little bit of time on okay what's driving that difference can we get comfortable with that and is there anything we think we should call out from a policy perspective right of of the differences there if there's nothing to call out from a policy perspective and we can get comfortable that that fits right what we think can be done okay fine um but i will point out if you look at tab two right and maybe just go to the end to the totals right levy taxation there's a two million dollar difference um you know we were two million dollars higher on levy taxation and then if you look at uh debt we were two million higher and free cash the town manager was four million dollars higher right and so that's where i'd want to spend a little bit of time on how does that work is that is that going to meet
the parameters we have and if if it isn't like is there anything we can point to right that might cause a difference so that's sort of my two high level and then it lines up nicely with your tabs right the third is on a detailed basis are there any projects so if we're okay on a total basis and we're um and we're okay on a funding source or we've reconciled our funding source issues then it's specific projects and so i think we do need to from my perspective take a look at the project differences and say hey that project you have in we were told wasn't needed anymore that seems like a place to get get consistent right understanding or hey there's a reason we pulled a particular project forward or we pushed a particular project back and we'd like to talk about that an example of that would be um we have a little less than two million dollars of roof related projects over four fiscal years which we got from mike fea the finance director slash town manager only picked up fiscal 27 piece of that and didn't put in any of the others and so that is probably a good chunk of the two million dollar difference in the levy debt yeah although they have two million dollars more in levy debt fiscal 27 related to the wastewater um facility at the school uh and that puts it at like six million of debt borrowing but their sideboard's intention is to pay the debt service for the two million dollars out of the cap stabilization fund but that would be an example of where we're talking about and the whole town building discussion you know it's not in either of our five-year plans it's kind of below the line but i think the finance director has just assumed it's going to be fiscal 28 we put it in the purgatory bucket saying we need more information but the roofs are the roofs i mean we we were told by the village i really need to progress along subject to if they make the decision yeah how many things that's worthy of another another discussion altogether like that project's so big those projects are so big it's worthy of a discussion we might not resolve that in our reconciliation but we might identify it as like this is a key a key issue we have to get resolved before the next town meeting because in the time that we were progressing through this right the select board voted to put together an advisory committee related to this building and that may change even though like oh let's progress on the roofs or not so but hopefully they'll get on with that right after town meetings on the side you all read the way on post i heard about this before i saw it on the post children's way which occupies a bunch of space down here is moving to happy hollow for next september so there's going to be a bunch of vacant space i don't know how much they actually have so that that's just an example that that now has to be factored into the whole building discussion but yeah that that this project but but in terms of understanding um when you look at the total picture how could this be but you literally have to look at each line and i and i i think we have to and i like the way you laid it out but i think that's the end goal for me is okay what are the things the the differences here that i want to call out and talk to the and and we can put the together a list right and i see is hey these are the things you included that we were told weren't needed are we sure they're needed right then there's things of hey a lot of question marks around this particular project right i don't know that we're going to come to a consensus right now but we'll put it on our list of things we have to get consensus on i.e the town building right the use of the town building the projects associated with the town building and then is there anything else right that maybe we can talk about that we didn't get told that we didn't need it but where there was a specific reason that we prioritize one project versus another it sounds like you're you're more inclined to basically start with the town managers five-year plan fiscal 20 to 31 and and offer reasons why we think there should be adjustments to that as opposed to literally saying we felt pretty good about what we recommended but we're advisory here's why and literally talk to them about all the items not sounding like what you yeah well i mean i don't know if it's six and one half dozen the other you can work in either direction um i still fully intend on looking at every project and making sure that personally that they i i'm good with it but there's some of them like it's six and one half dozen to me which way well another would be like an example just just a couple of pop-up things we all generally put fixing sidewalks at the low end of the priority scale compared to other things so we advance them things and we pushed off but because the plan structure tied into the prior five-year plan there were sidewalks slotted in all these earlier years so that's where they are and so that might be an example where if we said well you really didn't prioritize this you just used prior five year plan and you get an answer back well that's what you think is the right thing to do so i'm just trying to understand you know again i think we could probably do a lot of that ourselves which is i think what you're talking about and then just have a much more narrow focus and then if it's more narrow focused i guess you do it in writing and then invite them in or you just send up writing and said we need a response like in a week but we really need we discussed the last meeting we need to get we'll talk about later the project plan from now until october 15th we really need this starting point resolved pretty quickly
obviously the add-on here is the add-on here none of us know necessarily what's going to be there yeah i i guess your point brian right is if i start from town manager and make some tweaks to that then i'm giving up my prioritization yeah right yeah and that was something that even though it was rudimentary when i listened some of the fincom members they they asked that question of the town manager did you guys prioritize because they read our report looked at each thing and tried hard so as a concept i guess at least having a discussion about that concept because if town manager says yeah i hear you now that we have more time you know maybe you and i and financial director should town manager should you know we look at these things and decide our questions say you know we thought these things should be prioritized over these others why do you think the opposite right and and i but i still think we have to call out what those things are and i think sidewalks is a good one like you know we didn't we didn't think that should be prioritized over xyz help us understand why you think it should and they may say you know they may have good reasons for doing that but i think it's worthy of a discussion well especially so it doesn't happen again next year exactly that's the whole point they value it differently they're going to keep voting it differently let us know why we can build it into what our criteria are yeah we're still able if we hear that rationale to say i agree i don't agree like oh now that i have more information i can understand that versus okay i have that information i still don't understand it and i and in that case i wouldn't necessarily reconcile i would still have
yeah well i mean i think just like dpw we asked what are your priorities when we take that into account of hey i really need this first i mean no different from town manager what do you think you we need first as a town that's a weighted piece of it right we don't have to agree but i mean i like i think that's a good idea i mean it doesn't really matter what change it's just more of okay this changed what was the rationale and why to change a priority right i mean i think it's not simple but yeah i i still i guess i still can't let it rest that the answer is if the answer is i had i used what i used last year and i made some tweaks i i won't i won't be able to accept that that's what it is when you look at the numbers you will see that well that is a question in my mind is is the town manager going to be taking that position again that whatever i put in the five year plan is the five-year plan that's what we need to i guess we need to figure out some of those higher level philosophical issues because again otherwise we're going to be beating our heads against them but if he if he takes that position then it's kind of a meaningless conversation unless he's willing to change his mind yeah i think that's why let's ask the question and and see where i i don't want to automatically assume that we're not going to be able to come to some mutual agreement on this right in a legal term we took a de facto review of this stuff right whereas the finance director said hey i dealt with this last year i put together the five-year plan for the town manager i met with all the department heads these were their priorities other than they had a bunch of new projects coming into fiscal 27. um everything else i didn't hear anything to justify changing what was in the five-year plan and again you pretty much can match up all those numbers yeah but but i think had there been more time uh we would have someone had that conversation with the town manager and the finance director and said okay we came at this fresh remember we asked nelly at this outset should we be just locking in on what was already there or should we look at all this kind of fresh we looked at it fresh we prioritized and um and if that's not going forward if that's not what the town manager is expecting this committee to do then yeah i mean he has to tell us i i i don't know that that was so fundamental personally