December 15, 2025 – Select Board – Video & Transcript
December 15, 2025 - Select Board
recording in progress
thank you good evening carol martin as chair of the select board i call the select board meeting
of monday december 15 2025 to order at 6 p.m it's hybrid meeting we are in the whaling town
building the select board meeting room at 31 contingent road in wheyland one may watch with
the meeting link that can be found on the wheyland public body meetings calendar on the web page
pursuant to chapter 2 of the acts of 2025 this meeting will be conducted in person and via
remote means and in accordance with after law this meeting may be recorded which will be made
available to the public on wacom as soon after the meeting as is practicable when required by law
or allowed by the chair persons wishing to provide public comment or otherwise participate in the
meeting they do so by in-person attendance or by accessing the meeting remotely as noted above on
the public body meeting calendar we request public comment be limited to two minutes in person so i'm
going to call the meeting to order and joining me in the room is mr faye mr whitney mr levine
ms brinsley is on her way in i think she's just pulling in and we are also joined by the town
manager michael mccall and our assistant town manager kelsey spare house for that i do that every week
sorry okay so for tonight's uh agenda we are going to have announcement followed by executive session
when we return to open session we will interview a couple candidates for some board questions and
and confirm an appointment by made by the conservation commission we will have a discussion
in an interview with the economic development committee all of that we will have a short discussion
of one of the select board objectives for this year which is um limited to the creation of route 20
corridor joint task force that will be followed by a joint discussion with the board of public works
and uh hopefully a potential vote on the massachusetts water resource authority a request for that
project that is coming before the town in at time meeting in april approximately 755 we'll have a
discussion on 195 main street to which we'll invite our licensed site professional ben ghoul to join us
to explain the latest test results we have a couple liquor license um housekeeping items to do
and like which we will meet with the at a joint meeting with um the energy and climate committee for a discussion of the end review and uh look at the electric vehicle first policy and their proposed decarbonization roadmap for years 25 to 28 855 hopefully we will turn our attention to the 2026 annual town meeting and look at potential articles that the select board plans to intend uh submit town meetings report the consent calendar minutes of november 17 and december 1st 2025 review correspondence select board members reports and concerns there are no topics not reasonably anticipated by the chair 48 hours in advance and at approximately 9 30 we will adjourn so having said all that is there are other any announcements from the board no um i do have two announcements one is that we obviously were concerned um very much so about the the audio that was not as effective it should be at the last meeting and also miscommunication on them because we have gone into an executive session that the about the timing of the farm we apologize for any missed communications and we are going to take steps to be sure that we are more clearly um communicate the timings of the forums i believe we have also taken some measures this week uh worked with i.t and the town manager's office have worked diligently to see if we can improve the audio in this room so hopefully i'll get a lot more calls this week saying they could hear me so all right um we also are going to as part of our annual town meeting calendar on january 5th which is the first monday in january and approximately 7 45 we will be holding a petitioner's article workshop this will be advertised um in the newsletter and um to our other channels but want to announce it here as well so all right now anybody have any public comment
fresh investments 155 main street um i was one b or one who uh wrote in about um audio i understand that you've worked with uh wacom and trying to improve that i also um just learned that part of the problem is is maybe some of the heating in the building that there's one unit and it's really loud even just listening it was hard to hear so i guess my request would be that you know i understand that you're working on both the way cam and the audio in here and that sound and that gets resolved if it would be possible to meetings back to the old council of agent um room so that you know public can hear and participate it's just really difficult to hear in here thank you thank you thank you a public comment on online yes please gene i recognize you thank you can you hear me yes great i'm gene milburn i live at 281 concord road and i'm um hoping to speak to you about master planning uh and it i it's the end of the year it's the time to think about what we're going to tackle in the coming year and our master plan is now 21 years old here in wayland uh early in my residency here i served on a committee that did a five-year review of the wayland master plan and at that time we found it to be an excellent document and uh urged the select board at that time to implement more of the things that had been in the master plan but now it's very old and uh you have all worked in planning roles all your life you know how important it is to have a guidance document uh and the discussion that produces a guidance document brings in the entire community to try to achieve some level of consensus about the direction that one wants to go uh and i urge you to undertake it in 2026. thank you thank you any um ellen does ellen has her hand raised yes okay ellen tone yes hi ellen i i recognize you hey carol uh and crew ellen tone five fields lane and chair of the energy and climate committee i'm not a panelist for that part of the discussion so just wanted to relay the energy and climate committee voted at our last meeting just last week to support um the revised zero energy vehicle policy and the decarbonization roadmap as presented by julie in your packet you will discuss and it's a huge opportunity for us to approve those to be eligible for state capital funds up to as you know over a million dollars which will desperately needed to help us improve our facilities these two policies