that's a fundamental issue with me for me to be on the committee and not that i'm saying but like if if it's always going to be we did what we did last year and we didn't right which works if you prioritize last year that will generally work because then you feed in and prioritize but um you can prioritize but if you prioritized and i've come up here for the first time now um yeah you're you're a bit ahead of you but um actually when we speak with the department heads we talk a lot about how they prioritized we're talking about them prioritized but they prioritize but if you never prioritized we're always going to buy heads and there could be good reasons you have to change or you're me but um yeah so i i just i i just don't think had to be made and he couldn't accommodate, he would make those decisions unilaterally. This is a much more democratic approach to that, right, differing opinions on priorities. Yeah, I think that's got to be self-reconciled. What I want to ask committee members to do is to go through the file that Brian, if you haven't already, go through the file that Brian put together because I think it's excellent. Format's perfect, Brian. Put together your questions that you think we need to resolve on the differences. Broad, high-level questions as well as individual project question. But I agree with you, Brian. I phrased the first or high-level, but you'll ultimately end up in the detail in order to answer them. Yes. At a minimum, you'll need examples. Right. Yeah. If you don't want to hit them with every single project, and at least get the conversation started. Yeah. For me, I plan to go through it year by year and just look at project by project. Okay. Can I live with that? Do I have a really strong feeling about why a particular project didn't belong in that year or should be prioritized later? Well, again, most of our, I think, part of the issue was even though we asked several times, we weren't privy to the exact amount of funding sources and types of funding sources. We knew and were tied into the FinCom funding parameters. But as an example, fiscal 27, we didn't know what the amount of surplus capital would be. It turned out there was half a million dollars surplus capital, which meant there was more revenue funding. There was more revenue source available in fiscal 27 than we thought was available, which meant we by default had to defer something, right, until a future year because we couldn't hit the parameters of FinCom. So surplus capital, you're probably only going to know for the upcoming fiscal year, but that needs to be done at an earlier date like at the start of our process. It might change by the time you get to, well, FinCom gets, but I mean, I have less heartburn over debt service change. I mean, we made a recommendation to fit the profile, but at the end of the day, that's the finance director's responsibility to appropriately do that. I mean, that's why we added the contingency projects and prioritized so that if it did change, it was. Yeah, I would say, right. I agree with you to some extent, John, but I think this is where having a tri board meeting with FinCom was like, what's your level of comfort for those categories we can do? You can do that first. You can do first. Hey, we can manage this much debt right in these many years and then work into that plan. You just give us your four steps at a general level. Yeah, I don't know about you, but I don't at my house, I don't do it as I'm going to do all these projects and then see if I can afford them later. Right. I first figure out what I can afford and then plan to plan the projects. So I don't think we should have to make that decision. But without information, in addition to what we've been given in policy, I've got policy if FinCom or somebody else wants to get like, hey, yeah, that's policy, but we plan to exceed policy in this year. Fine. I can do that. Well, that's that's a possible approach. I mean, I personally think the finance director could have been should have been involved, just as you always have on the front end of this. Working side by side with us. And we asked and it just didn't happen because he could have then basically guided us as to how much funding he felt should be available. Or he could review a draft form what we were doing and say, OK, I'm suggesting you instead of doing this on borrowing and this on free cash, you know, switch it around. And maybe that'll happen. But I think if if if he were involved, he would have a similar effective effect. And we've gotten that across the board. I think there's question asked is that the Washington Board has a survey over, you know, probably half a dozen people who have been awarded grants to fund the national debt relief program. And so has there been any sort of change in acceptance of that? It's, you know, it's it's not, it's not, I mean, you know, I think it's, you know, it's, you know, it's, you know, I think that's a, it's, you know, I think that it's something I would like to about what, fun, right? Because we'll see how much it changes. That's a whole nother problem. I would at least like to be like, yeah, I heard you. You did it because of this and we did it because of this. And we need to do that next month. We talked about last week having all these questions discussed before we do a tri-board meeting, select board, the FinCom town manager and the plaintiff's director, which we also discussed. We need to do that in May so we can be pairing in June to get the requests out for next fiscal year. So that sense of urgency when we ultimately deliver on behalf of the committee, whatever we're going to deliver, I don't think we're going to overwork what we're sending them. We just don't have enough time. And we just have to create a sense of urgency. And if the sense of urgency isn't there on the other side, it doesn't bode well for what comes next. I agree. Which we already expressed last week, there'd be challenges, you know, doing department head meetings and things throughout the summer. It is what it is. And I didn't, I mean, I assume I didn't miss any communications. I mean, there wasn't really any feedback from what we submitted other than thanks, right? I mean, it wasn't, we didn't get any detail back into what changed. No, we did it ourselves. And in fact, we gave it, you know, for FY27, I'm the one who looked at it and gave it to FinCom, right? What's the next step? I don't know what the detailed differences were. Okay. So no, we didn't. I didn't think so. I just don't know. Just make sure. No, I mean, the main difference, Brian's already said it a couple of times, was the finance director took his prior plan and that is what he used. And then he made some tweaks to it. Whereas we wholesale said, taken all the projects and I've ranked them in order and I fit them into the policy. So that's, that was two things. Two different approaches. So you're going to get two different answers. I mean, obviously the question becomes, if it's going to be just take what we had last year, there's really no point in this committee. I mean, that's kind of right. That's why I raised the question. I mean, if the finance director takes that position. Yeah. I don't want to assume that's going to happen, guys. Right. I think that's, that's why it's important to do this now. Right. Ask the questions now. Identify that. If, I don't think that's what's going to happen, but if that were, what? Happen, then I think there's an existential crisis, right? Like why are we here? I'm not, you know, there's five of us sitting, spending a lot of time going over this stuff. If, if where we're going to land at the end of the day is you're just going to do what you did before. And I don't, I don't know why we're here, except I will say the town manager recommendation is not right. Original recommendation is not what is going to town meeting. So there at least was some, right. The fact that our. Right. And I can pretty confidently say if we hadn't done our report, I don't know if that would have been the case. I think there would have been some pushback on it, particularly around the fields project, right. It's a big project, but I don't know that there would have been the same level of edits. So I do think it provided value. I just would prefer as I think you all would to be in a less frustrated position, right. As we're doing, as we're doing the next one. I would do propose in order to keep this moving along and be in a position to get something to the town management finance director. Why would you propose accumulating these individual high level and specific project related questions? Well, I think we can do it similar to consolidate similar. We could do it similar to what we did with the department managers, which was you guys all submitted your questions to me and I consolidated them. Right. And you'd have to give me a little bit of liberty. I'm going to go ahead and do that. Okay. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. So we do have to their funders who are up and running, there's this high demand, the high demand was, you know, high quite a high demand, but still to form the when that reach up, for us, you have to sell it to that bank. But yet we'reume anybody granted is FNY, right? Right. So it's not all in all. It's not something that have estimated manufacturing costs these for us for now more than somebody I don't think that everybody, it's, it came to us to our. One, exactly. So what I've been doing lately, I've been moving forward to a grant to come with all thehan畅l who look after��니ers if they do want them, but I think the goal system is the same. And this is a vision plan. We did. Right. Right. um we need a motion for that should we limit again just because there's there's lots of numbers so it'll take you all i've already been through that put it together but you know it'll take you a while to look at each one but you you may very quickly get in the flow saying i really don't care you know that one can say that you know so you know would it be helpful if we all said or would provide you with our top two or three high-level questions and our top five or six project related questions just so you don't end up getting great questions 30 questions from each of us and then you gotta still pretty confident i'm not gonna get 30 questions from each of us i know one of us maybe two of us um yeah that's i think that's a good guideline i don't think you have to strictly stick to that like if you have a burning question but i think but