should not add annual significant annual operating costs and the the planning document the decarbonization roadmap actually has no real commitments in it it's just a plan of how we might proceed so i will join you at eight i'm not a panelist but should any questions come up that uh for some reason julie or mike can't answer i would be available thank you ellen um sure dave i recognize you on mute um dave bernstein 25 please in lane uh i have a suggestion regarding the uh decarbonization roadmap we'll be discussing later and that is uh to pilot the use of electric electric school buses uh school buses electric school buses don't have a tailpipe that exhaust diesel combustion byproducts into the air they don't drip pollutants onto the ground from their engine and therefore can be parked near environmentally sensitive areas they have silent engines that don't require a warm-up and thus can be parked near residential areas and the best part is they're available from first student which provides wayland school buses so i strongly suggest that you start a pilot program with first student maybe evaluate three to five school buses with a temporary charger and see how they do um shouldn't be a whole lot of money and would save a whole lot of pollution thank you thank you um which like marjorie lee marjorie i recognize you uh marjorie lee 14 brooks road and i am also calling um about the zero emissions uh vehicle first policy and decarbonization road map um i did send a letter to you all uh which was acknowledged by uh chair carol martin um explaining why this would be really advantageous to wayland financially and also in addressing climate change um what i didn't mention is that as of may 2nd of this year there were uh 19 cities and towns um that had applied for uh being in climate leader communities um and they applied for and met the requirements and several of them are nearby communities um certified communities um certified communities now include um actin carlisle um nadick wellesley uh stow um in addition cambridge in addition to um the in all there are 19 of these uh climate leader communities um so uh they're all eligible as as ellen said for grants of up to 1.15 million dollars for projects each for projects that reduce municipal emissions and for technical uh support ahead of those projects um so i can't see any reason why we shouldn't do this and um i hope you will um expedite this because time is of the essence thank you thank you um looks like mr delman michael i recognize you
great thank you very much uh carol and the board um michael delman 192 stonebridge road wayland obviously and um but just on a similar vein but maybe another point here um this is an increasingly competitive pool when we apply for these funds these uh the decarbonization plan and the ev first policy so my wife often jokes if she lives long enough she'll win the senior olympics in skating because there just won't be anyone else left to compete against her this is exact opposite uh phenomenon where if we wait long enough we absolutely will not get the funds if we act early we're in the early group to even be aware of the opportunity so i say strike uh strike now while the iron's hot and and uh let's go wayland thank you thank you michael are you all set robbie um i've had some other people come in the room and before i close public comment is there anyone who wants to speak to public comment yes hey that was what the slang was for i was being subtle i recognize miss plum uh carol plum bob record um having looked at the slides for the edc presentation and my first comment was how does this fit into a town-wide master plan and that you know we're a high capital high labor organization 120 million dollars and you need to have long-term planning to keep it going and i guess i'm just um see all the committees i watch that are stuck trying to prioritize how to put in their capital because we can't actually say gee where this is where we're moving the town building should we put more money into the roof or should we put more money into that and should we where should we move the schools should we move schools and i guess um i would really like to have seen the select board sit down with a map of wayland a list of the properties and things people want to do and their limitations and pin down some plausible scenarios for how we're going to cover everything and to do that perhaps before we go off and try to do more projects considering we have still something probably less than 125 open capital projects before we move on to something else um we have left employees in decrepit um conditions at the old dpw and then at the fire station too and then we finally get out the coa and now we still have the town building to go and if you aren't pushing your own children into being municipal government service you might want to think about how you want to give them a decent place to work so we can hire competent people because people aren't going into government now right it's not a a sexy position or whatever you want to call it or maybe profitable um so we don't have enough land for the town and i think if we spent more time figuring out what we're going to do with town building and where the land is going to come for both the school and for the town we'd be better off than moving on to more new projects um i guess the other thing i would point out is that um sewer and septic should be our top infrastructure problems because the um wastewater facility at town center was built without having sufficient permit to i put water out in the 2012 whalen high school wastewater committee we start wastewater treatment plant um you know worked for two years and died that's not helpful so you can't activate or leverage anything if the fulcrum of the infrastructure which is your septic can't carry the load and until that problem is solved all the rest are certainly not worth prioritizing they're definitely there and they need to be addressed but they're not the biggest thing so um i just wanted to wrap it up on the page so um i want to point out ebc has already spent 95 000 on the beta's route 20 corridor without counting staff time and uh the way finding and it feels like we're still chasing the route 20 revenue pipe dream that we never ever do so i guess i'm just asking you until the open capital list is winnowed down and that we've got scenarios that you've brought to the whole town saying this is what we all want to do and we all kind of agree to it and we all have prioritized these are the things we're doing please do not give on to new things okay thank you appreciate right i'm now going to assume that we are all set on public comment and close public comment thank you everybody second mike okay i'm moving that the select board enters the executive session a pursuant to massachusetts general laws chapter 30 a section 21 a3 to discuss strategy with respect to the real and firefighters local 1978 grievance number 2025 dash 0002 step three is there a second to the motion to enter into executive session second thank you the chair declares that a public discussion of these matters may have a detrimental effect on the litigating negotiating or bargaining position of the town we'll take a roll call vote ian yeah tom yes yes yes yes yes and carol yes so it's five zero the chair invites attendance by michael mccall town manager kelsey powers for lab assistant talent manager kate ryan human resource director and dave jenkins town council kp law the committee will rejoin the public meeting in from executive session and we anticipate we will return to open session approximately 10 minutes thank you the select board is back in open session at 6 32 pm thank you so now um we're going to interview mr williams i see mr williams is there so can we take him off mute who's offering you hello how are you good how are you good thank you you've applied for a position on the personnel board would you like to just briefly tell the board uh we've read your materials would you like to you know kind of give us some overview as to what's your motivation to apply with really you've applied yeah yeah no sure so i'm a wayland resident of seven years now and uh ever since moving here i was hoping to participate in some capacity um wherever it would be uh within the town and for me with my background in hr and recruiting when i saw this opportunity it just felt like it was one of those chances for me to to put my step uh my best foot forward and hopefully uh bring some of my expertise to support the board in the town uh which this position seems like it involves is a lot of that from the human resources standpoint thank you um for our processes the board members will each have an opportunity to ask you a question and then we'll take a vote sure who would like to start mr fay does not have any questions for you uh nor do i just want to thank you uh for your willingness to step forward um i see that you spent some time at uh simpson gumpert's and uh wondered if uh based on forensic engineering work that is done there if you uh can apply those skills to uh the personal process here i can't do the work but i can help with uh helping to recruit for anyone that needs to do the work uh but no i had a great experience there for five years really good people actually couple residents here in wayland that are employees there but i could take whatever skills i gained from leading their talent acquisition team to help wayland just can't do the hands-on work sounds good thank you thank you mr levine um dave i just wanted to also echo my gratitude for stepping forward we have a good number of boards and committees in this town and we're powered by a lot of volunteers so always grateful when people especially who have relevant experience come forward so thank you especially uh yeah i just wanted to echo the same thing one thing i would say is that um there is some some modifications being done to some of the policies to update it um due to the town manager app so you got some work ahead again it's good work so thank you for uh being willing to uh volunteer definitely and i also want to thank you um your experience dovetails with as ann has mentioned number of the initiatives that the personnel board is undertaking at the time so i think your timing is is excellent so appreciate it very much um unless you have anything else to add i'm going to ask for a motion here so may i have a motion please i move that we appoint dave williams to the personnel board for a term ending june 30th 2028 second thank you um all those in favor say aye aye motion carries 5-0 thank you and doug's going to give you a little explanation now here um dave in order to be uh an official member of the personnel board um you'll need to swear in at the town clerk's office but you should receive a letter in the coming days from the town manager's office with specific information and then you'll go you'll come into town building see the town clerk and make it official okay thank you outstanding i'm happy to help and look forward to working with you thank you
thank you everyone take care so now we're going to there's a candidate for the economic development committee and would you like to step forward sir thank you for coming in person i appreciate it so much for your time thank you um would you like to introduce yourself and as you see how fast these interviews are so right in depth my name is soydan alihan polat i'm a wayland resident with my family since 2024 summer i am an urban planner and an architect by training and i work in academia and i have my own consulting business and i work with a lot of community boards and organizations predominantly in new york city and also upstate communities around new york and long island so the reason i wanted to be part of this is i have three young kids we're here to stay we love wayland and since i do this professionally i want some some input on the community and i want to be able to part of that um and i believe i have good skills on urban planning um urban resource management and um master planning as well so i i i have strong confidence that i would be a good asset okay so i'm going to open it to questions from the voice star and miss bransley uh i didn't have any uh questions i just wanted to thank you for being arrested yeah thank you i consider one of the most important committees in my life thank you so much so levine uh sure thank you for stepping forward um so i think it's an exciting time to join the economic development committee i think that we're on the cusp of some exciting changes potentially in the next 12 plus months um but my question for you especially as somebody with a background as an urban planner is you've been here for a little while now what do you see as some of the challenges for the commercial side of town to be able to flourish thank you so much well one of the things that actually got my attention um for the last year and a half is lack of pedestrian activity for the commercial activity i