try to focus on those yeah i i again i'm going to start with the two first tabs and just step back as we just did and say philosophically here's my two or three things i think i'd like to get clarity on and then uh yeah i'll go through again the numbers myself and again they'll just be some that i know haven't been through it already that i'm gonna put down on a piece of paper just make sure everybody is focused on them again i tried to just put some random highlights and things that would inevitably be a question so i think you'll see two or three bright yellow things i think those are the items that the finance director included the department had said you know either they weren't requested again yeah the department has we didn't need them but they were in the prior five-year plan that's why i did that yeah so um well those those hopefully are the easy ones to resolve like yeah we'll take those out but you'll see uh you know you you'll get a sense of um i i color-coded some of the text projects just because there's some footnotes where i was trying to also explain away some of the variances based on what was in our report the tables that kelly put together so you see at the bottom of the detailed schedule there's excerpts from both kelly's report or our report that we did that um identified you know certain items that um heрен BOA planning you know um you know either weren't in the five-year plan at all and then there were other items that we were in purgatory and that explains you know some of the bigger variances right there yeah and then you'll see above that a couple other reconciliations that are information that we're in you know stuff that finance director provided and um so um um yeah there should be enough information there for you to what I was trying to do. And someone was just trying to cross-check all these numbers to add it up. Okay. Yeah, and I think back to the town building, right? I still, the key question for me, now that there's been some movement with the select board is, how much of the, we broke the projects up into pieces and then deferred, right? Put the rest in purgatory. But with the knowledge that they're going to study what to do with the building, how much of it, then I think you move to like, what of this absolutely has to be done and the rest of it has to go in purgatory. And I don't know that that was the context we were thinking about or had when we were, when we originally decided to break it up. Well, yeah, I mean, I think he only included portions of roof. Yeah, but we phased the whole roof in. We did the entire roof. But I think he prioritized it based on things he really knows kind of have to get done. Yeah. But I think, yeah, maybe there's some of those that wouldn't necessarily get done if they decide they're not going to. Yeah, I'm worried that we're putting work, you know, over the course of, it'll, God knows how long they'll take us to figure out what we're going to do with the building. By the time we're done, we'll put a whole new roof on it and then decide, you know, and especially without the children way here. I think that that's a pretty key difference, right? Because that's always been, at least in my mind, one of the big, hey, you could probably move the office space somewhere, but where are we going to put that program? Yeah, the school committee, I presume could find some space in the high school, one of the schools, but maybe not. I was surprised they're mentioning it. It's in the park, that school committee. I was surprised it was moving to Happy Hollow. I thought the building was full, but that's... Yeah, I think they, it sounds like the kindergarten, they're projecting the lower kindergarten enrollment. Yeah, we've done that before. It was surprising. I was like, are we studying to make more buildings? And that seems like a hard left. Yeah. We've also projected lower kindergarten enrollment and closed schools before and then had to reopen them. And it may move from Happy Hollow. That's what CPC was discussing. There was money, there was money appropriated. I guess I'll mention this while we're talking about it. It's in this detail. There was money appropriated last year's town meeting to redo the playground. I was like, which described the town meeting as the town building playground. By the way, Children's Way used it during the day and then it's available for the public. And then the announcement that they're moving took place at Happy Hollow. CPC discussed, well, you know, we'd like to maybe be able to use the funds for that, which was being held up over some other issue over at Happy Hollow or some of the other schools, if need be. And they're trying to figure out a way how to accomplish that. But if you need, you need to get town meeting approval. My understanding is they're gonna try to amend or try to include in their motion something that's not in the warrant, which is to amend the last year's vote to authorize use of $400,000 on that or any of the other, at any of the other schools. And so that'll come up at town meeting if it gets, if it's allowed by the moderator. And that might affect, you know, in the five-year plan, I think we had 400,000 for, Boker is in there. Yeah. Next up. And there's another school two years after that.
That's just, you know, things move around. All right. So. We'll send those to you. Send those to me. Send them later. Yeah. I'd say like a week so that you can consolidate and get them out. So we're, we're suggesting you'll just consolidate and go ahead and send them to the town management. If everybody's comfortable with that. Yeah. And I imagine 90% of it will be similar themes. A few. Yeah. I imagine I'm pretty confident that when I consolidate them, there's going to be a lot of repeat. Teams. Spend a lot of time deliberating each item. So.
All right. Oh, capital CIP form. So Brad, I sent that to everybody last time, I believe.
Brad ,do you want to give an overview of your thinking and then we can sort of have a discussion? I'm embarrassed to say I forgot to. Oh wait. My fault. I am embarrassed to say I forgot to bring it with me. But let me pull it. So does everybody have it? Yes. Okay. What I did was I took the existing form. Tried to use some of the same information, but at the same time, I did. multiple other sources, including Millis. I know we talked about Millis, and I tried to combine what I thought made the most sense from the various forms, try to give certainly more detail than what was in the town form. So I think that if you go through the various headings like project identification, description, readiness, project schedule, I think a lot of these things are things that we talked about during the course of the year in terms of information we'd like to have, and that's sort of the genesis of the form. So I don't know if anybody had a chance to look at it, if they have any questions or thoughts on the form. So I did look at it, and I guess the only thing, and this comes back to some of the other last three conversations, is it goes through one through five, doesn't really do the long-term plan, five plus, whatever that is. Does it? I know we talked about maybe making that its own separate process, since this is a year term, but it's not long. Right. Yeah, I specifically did not do the six through 10, because I thought that the six through 10 years are, they're not going to be as precise, or I don't think they're capable as being precise, and that's more of a long-term planning as opposed to specifics that are what this form is sort of directed towards. Specifically, what do you need? Because I think from year six through 10, maybe people do know that they need, but I doubt it. It's more of a planning process. It tends to be more of a big picture. Right. And I always say it was like a big thing. We need a new school, or we need a new building. I think we talked about maybe adding a question, not looking for this level of detail, but a question saying, and maybe you put a dollar. If you have any large projects you foresee in year six through 15, or six through 10, whatever you pick. Michael Fay, I'd be like, yeah, I might need $600 to $900 million worth of school buildings, right? The public safety building is going to have to be $20 million spent on it, as an example. Who knows? But not get it down into specific long-term planning. Actually, I think it's a good exercise, but just start to get bigger things on the radar screen. We know this building is on the radar screen, and the school, long-term school buildings, those will dwarf pretty much anything else you said last week. That can certainly be added. It would be more of a broad-based question, I think, as I see it, and I'm thinking about it in terms of three years, six through 10, or even beyond, because I know they talk about going out 30 years, you know, what do you see on the horizon? Well, and I guess I would point to, you said the article about the group 20 parcel that they're considering, like, I don't know if that's like an example. It's not necessarily in five-plus years out, but maybe it is, so maybe just kind of couch it and do it. Yeah, no, that's a perfect example of like, hey, we'd like to do something with, we're not quite sure what we'd like to do, but we'd like to do something, where's that, what's the placeholder, right, that goes in, you know, and, you know, there are people of different opinions that might be like, oh, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't that might be like, no, I'd like that in the five-year plan, right, even though it's defined personally or anything that's not fully defined yet, I'm outside the five-year plan, but what is that? Is it $5 million? Is it $2 million? Like, those sorts of things, I think, slotting them somewhere, even if it's not slotting them, even if it's just knowledge that beyond the five-year time horizon, I have a list of wants, needs. And it consolidates. Right. In a consolidated spot, right, because that ultimately, we said we want that to be a section of a report of like, hey, these are the things, not necessarily purgatory, but maybe it's a combination of purgatory and long-term plan, like, these are the things out there on the horizon. It raises an interesting question. If you're talking about years six through beyond, and you're trying to frame a question, is it more, when we're trying to frame a question, what is that in your wish list? If you had unlimited funds or from year six beyond, what are you going to need? Not, so what are you going to need?