mean it's very car centric community it's understandable our zoning laws and planning criteria for the past decades always was on the side of car centric and now we're having hard time switching it back um so that's definitely one of the um most important things and then the other thing is variety uh especially looking at um the 20 corridor we have a lot of kind of post-industrial commercial so hard to define if they're actually commercial or light industrial manufacturing i think you know maybe we develop some distinction and try to revitalize without letting them go so people can adapt you know things change in retail things changing commercial i mean after the pandemic we have completely a new set of roof or the retail activity right so uh i would say we plan ahead to make sure that um we have an active retail commercial availability for residents and it would help the economic development for sure for the time thank you okay thank you you have a very impressive background mr palat um i i wonder if you had considered joining uh the design review advisory board uh as an architect i think there are two vacancies one for i think uh a landscape architect and another for someone with a design background but is that something you've given any thought to um i didn't but maybe in future i can sure great and uh also i noticed you have particularly strong background in zoning correct i wonder if you would uh have the ability to to work with uh our planning board as uh uh proposals are developed uh as you know i think the responsibility for actually drafting zoning resides with the planning board but i think it could be very helpful in working with them absolutely yes and if you'd like to leave your job and work on multiple boards
i think the tricky part is not the job but i have three kids so i'm going to be honest yeah they're all young but i would love to put more input as you know as you see necessary you know we laugh but doug is so right you start out one spot and then you find others that have interest to you as well tom thank you mr paul for submitting your name and uh as doug mentioned we're in a time where we're looking at change positive change to make this town more vibrant more successful more successful commercially we're going to be discussing both charge for the task force to look at route 20 and uh it seems to be a background is ideal for that uh that task force if this were established but thanks very much for stepping up and uh as bill whitney said your resume is extraordinary thank you so much thank you very much for replying let's wait about going last as everyone's already asked you questions all i have to say is thank you we appreciate it welcome to weyland as well and may i have a motion please i moved that the board appoint alahan polat to a term on the economic development committee ending june 30th 2027. you have a second thank you all those in favor say aye aye great thank you and you may have heard the spew but would you like to say it again sure a quick quick version um you will receive some information from the town manager's office in the coming days and we'll direct you to come back to town building to the town clerk's office to take the oath and swear in and she'll give you some information also about conflict of interest training that you'll need to complete thank you all right welcome aboard thank you thank you for your time thank you all right and i'm going to have a motion um a number item six is to confirm the appointment of phyllis dean milburn for retirement in june 30 2027 to the conservation commission and the excuse me the appointing board is a conservation commission to the whale and housing partnership in june 30 2027. thank you thank you oh hello is in favor all right okay motion passes five zero great so now you know only seven minutes
excuse me they gave me this tonight it's a bad idea okay i'd like to invite um becky stanisi to join us please we're going to have another 25 30 minute discussion with the economic development committee um we wanted to talk about briefly michael we could give a quick update on the town center amenity project that the committee brought before us in august we said we would um reach out to the new owners i think that they just got here so it's not too much of an update but i did want to put that on the agenda um so i think um the committee has some slides with the finance committee some overview thoughts and some directions where we might go next year so we want to have a quick look at those and then allow the um the board to ask some questions would be great um i did have on here the annual review of the charge but i think you want to come back the beginning of february i'm going to defer that till then so we can have a look see it up then so part of it is to review the income presentation then we'll talk about the goals a little bit but we'll be coming back we'll explain that coming back like you asked this is actually a joint meeting so i'd like to bring up the rest of the meetings everybody can come up i've only going to have one speak because you only it's fine okay thank you so technically you have to call a meeting to order you called your meeting to order yeah so we'll call our meeting to order now it is we don't know the clock in here it's 44. it's 44. we will call the meeting of edc to order we have four people in person at least not quite yet right i don't know if we probably can you tell if there is uh jeff becky
attendee no he wasn't able to make it okay okay you want to be the whole preamble i don't know you do have to say uh present in the room with us is present in the room is karen kelly myself rebecca stanizzi katie harris and david galari perfect thank you so can i plug in robbie can i have a uh cord to be able to get to the screen you can't do you have to you have to either email it to him or have him on flash drive and then he can put it up on the screen or alternatively you can join the meeting at like zoom meeting and then we'll update oh well yeah okay so copy the slides under in our packet and they start on page 18 for those who are following along either in the room or elsewhere these are the slides that the economic development committee presented to the finance committee on november 17th and we're going to go through them much more quickly than
than the 45-minute presentation that they did for the finance committee and i'm looking at mr whitley was going to love that idea 45 minutes wants to see it again oh there is oh yeah like the fourth quarter all right ready can you raise me as a