Other than normal replacements, you know, EG, new roadway, et cetera, et cetera. I think we're trying to narrow it down to things we just aren't aware of that folks may have talked about. It's everything that's applied. Like, roofs have 20 or 30 years. Vehicles have, like, in your cycle, those are probably easier because they're not going to be out, like, they're not, hey, let's redevelop through 20. It's in your project cycle, so it's a different bucket, right? And maybe the form is, like, zero to five or zero to three, because it obviously, we fill this out in the year zero for next year, it's going to be very different if we fill it out for year five. Like, when do they redo? That's something we should probably build into this of, hey. Yeah, and I think I'm not quite there yet on how to do this, but I was thinking about this as we were going through the capital plan previously. I think if you looked at the trend for any given department. Right? You can get a sense of what that's sort of normal. There's this many trucks that have to be replaced. You know, I don't know which truck it's going to be, but I know there's going to be X million dollars of trucks a year, X million dollars of roads, right? It's recurring. There's recurring stuff. We could probably, with the data we have, sort of guesstimate what that looks like. What I'm looking for is, what are the one-time big things that I wouldn't necessarily know, because you only do them every 20 years or every 30 years. I don't know how old any of these buildings are. So, right? It's those things. It's the big things on the horizon that I can't anticipate because I don't have enough knowledge. There shouldn't be that many. Well, I guess I would think about, you know, one-time big things that are coming up, or it could be things like change in technology. I don't know. Maybe there's some that DPW knows that there's going to be something coming down. The next 10 years about the way you do legislation, or the way you construct highways. There could be doing a lot of things that we wouldn't know, but DPW would know, or the fire department would know. I guess those sorts of things. Stormwater is a good example. We're seeing the tip of the iceberg, as I mentioned, at a meeting a long time ago in the fall. I still think there's millions of dollars that are going to end up having to be spent on infrastructure related to stormwater. And we have to do it within a certain time frame. And we need to get it done. We have to abide by it. To be able to get federal permits or whatever. And there's a deadline, and it's under the select board's purview. I think Kilmart heard that when we discussed it, and I believe it's brought it up at least at one select board meeting, that they're the owner of that. DPW executes, but they're not the owner of that issue. So that's one example. The Energy Committee, the Town Sustainability person, you know, the FinCon. It would be the finance director who showed FinCon a request for, I don't know, $12 million of zero-carbon stuff. I don't know where that is. It showed up on a piece of paper. It may still be out there. But it's those kinds of things where it may be 10% probability or really need to be done. But there's probably maybe five to 10 of those kinds of things. Now, there may be some. But no one knows about sitting here today that just comes up. But one of the things I was going to say is when you look at what went out to the employees, the one-page form, there's a set of instructions. And so I think it's going to be important on particularly a question like that, so they don't inordinately spend a lot of time on it, that we probably need to develop a set of instructions in that particular question. It would have to be pretty clear. We're not looking for, you know, really detail behind it. We're really just looking for big-picture items that you could conceive of in the next, you know, year 6 to 15. And, again, what you would expect to hear back, I'd say, well, you've got the long-term school projects. You've got the town built. But I just don't, you know, wear that list. My overarching comment, and it's not getting into the details. So there's a few things. I think from a couple of words, consistency, which I can help with, like project category, and we've got some categories here, some of them align with departments. I think we already know department. We've got some categories that we've used in the past that are in my big spreadsheet that I'd like to either stick with those or modify them. And it lets us sort of group things together, like I think it's grouped, you know, land improvement, infrastructure. Building repair, stuff like that. So we can debate that. I don't think we need to debate it right now. I think some sort of categorization is important. I don't think we need to debate it right this minute. My other comment I really would love is for this ultimately, and we're going to debate the details, but I would love this to be in a format that is easy to take the information and use it and pivot it, which word is? Not that. Excel is what it was in before, and I don't think necessarily everybody uses Excel very well, but it's my preference. I'm wondering if there's a better solution in terms of like, I'm thinking along the lines of like Google Forms, right? Like where they're filling it out, it's easy for them to fill it out in a pretty user-friendly fashion, and it's spitting it out into a spreadsheet, right? That we can then manipulate. I'm happy to take whatever feedback you guys can think about that, but I just would love to see this be user-friendly, as user-friendly as possible for the department managers, but also allow us to use it in a non-tedious way, right? To populate forward. So the hope was that the town, which was moving forward or had moved forward on a project management software package, that it would be capable of doing that. It would be capable of doing a front-end process too, in which case the employees would be interfacing with that system, and no one here would be having to manipulate an Excel spreadsheet. The town staff might have access to it, you know, read-only or whatever. And they could update it, but yeah. But I don't know if they've fully abandoned that. They sound like they tabled it. I don't know if they fully abandoned it, but they tabled it. And that's not going to happen. Even if they agreed and said, oh, that system will work, we'll resurrect that. Or we think there's another one out there. Because there are systems out there that, you know, project management type planning systems that probably do all this and can be tailored for our particular needs. Is there any forms that we know of anywhere in the town that we're using? I don't know if they're using it. I feel like they asked the IT director, right? It's just, for me... They're just having to copy and paste everything. It's just, I mean... Yeah. It's just, it's easy on both ends, right? Like, it's easy if you can set up a form. It's a lot easier in a Google form to just like, okay, I checked the things off I needed. And then you're spitting them out. That was my question. So I looked at the instructions for this form. There's a map that maps it to the Excel. Yeah, it's perfect now. And each field, you know, not all the fields are used for that. But, yeah. But that was the intention, right? Yeah, yeah. But the map is, it got broke, it broke. It was created before my time, but they, it's broken, so. And then the question is, you know, the only other question I have is optics. One page versus at the moment, they're called four pages. I mean, some of it's just formatted now. I think a lot of it. Yeah, that's formatting. I think we didn't, I think when you're formatting, it can be formatted to less. Um, so I wasn't overlooking it. I wasn't overly concerned with that. That's just sort of my overarching. I think we need to decide on, you know, content and then we can work on format and delivery method. And I had a question on item number six, um, which I have no issue with what we have in here. Um, and it seems like this would be asking the, uh, submitter to come up with their own rankings. It, it does, which is, I recognize this can be. Problematic. It'll be all, they're not honest. They're just going to say it's important, but all the highest parts, but I didn't know if you were in turn, um, or we thought that if we use this in this form, whether we in turn wanted to use this same kind of ranking for our own assessments. So that's one of the items is in our report is to look at a more detailed variety approach, which is something that I've pulled together a few other towns. I mentioned last meeting. I didn't circulate it yet. Um, some of them are way more extensive than you would be able to put in this thing. Um, so I just didn't know if this sort of philosophically is this, I think the old form had some sort of evaluation criteria. Well, you know, we use low, medium, high when this past year, which, so I thought that you could have five as opposed to just three, something is important. I think aligning it. I think that's what you're getting at. Brian. Aligning it with whatever our rating is going to be is ideal, right? They should, it should be tightly aligned. Are we going to have a problem with everybody giving, you know, five maybe. Um, but I think it depends, you know, it's hard to say like project requirements, like if it's required or mandated, it's hard for everybody to say everything is required. Right. The instruction could say, if you give off all for the highest. I think there was, we talked about, there's two components to the ranking, right? You can write the project, go ahead. But then I still want, I still want them to rank in a given department, right? Given submitter rank your projects, one to one to 10. Right. Cause I still think you can do this. This is sort of one way of ranking, but there's also the, at least within your own department, put them in order. Yep. And then we've still got to do. I'll do the across departments, but at least if I know within a given department, what the order is from the perspective of the person submitting that, that is good context. Right. But do we, I mean, do we just tell them section six, well, for your department, we're going to rack and stack and you have, you can't, you know, they have to be prioritized. If you have to pick their ratings based on that. I mean, we all know how that's going to look, but at least, you know, cause then we can take this and send it back and say, Hey, all right, here's your section. They're all 25. Like you can give me all 25. You're still going to have to put them in it. Right. I'm just wondering if we make them again, cause if you know that this is, but that's the outcome, maybe in year one, it'll be a mess. Right. But if in year two, you know, that we're going to send this back to you. Cause you've ranked them all the same ranking. We're going to say, go tweak your scale. So you can probably, none of them can be the same. Yeah, we can do that. I just, we you're right. First year will probably be a mess and we'd have to go back, but like, it's kind of like the, you know, the professor who has yourself score yourself, like, or, you know, if you're ready to work, if you all give yourself the highest rating, right. I'm going to knock it down. Like that's yeah. Be, be objective. I just, I don't think you can answer all of these five on every project and good conscience. I mean, urgency, definitely. You can't get five. It's a baseball field. Right. Interior. Maybe, maybe, maybe the right person. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The question is failure to proceed with the project in the next fiscal year. Right. Impact. Right. And we're asking very specific questions. I don't think you can say for every single project. Right. That if we don't do it in the next, next fiscal year, it's going to have an imminent impact. Yeah. So like sidewalks would be, which is how we are, you know, we need a new transfer station garage.
We don't do that the whole, the whole. Set up, there's going to fall apart. Then, then the credibility of that is shot. So I, again, I, I don't, I don't think that's, I think I'm more focused. I mean, Taylor, your idea of just rank your projects, rank order them, that would have to go in here somewhere. Um, um, but you know, we just, just need to make sure that whatever we're putting here and these looked fine to me, um, um, it kind of. Covered our low, medium, high concept. Well, that was the idea. It just added two additional levels.
And theoretically tell you what you were saying, uh, have it on a department basis, theoretically, I mean, whatever their priority range total is the bottom number they should, those numbers should correspond with in theory, in theory, they should, unless they're all right. Maybe that's the solutions. Like you, you give. Your rankings, but if your stuff all comes with the same score, I'm going to send it back to you and tell you to give me an order, which is why I actually, I like your idea of having them have the department heads actually rank it. I mean, it should theoretically be similar to this ranking, but individual projects is important information for me as a member. I like, I need to know if, if a regulation says I have to have it and I have to have it this year, that changes my outlook, right. Or if it's an immediate. Immediate safety issue. Um, I think where you get, you know, the value question is the one that's the hard for me, one of the ones that's hard to, I mean, it seems to me that this is where, and, and I don't know, they've been overly consistent. I think mostly we get these forms for the upcoming fiscal year. Only hope is we can get these forms for every fiscal year and to me, when we then meet with the department, it's the first. Place I would suggest we probably go with that chart because we're likely going to need some elaboration on either why are all your scores the same, or these, you know, you have limited funds, you know, either you've given us ranking one to the 1500 projects, or they've worked out this way and you elaborate on your ranking on this particular item. We don't, we don't fully appreciate that. And that then would, you know, same conversation we had that this past cycle. But it'd be a bit more, you know, focused, I think, and allow us to focus in specifically because something that's, you know, life safety, I don't know, we're gonna spend a whole lot of time other than if someone questions the amount of, you know, where'd you get the number for the new fire truck. I have one more question. This is more of a nip than anything else, but when we identify the source of funds, if I remember correctly, didn't the previous departments not fill that out? Yeah. Yeah. I was gonna, that was my next on it. So I'm, I'm gonna advocate that we take the funding source out, but I do think we need something it's, they usually don't fill it out, but one of the things that has, I've always kind of grants and things to be grants, like it really is, are there sources of funding available outside of the town? Right. So, and that's a grant state funding now. Yeah. Are there any other funds or like, I just identified you need town funds versus get it from someone else? CTA funds. Is this project eligible for gifts, grants, other, you know. CTA funds I would include. State funding. Yeah. Federal funding I guess. Federal funding. Right. And then again, the town employees have been pretty darn good going after grants. Yeah. The other thing I want to make sure we include. include in the instructions, is that the project cost should be the total project cost, including any other funds, right? Because what we've experienced, Brian, I know you have too, is we get a request for a piece of a project, there's funds somewhere else, and they've netted it out already. And this has happened a couple times to me, and it was like, something happened where they were counting all their funds, they didn't come in, or they didn't get everything, and then they came back for a supplemental request. So I want the request to be the full cost of the project, right? And then I think on the table, there's been a source of confusion on number five, in the way it is a current form, and I think it may continue here, of the difference between staggered request amounts, and the way it is a current form, and I think it may continue here, of the difference between and the way it is a current form, and I think it may continue here, of the difference between expenditure. So depending on who fills it out, right? Are you requesting amounts for approval in various years? Are you requesting an amount for approval that you're then going to spend over a period of time, which most capital projects don't get spent all at once? I don't know how much I care, and you guys can feel free to how it's spent, because usually, if you're doing a project, you need to secure from the town approval, to pay for the project. The only reason I care about when it's like, okay, you're doing a project, you've asked for a project, when are you going to be done so that we can be checking in as to whether or not there's surplus funds, or you're over, right? I don't know if I need to just to make it easier for them, like, do we need to know expenditure year by year by year? I mean, we do for the budget, depending on how the project's structured, right? I mean, not necessarily, so that was, that's what I'm getting at. It's not located. If you, are you spoken for, right? Yeah, when, when we approve something at town meeting, we're not approving when it's going to get spent, necessarily. We're approving that it can be spent. Wouldn't that affect our funding sources? If you only need to have two million this year and two million next year, then they wouldn't necessarily, they wouldn't pull levy, they wouldn't pull debt next, this year, would they? A little four at the beginning. We don't get to make it. A financial, financial structure will, it varies. I mean, like on the council and agency building, they borrowed a year before they started spending money. Yeah. This thing got delayed. It depends. Other things, they put them off, and then in the next borrowance cycle, we borrow them. But I think at least this form asked for a, the upper right corner under four in the project schedule. I don't think that was on the old form. Which one? What are you looking for? On the draft form project schedule. So it has estimated dates. So at least we would start to get a sense of their expectation on completion. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm good with that. I want that. It's more like, do I need, I'm trying to figure out how, how do we streamline this? Least amount of information that would give us the better. Perfect. Make it easier. Instead of estimated expenditures in five, although we have both, but you know, are we really getting at, you know, you know, year of appropriation?