am i able to share my beautiful yeah okay i think when i do this i'm not able to slideshow but
let me see if i can do a slideshow does rick have a microphone down there because i'm not hearing it that well well that doesn't amplify in the room okay it just picks it up for people online okay
it doesn't oh it does okay good all right um so in the first hour of this meeting we said we'd go on turbo overdrive so you had the slides ahead of time we met with robbie can you move the there you go thank you so we met with the fincom and with them we walked them through the slide presentation a lot of this was news to them you guys have heard a lot of this already um we literally walked through it and it was almost 45 minutes to an hour so we're just going to zip through it mostly to present ideas we are going to be meeting again with the fincom on january 5th and then discussing through i don't know if that meeting or a substitute one to come to the select board with a recommendation but we wanted to just present some of the topics because this is sort of this is a menu of options right if we don't have a recommendation right now that slide is who what where and how how are we going to do this this is what we're going to figure out but given that we are one of the slowest growing towns in the commonwealth and we have a huge budget prices facing us ahead here are some potential ideas to be able to grow in different ways so this is the most depressing slide we realize commercial tax base is only 2.8 percent of our entire tax base i think when we started edc we were like four to five percent it's progressively shrunk just because our residential values have skyrocketed and our commercial really hasn't so it just keeps getting smaller so we have to think about things differently um three different things one is alta oxbow which you guys are all very aware of this huge amount of benefits across the board both cash and then also being able to get affordable housing hitting 20 affordability etc but from the fincom's perspective it really is what about the dollars right so from the fincom's point of view we permitted the land we sold it um ultimately we then also got a building permit fee we got over four million dollars in massworks funds we did spend some money remember we got funds way back in 2012 um to due diligence there were some legal costs these are sort of again this is like ballpark to get a general sense of what it is so from the land itself because we owned it we were able to get these benefits and then the big one is the annual tax benefits going forward so it's the 1.1 million dollars every year as a fiscal year 24 if you put down a cash flow stream or if you floated a bond on that that's in the 20s in terms of million dollars so it's you know 40 million all from 80 acres of underutilized land the key this year alta oxbow just sold for 98.4 million they should be reassessed their draft recommendation assessment is 98 million typically when a building sells it always gets reassessed typically it's not always up to the sale value would not be surprised if they came back and asked for a little bit of a haircut but we should watch this really carefully and i don't know who does the tax abatement applications but making sure it should be in you know sort of the 80 million range or no plus yeah because you just don't for some reason and i show the fiscal year 24 we were at 72 million dollars it dropped back down in the 60s for fiscal year 25 i don't know why it shouldn't have because it just sold for 98 million so we need to be sure that we get all the value second and this always this surprise the fincom surprises a lot of people our commercial districts typically you look to a commercial district to get a lot of tax revenues and it doesn't really cost you a whole lot as a town we have townhomes and they have a lot of the attributes that commercial districts typically have high assessment values efficient land use digestible density high value per acre low town cost when townhomes is primarily retirees there are some school kids but not a lot so it's pretty amazing when you look at it our entire commercial tax base is 160 million dollars alta oxbow was 73 so with one residential project we created the equivalent of half our entire commercial tax base but when you look at the townhomes townhomes this is mainstone this is uh river trope place this is wayland commons this is willow band our willowbrook they're three and a half times our commercial tax base all hidden away tastefully done not huge density this is not alta oxbow we are very good as a community of building really expensive towns and they're beautiful river trail place are going for a million too they're assessed at a million apiece so when you look at it overall it's huge tax benefits and when you look at purely town center town center the commercial side alone is assessed at 43 million dollars which that's probably going to go down because their sale price was less than that river trail place alone on six acres instead of 21 acres is worth that same amount and then you put in whalen commons which is the other condominiums like beyond stop and shop along 126 it's almost double so it's a really efficient way to create value without necessarily going all the way to an alta oxbow level um so that's a question of how could we use this tool so right now we have conservation cluster development it's very difficult it's special permit you have to jump through all kinds of hoops etc etc there's a reason why the state has done adus and nbta is as of right because things get done right but if you draft it properly that you have the setbacks and the citing and all the things you're typically looking for in a special permit if you bake it in then you can make these a lot more palatable um to people that live thereby so it's a question how can we streamline because right now our permitting process is very unwieldy