How much do you need? When do you need it to be appropriated? That's really the question. When, when, when we think it'll be before town meeting. I'm just saying later, Tom, let's just talk about the roofs, right? We put everything else in hold, but the roofs have multi-year. How would we want that put in the future? That's a good question, right? No, it's done on an appropriation basis. So we take that by, you know, if we want that as a, that could be a series of projects, new projects, or it'd be one line item, town building roofs. And I, they need appropriations or I'm asking for appropriations over these five fiscal years. Well, I think it's like road maintenance and sidewalks. It's like 200,000, 200,000, 200,000 with the ass versus, and that's one where I can use break out here versus I'm asking for 600 all in one. Yeah, I guess that, yeah, that's right. I guess I'm trying to figure out how you put that in a form because you're right. There are some recurring items that are not total costs that they're just recurring items and there are other items that are, yeah, I want the total cost of the project. Two different things. Maybe it's a different checkbox. Hey, if it's a reoccurring expense like roads, then estimate your next five years. Maybe that's just a different section of the form you get to use if it's a reoccurring project. Right. I mean, I know. I think that's possibility, right? You have a question up in the first section, Brad, right? Is this part of a multi-year project? And I'm, again, I'm back in Google forms, right? And I've got two paths going. One is, you know, is this a one-time project? Is this a multi-year project? Is this a project that's going to be requested for appropriation in parts? Or is this a recurring project, i.e. roads, right, that's going to get appropriated? Like it's just going to go on for, you know, roads are going to go on for the, you know, forever. Again, take the roads. You know, right now, when a holder submits, he submits an Excel spreadsheet that has five line items. Well, a single line item for roads, but he puts a number for each of these. Yeah. Appropriations for each of the years. So is that what you would expect him to do here? And he'd have an amount in each year as an appropriation for roads for that, an appropriation for that year. He certainly is not going to spend it in those years. Versus you don't want five forms for one for each fiscal year because it's not a multi-year project. Yeah. I think we can tailor this so that it's sort of a two-term. It's your own adventure, right? You pick the, you pick the category. It's a one-time project. It's a multi-year project, right? With multiple appropriations. It's a recurring project like roads going to happen every year. And depending on what you pick, right? The question about cost is going to come up differently. If it's a one-time, it's going to be one box. If it's multi-year, you're going to see the multi-year. So a multi-year example would be, you know, five years. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. phase one, two, and three. And phase three is what we were doing with the field. That would be one submission, multi-year project. Multi-year appropriation. We want to do phase one, and therefore we need the money appropriated in fiscal 27. And phase three is out here in fiscal 29, and that's when we need to have one chief. I think that would work better than what we're doing right now. It's, well, first of all, we're only doing it for one year, right? I would love to see them connected projects be connected. Even things like the JT, I mean, all the joint, the radios, all that. You can see that whole schedule, right? Because then we wouldn't have to say, hey, this capital project seven versus 15 next year would all be part of the same form. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a good idea. I think it would be a lot faster, right, for Tom Holder. I don't want him to have to fill it out five times. It's the same roads of the same project. Fill it out once and just put the five numbers on. So in addition to instructions, I'm just wondering, assuming we're going to try to roll this out for plus or minus a July 1 dissemination, I assume it still comes from the town manager, so that's got to be discussed with the town manager. I almost think you probably need to do a meeting with those that will be submitting. Walk them through the particular changes and what we're expecting, just so they don't end up reading the instructions, not really getting it, filling it out where you want it. It's pretty frustrating.
But again, that's the most we know.
If you're trying to give me anxiety, you succeeded like an hour ago, Brad. I just want to be a realist. Are we going to be able to successfully get this into a format that we all agree upon for the upcoming cycle, or is this a continuing work in progress and we maybe look at this and tweak it slightly for the upcoming cycle, just to see what happens? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Listen, I think we can do something better than what we have, and we might break this into like, okay, my wish list, right? We can get it better than it is today, but we've got some things we'd like to do. We'll save them for the future.
But I don't actually think this is, as long as they have the technology, which is a big if, I don't think this is that hard to create.
I don't know Google for me. terms. I guess my concern is that they have to fill it out 30 times, one for each project, but if you're just clicking through something, that's a lot easier. It's a lot easier. I just don't see how that's going to happen between now and July 1st. Well, in past years, they have to fill out one for each project, right? Yeah, but they only did it for the first year. So the other thing is, as much as I want them to fill it out for all the years, the idea that we're going to get it rolled out and they're going to do it for five years, like that's a fight that we've been having for... Well, I think that's right. I think we need to prioritize what is it we're most interested in? Are we most interested in the immediate future, getting better clarity on five years? That's a good point. And therefore, do we tweak the existing form because they know they're used to it, but we say, by the way, we're going to need to meet with you in the summer, so that's going to be not great, right? And we need you to get this information that you just got on. July 1st and get it back to us within two or three weeks. And oh, by the way, we need, if it's a priority for us, we need you to make sure you're filling one of these out for five years worth of projects in the summer. It's just not going to happen. And if you then say, and by the way, we have a new form, which ultimately I'm saying we need to get a new form, right? But you could advertise to them, we're working on a new form, but we decided in the interest of time and getting this... Moving forward on the right project schedule, we're going to do it in steps. And who's delivering that message? Is that the town manager message? It's his employees. Ultimately, we can ask, but we can't direct. That's my opinion of town employees. So to your point, Brian, what I would say are the things that aren't on that form, right, or that haven't been filled out that I think are most important. Right. Are a categorization of the project, right? Because I make them up as I put them in my spreadsheet and used to put them in the warrant. I think the project schedule is key because it helps figure out project schedule slash project readiness. Because I think that's one of the things we've, it's in our, I think it's in the bylaw or the policy, right? That we're supposed to be... Prioritizing based on readiness. And that's not on that form anywhere, right? I think you could take the ranking system that you have in DRAP and substitute it for the ranking system that's on the existing form.