so third big topic and these again just three big topics one is all to oxbow as a lesson then you have uh townhomes and then nbta communities this is what was approved so it's 50 acres to get to basically 750 units doing the math we're actually above it um there's more units at town center if you do the math than i can we all anticipated but basically we're supposed to get to 750 units we're about at 904. there's value here right so to the left is the approved zoning if you try to tie in again just relative values but if you take alta oxbow average units about 334 000 a unit we have roughly in the mbta communities about 300 million dollars if it were all built out right annual tax revenues that's in the range of four to five million dollars every year but part of this is what's already been built is right now alta oxbow has already been built it's already on our books so you kind of have to pull that one off and the other ones colt's way at mainstone it's a theoretical district we know it's a paper district you're never really going to build it you know you would never tear down all the condominiums just to do a high density apartment build so that's really theoretical and then i'll play town center as a funky deed restriction we need to either figure that out or that zoning is also worthless to us so we're losing out on 2.9 million dollars of potential um tax revenues so we need to look at that as a potential tool so this is just overview so then we get into commercial districts these are sort of medium impact right still important the commercial districts you know like rue 20 center hasn't worked in a long time town center hasn't worked to its ultimate participation or its ultimate uh ultimate potential but say that we look at our commercial districts and we add 25 density that's a lot like we're never going to completely double our commercial districts we don't have the sewer for it we don't have the capacities for it but if you added like 25 that might be a milestone that we reach for if you think we have a lot of empty parking lots if you think about it we have very high parking requirements which everyone always knows it's too high if you drag it back a little bit then you could get some infill and potentially get 25 more as a goal um the self storage idea was one site with nothing on it right now really kind of slingshotting and trying to get to that but it might be more palatable that you can get it 25 incremental um across the districts and then it's adding value to the districts the districts we have how do we make them better how do we make them more appealing more valuable um so there's a lot of different ways that you could do that so with that you know commercial districts and we'll talk about new revenues and creation of value a little bit but putting it in perspective kind of high medium and low high impact are a lot of those big three we talked about right so just revisiting mbta community zoning could get you potentially 2.9 million just and this is just kind of order of magnitude to get a sense the interesting thing townhomes if we encouraged 350 unit townhome pods this is not a massive mainstone exercise but literally taking six seven acre parcel with some setbacks you could actually get pretty much the same impact from three townhouse developments modestly sized it's really interesting so both of those are ways that you could get significant tax revenues each year over time and also there's been suggested potentially using town run like we used um the alta oxbow site something was singing um using orchard lane it's 13 acres it's under the purview of the schools it's too small for a school just sitting there do we potentially do something there similar to alta oxbow put the permitting in place we control what gets built there and then we ultimately get the land value and we're able to establish a long-term task revenue stream so these are high impact medium impact is really more of the commercial districts right even if we added 25 density of commercial districts it's really only about 625 000 a year so if you add it to the density and you add it to the value if you did it together very robust and you're like working it out those commercial districts getting to be more productive it's still like a million two together if you were able to do both right and part of it too adding the value to the commercial districts that actually boost the home values as well which is great right but then it basically kind of shoulders the that value on top of the residential it's shared across the same party of users so if anything it might actually skew it in a different direction it's kind of interesting so it's that's a median impact should we ignore it no is it a tool in the toolbox yes low impact um meals tax right now we have about 300 000 a year with new meals tax coming online 2026 terrain duncan townhouse those are three new that we are not collecting any revenues right now that might be 50 60 70 000 for 2027 a lot of communities use those short funds targeted for signage for business grants for helping commercial districts something to think about so it's it's not that it's suddenly going to make a difference in overall budget but it could absolutely make a difference in how our commercial districts look and feel same thing we do not have a wounds tax right now airbnb brbo's there are some in weyland taxes can be up to six percent it adds up but they're not allowed they're not allowed well oh really oh there you go oh interesting all right so if they were then you get short dollars and you know again it's not going to suddenly adopt the excise tax on them so it might be a little bit of money again it's going to be a drop in the bucket but if it can be focused be quite interesting and then the indirect impact is looking at things a little bit differently in three different ways how do we build smarter consider not building because when we build a town it is so expensive how do we help offset costs when we want to do something if we wanted to do a new town building how do we craft it together with different uses and pieces and growth so that it basically pays for itself or helps offset a lot of the costs and how do we find creative solutions so again these are sort of outside the box thinking it's working with whether it's capital improvements committee select board whatever but it's kind of just rethinking of you know town offices if we were to build we spend at coacc a thousand bucks a foot if we're building 30 000 square feet for new offices that's 30 million dollars that's a huge price tag right that's why 14 west plain was really interesting and i know it was tough time etc but when you can get land and building for 283 bucks a foot that's huge the schools if you're building new at seven to 800 bucks a foot lexington just proved theirs at fifteen hundred dollars a foot but with elementary schools they're typically simpler they don't have the lab spaces all the tricky stuff of high schools do we refurbish