Like I said, we don't really need cash. We could take out some of the... Make some room for some of these other items. We have a soft copy of the existing form. Is it like a... Yeah, we have Excel. They send it to us in Excel, I'm pretty sure.
That's what you could send out. It's an Excel workbook.
I think they were PDFs when we got them. Yeah, I have, I mean, I printed it off the Excel version. I'll resend that. Yeah, right? No, if it's, you don't, it's in my email. You don't have to resend that. I have the form. I'm not sure I have the instructions that they use. Is it on the same... Another tab in it. Yeah, there's another tab. Okay, I'll find it. Yeah. I mean, I guess if we, if our goal is to say, I mean, I think this is what sessions we want to add. And then we just kind of stuff it into here without remaking the entire form of comments you were saying. I think for this cycle would be advertised like that. But we're working on something that's going to be, you know, a little bit different for the future. But I just worry there's not enough time because we're dependent on, if it was just us doing it, I understand we have to do things in public meetings. But it's just, everything takes time. But I'm saying you want me to take the existing form and try to add some of the stuff we've talked about tonight. A few of the things that Kelly was mentioning, you know, maybe, you know, again, remove a couple things that maybe we don't think we need and substitute in a couple things you have in your form.
Again, if you're okay working with Excel, then you can just do them right in the... I'm terrible with Excel, but I'll... I'd say don't worry about pretty. I'd say worry about sections that even if it gets messed up, we can format it. That's, that's, any of us can help with that. I think that's easy.
We don't, you know, at the moment, we're not planning to meet for two weeks. So again, we need to see this again.
And then ultimately, it's got to be visited with the account manager and finance director. Ultimately, they're, I think they're the ones that... We still have to deal with our ads and distribute it. Yeah, maybe the... I think it's making the list of, you know, maybe, yeah, because I think others can help with Excel, including myself. But what do we want to add to it? Right? What are the things that we think are critically missing? What are the things we think can come off? And if we have those two succinct lists, right, I think we can, we can dispense with it and get it over to Tim. Yeah, sure. So should we mark up what he has here just to say, add this, don't add this? Is this our best way? Yeah, that's... I mean... Yeah, you could just say... I mean... We're ultimately moving to a different looking form with more information that we think will be helpful. But for now, we want this form you're familiar with, except we've changed these three areas of the form. But we're sitting here a minute. It sounded like, Kelly, the things you indicated are things we seem to ask about. And I like the ranking you had versus the one that's in here. You talked about not necessarily needing specific sourcing, just are these kind of things available? So that maybe is more of a question.
All right, Brian, can you send out the blank form? Because I think the one that I have that's in Excel, it's filled out properly. It doesn't have any instructions. I think that's the one I have. But it's like all the... Different departments filled out all of them. I don't think we have like... I'll circulate where I printed this from when I get home from work.
So you have it.
Yeah, well, I was looking through and I was like... When you showed the instructions, I was like, I don't remember seeing those. But it doesn't mean I just didn't miss it. But yeah, going through... And there's some things that are, again, a little bit dated and it weren't updated fully. But it's what went out. I mean, they're doing this in Excel. So, I mean, one page is artificial. I just want to make, right? Most people did this in Excel-ish. Yeah, I mean... But it's not a page. But, I mean, that's only because we printed it. Yeah, it converts into more than one page just because some of these boxes are... Yeah, but we... I mean, I think we just want to make sure we're not trying to shove it into one page just because we printed it. Like, if it's two pages, our front and back, then what... Yeah, I think we probably can fit it in there. But... Well, I'm just thinking, like, the multi-year could be the second tab or the second page because... The only problem... If it's two tabs, is that then it makes it a pain in the butt to put all of the CIPs in one file. Like, each of them fill one out and then Brian consolidates... I meant from just printing standpoint. Yeah. We had a... Yeah, no. The bottom page two, which is just further down, is your multi-year schedule, which only gets used on four submissions. So, that doesn't need to be in the... I just don't want to try and just, like, shove it all in. It's, like, it should be in order of what you really, really need, right? But if anything, we change them, you know... The term would require changes in the mapping, although you're saying the mapping's not working. What mapped that? The mapping was in the Excel spreadsheet, and then the instructions are there as well. I mean, we can change it. I'm not... I mean, I'll happily do that just to change it. Yeah, no one's using... This isn't even in, like, do you have your warrant? I don't think this is in the warrant. Like, this is a map to what's going to go in the warrant, and I don't even think there's... I thought it was a macro that, like, spit it out into a nice, pretty... No, no. Data file that you would spit it out. I thought that's where it was. I was thinking... Dropdown. I'm pretty sure it's where it's... It used to be with... I thought that's where these forms were coming from. It's just been created down at the bottom. There's a little box, and it's pulling data. This is where that information came from. It used to be. And now it's manual? It's mostly manual because they don't... I mean, some of it's... The actual thing doesn't work anymore. So that thing was at least initially intended to... Yes. Some macro broke. No, no. It didn't have a macro. I built a macro for it, but then that's when I built a macro, and then so many of the things weren't being filled out or don't pull over correctly that the macro didn't work. So what I ended up doing was... I filled them in. I pull off what I can, but I fill in the rest manually. If you go back... I didn't do it this year. They did it this year. So is it clear what you need to do? Mud. I need to do... Next time, go with me. You just... I'll give you... If you just put the things that we talked about in the bottom of the file, I will reformat it and put it in Excel the way that it... I will draft the minutes quickly as I can, and hopefully... Do the Excel fixing. Don't worry about it. Hopefully, I will capture what I thought I heard. These are the three or four potential changes to that.
I'm not worried about this, but... Again, I'm not going to stop, all right? So to me, I think we're saying stuff that's in item one, I think we're good. We want to make sure those elements exist, right? Most of them are in the form. Yeah, they're already here. But I think the multi-year project, prior CIP, or at least the way we're presenting it, right? If it's a reoccurring project, we said... Yeah, I think those three options, like one-time project, multi-year appropriation, right? Recurring appropriation. We can probably give some examples. The categories we want to take from... Do you want to take from our current assessment? Is that what we're saying? Like the second half of two?
Kelly, you said you want to make the categories consistent with what we currently have, I think. Yes. I can do that if you just write project category out for what I have consistently.
Project category, yes. Yeah, the one... So when I'm looking down what's on here, right?