what we have is there a way to do that and reuse some of those functional spaces and just like everybody's home you have a home that grows over time affordable housing we should absolutely zone and not build we should not own or build because it costs us four or five hundred thousand dollars to do that if we just zone just like we did at alta oxville we get 55 units and it didn't cost us a dime so how do we offset costs next playing field carve off a little extra piece of land do some townhomes that would pay for the playing field and the ongoing tax revenues would pay for the maintenance do we you know new town offices how do you wrap together some kind of clever solution creating value at the same time as you're spending money and creative solutions trying to talk about the proposed playground at town green public private fundraising the proposed sports center we don't build it do a public private the town pool was similar to that it used some cpa funds but essentially has been standalone you could even be creating teacher affordable housing there's a lot of different ways that you could work together to have the private sector either contributions or helping the market having the market help get those things that we would like to do as a town so it's all about these are all a bunch of different pieces and parts who what where when and how do we want to do this so that we can figure it out and what we're trying to do is we can look at our tax curve and our tax curve with no growth goes like this your tax rate is going to go like that so if we had low growth medium high growth looking at that what's the acceptable level of taxation and what's the acceptable level of growth it's trying to figure that out because if we do nothing we're going to we know we're going to end up we can all look at those trajectories and they're tough so it's really a question of what makes reasonable sense so part of that we're going to try to put it in context with the fincom get their input because they're always looking at it from the other side and come back to you guys with a recommendation but in as much as you have thoughts definitely send them to us so as we're kind of perking through with the fincom um we're happy to do that we'd love to come back probably in february if we had to guess so i'm getting on the agenda now um but yeah we'd love to come back with you made a reservation already
thank you so that just gives a broad brush overview what we're actually doing see is it switching now it's not switching this year again so i'm going to open it up to push into to the board yeah go ahead if you want to anybody want to start on that discussion here other questions should becky during public comment yes comment was made that before our board explores development such as this that we should complete a new master plan uh do you agree with that and if if not why not um well the master plan basically is a guiding document but when's the last time you looked at the master plan it's done 20 years ago i mean ultimately one of the few things that came out of that as evc was created it was one of the recommendations but there was no zoning there was no you know long-term growth it was really kind of how do we want to look in fields of town it's a piece but it's not really the guiding document should we do it i had seen gene milburn she had put together this really compelling we should we should revisit it but we've seen all the financial picture we know what's out there right do we want to have root 20 looking exactly the way it looks for the next 10 years or the next three or four years while we do a master plan probably not like there are certain things that you would do um can they run in parallel absolutely would you wait until it's completely done no no good advice not just because we are in the usual straits right now we need to figure out how we want to grow and we have some good opportunities that are coming up thank you um i think one of the only comments i had i looked at this um when when it was in our packet and then quickly then before the meeting and then just now and i think i see the same thing every time because
so much of this is dependent on the owners of these projects themselves so wouldn't it make more sense threats to just work with them to figure out what they're willing to do and then kind of accommodate versus maybe trying to put a master plan that is so reliant on other owners and i only say that because i know some like when i look at this the most realistic stuff i see are the ones where we're not the developers right we're just trying to assist already existing groups so from a prioritization standpoint i feel like that's what we should be doing and not necessarily so like the feedback on the master plan after reading this i was like we should not be doing the master plan because the reality is that there's there's a very strong partnership that we essentially need with all these developers so we kind of need their buy-in to really have a feasible master plan that's a lot of outside feedback but i think it aligns with kind of what i see you i see your brain in here yeah all of it it's like the master plan itself somebody we one of the issues we've talked about is given terrain and given like the green quarter room 20 that is a long-term plan but if we create this identity as a green quarter that could completely that's like a master plan thing right that's not something we're going to institute tomorrow but that is really getting the buy-in from some of these tenants etc that's how we grow in a long term right and so again they sort of work in parallel but to your point i mean we can put all the zoning in the world like we just did the pre-order pickup window right hasn't been used yet is it a tool could it be useful we're not the private property owner so some of the things we want to do and people may or may not do it like one of the things we recommended is people and we heard very strongly from the polling people like the village standard they want to have signage that's more subtle they want to have more tasteful things happening in that root 20 quarter you could write some very simple things into zoning and we actually wrote those into the pre-order pickup window if you exercise that you had to do those we should just write those into zoning make it easy don't bait and switch people and people will see i think you're going to see terrain getting done duncan getting done some of these other property owners