The project description and justification. Can get combined.
Because they almost always either say the same thing or they only throw one of them out.
The evaluation criteria that's on here, no one has ever done in a way that makes sense. They all do it in consistently. And I think that's where the ranking that we have... The substantive... What do you say? The substantive... Yeah, I was going to say... Yeah. There we go. Yeah.
You're saying financing, we're not going to... We're going to eliminate other than the grants, funds, CIP... Yeah, funds or state or federal, like additional funding sources or something that'll swim that section down. Yeah, that's... The funding sources can go. It's just a question of... Right, exactly. And the rest of five, the multi-year schedule, we're saying only fill that out if you have a reoccurring or multi-year project. Yep. And I don't even know if you need... Like, I don't think anybody ever fills out the planning and design, land, construction, equipment, and all that. Make it one. I think it's just... You just make it one. And then what we've had to do, right? Like, if you've got an estimate of cost, provide that estimate. I don't think filling out this has been helpful. I don't think most people do it. Number five and number four. Four is project scheduling. Kelly, you said you thought that was number four. So, number... If you have number four, I think you were suggesting you don't need number five. I think what you're saying on number five means... I need five. I think this is down to just what are the amounts... Total cost. A year. Yeah. But again, it's a year for project. A year of appropriation. A year of appropriation. You don't need to know their schedule of expenditures. I agree with that completely.
And then... We did have something in the existing form that had a prior year column, which, you know, an example of that was one of the IT projects this year. They had gotten that... It's filled out wrong, though. But the intention was to... Highlight for our benefit, viewers' benefit, something that previously was like station two, had three different appropriations. I think it's a different question, though, than the way it's presented here, because I've never seen it done correctly. Maybe just a question. Did this project get any prior appropriation? If so, how much per year and amount? Yeah. That's one question. It's a one question, not... That prior year to date column, I've never seen filled out correctly. And then... Yeah, so it might be like design. Yeah, we got $50,000 in design money two years ago. Yeah. The operational budget impact that's on here, I don't like... That's also rarely filled out correctly. I actually liked what you had better.
See where it goes.
Yeah, it's much more specific about what you're answering.
Yeah, this is... The ones that are on here almost... So seven is good. Yeah, I like seven and said, what's on here? I mean, section nine... I almost feel like you could just add those questions into the justification if these are in there and note it versus making them separate questions. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, I think eight and nine, you could probably leave out or just have as anything else you want to add, right? Any other things you want to add, but I think that should... It can be a description and justification. Like if it's got... I would expect that anybody who's doing an energy efficiency sustainability project is going to put that in the justification box. Yeah. Maybe that's like one of the notes that says, in this justification, here's the different things you should consider. I don't know. We're going to get to that right this year, but I agree that's a possible improvement. So I would stop... The only other thing I was thinking that we might want to add, I mean, I assume we know, but is there a committee working on that? Right? Like the town building. We don't always know that there's... I mean, maybe we do. You do, but for those of us that aren't... Deeply embedded... Yeah, that's... I mean, the interdepartmental... You've got it here, Brad, right? Interdepartmental or regional coordination. It's not quite that, but it's like, what committees or departments, other than your own, are stakeholders in the project? Something like that. It's not so much like the school and DPW, like who's doing the work. This is more of, is there a committee that's assigned... Again, they go back to the town building, they're going to assign a committee. Well, or there's already a committee, right? Because there's Board of Public Works, so I think that's... That might be up at the top, right? You've got department. You might have... Committee... Committee... Yeah.
Committee of State... Because we've got a proving body vote, but I think there's not always... When these come over, they usually haven't been voted on yet, right? They usually get voted on later in the project, and it's not necessarily always a committee that's voting on it versus a committee who's... A stakeholder involved in it. So I think you can probably swap that out. Okay. Why don't we start there? Okay. Good. And then we can take another look at the next meeting. And then I don't think our stuff goes on the form, like down the bottom. I think we will ultimately opine on them, but I don't think it goes on the form. Right. Okay. Or the signatures or the reviews.
I think that's a good start. All right. Let me get that back to you.
Okay.
I apologize. I still haven't adjusted to the time, and I'm starting to turn into a pumpkin.
We noted for a minute. At 8.30 p.m., Callie turned into a pumpkin. I'm really well going over there. Coming back, I'm not doing well. That's just the reality of coming back. Yeah, I think so. I think when you're excited, right, it's easier to adjust when you're on vacation. I'm like that. Sunday. Yeah, so it's been a few days. I should be fine, and I'm not.
Okay. We don't have anything else on succession planning, as I mentioned earlier.
Let's move on to minutes.
Any comments on the minutes? I have a question for you, Kelly. Do you think I generally covered the project plan points, timings properly? Yeah, I did have. I had some thoughts on that, but I've forgotten what they were, so they couldn't have been not burning. You want to put the project plan on the next agenda and correct? Yeah, I'll put it on the next agenda, and then I'll send it out. Yeah, we can correct it. That's fine. Okay. Anything else?
Can I get a motion to approve the minutes? Motion to approve. On the second? Second. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Okay. Good. And topic's not reasonably anticipated. I don't have any. Next meeting is two weeks from now, and we are moving, starting with the next meeting, to the former Council on Aging room, which is called, is that Wayland Community Room? Wayland Commons. Thank you. Okay.
So, the big room, when you come in from the back of the building. That's the 13th. What do you think, 27th? The 13th, yes. Yeah, there's 30. 630. They're setting up hybrid over there? Yep. It has hybrid, right, Robbie? Yes. We have audio-visual, like a screen like this.
Yeah, there's the owl over there. Yeah, and it has a screen. Does it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So, the meeting, we have one on the 27th of May as well, right? We do. And I believe 630 would be the same location. Right.
And then, we are supposed to, every two weeks, we're supposed to have a meeting on June 10th. I will not be able to do anything that week, at an event on Saturday. Sure, you're up. I'm ready for it, so. For the 10th? Yeah. So, Brad, you're going to have to chair that meeting, okay?
And as soon as Tom meetings over here, I'm going to, I will send an email before that, but try and get coordinated for a meeting with FinCom and select board for the end of May, but we may have to, we may have to move that meeting. So, just FYI, I may be reaching out to you if we have to shift the 27th, although that will be a tough week. Yeah, I mean, my personal preference would be it not be done as an agenda item on the select board, at a select board meeting, just because, you know, 20 minutes, 25 minutes, and, you know. Yeah, do it as a separate meeting, you mean? Just have people make another night out, and select board and FinCom. I'll see what I can do. Yeah, as for that matter, I mean, if we have to do two meetings, accommodate, whatever we're trying to get accomplished, to be able to get, you know, get something out, start collecting information, that is the enemy of progress, and it's the pace at which you hold meetings and do them in public, et cetera. That is the downside of opening a meeting. It is transparent. It takes a long time. Okay.
I don't have anything else, so if I can get a motion to adjourn. Motion to adjourn. Second. Second. Thank you. All in favor to adjourn? Aye. Aye. We are adjourned at 8.37.