like oh wow it's starting to look good maybe i'll put some money in my property if those rules aren't in place they don't know any better they'll just do they want to do something that looks like a village design or they'll have a sign that's 15 feet tall type because that's what it's allowed right now like some of the things we should do so those those guideposts are there for the private property owners as it you know the bigger like root 20 master plan we'll talk about the task force in a second that is really that task force is really about working with some of the property owners and figuring out if you added density in certain places how would you do that so this you know this whole recommendation of the fincom really that's a longer term thing everything in that fincom is what could we be doing from you know the townhome zoning how do we deal with you know just these very simple things with the with the um design criteria things like that things that are doable but the a master planning process will take longer and you'll want that buy-in from some of these property owners because otherwise you know some of them are motivated and some we've met some that just will never do anything right some but some are the fastest way i see is getting money in the most um efficient way possible is to help fast track the fast track terrain train when it's done is not going to add a whole lot to the tax base it's already being taxed at whole foods so it was fresh market at full market rates they're actually taking out square footage right so we're going to get some meals tax but it's not like we're starting from nothing and getting terrain some license yeah but it's not it's not going to move that needle really you need to add you know part of it is increasing the value over time that activity will help other property owners right but that'll take time and what do you think is the fastest that's what we want to talk with income about and talk through with them and see what some of those things are so time is absolutely one of those things thank you for saying the word time and for example though we we have with the edc and even independently worked with some of the owners for example we worked closely with zurich when they were here on the town center and there was just things external barriers to us getting that moving that 1.6 million dollars which would be huge you know if we could get the mvta in time there so um a lot of times we're willing we sit down and talk with these folks for those circle member friends and say a lot of it is determined by the owner of the property and how willing they are to uh move some of these things forward okay so if anyone wants to speaks and one of the last two board members to speak first so um i haven't been on edc for some time but almost 10 years but i do remember i think we had somebody come in and sit down and meet with us back then who was an economic development director because i stopped you cited that ashland had done that i don't remember if it was ashland yeah so it it begs the question from me have you guys reached out to other colleagues and other edcs or spoken with folks in ashland just for some of their best practices as we're tackling some of this because i feel like others have gone before yeah so part of that is in the economic development bond bill we got awarded a thousand dollars for an economic development director the sad thing is in in town government it kind of falls between the cracks it's not necessarily a town planner because it's part of how do you get a business going how do you help that business how do you encourage people to come to town it's hard to talk with the brokers who are all over the place you kind of need that centralized point and they can suddenly make things happen because they can pull the different town parties together we do that somewhat but you really do need that to be a person inside and that's what axland found and they did some really interesting things right so it's kind of that one person in town building with that is their responsibility so you see that as a prototype and it's often with meals tax they set that aside and they have that pay for that person because then it can again slick slingshot that effect so there are a ton of different things that could be done some of them you know are bigger communities and it's a grant program and there's a lot of different things that you can do we're a smaller commercial tax base we're smaller and what we can do but we could absolutely you know if we had an extra fifty thousand dollars a year from the meals tax to encourage some of these businesses to upgrade their signs help them out like pay for 25 percent of it to get them to pay the other 75 that would make a huge difference right so there are a lot of programs and there's a ton of stuff the more urban you get the more resources you have so our hands are tied a little bit but ashland i think is a great example although i have heard that they cut theirs back i don't know when budget times get tight they're like well look there's yeah so but that's something we definitely want to look at did you want to hop back sure well i just want to thank the edc for their work on this uh you know to ann's point about the fastest thing out of the box i completely agree that additional multi-family residential would be great for enhancing the tax base following the model of the alt l expo we do have this uh large parcel at uh holiday road um we have an upcoming annual town meeting uh if we were to uh seek uh transfer of that property from the school committee uh we would need a two-thirds vote from the town meeting it might also be appropriate to put in some money to do some site planning uh so as to uh then inform zoning uh that could signal the development community as was done at all times so i think that's a particular priority to michael's point you know unfortunately we weren't able to elicit the cooperation of raytheon about the town's standard property but uh this is uh property that's within the town's ownership and the school community control and if we want to do something with it go ahead mike one other thing i think we also have to think about it's also the it's kind of infrastructure because if we're referring in certain properties in multi-family in certain areas we are challenged by our wastewater here especially with our all the wetlands around us so that's another consideration that we need to think about if we want to attract more of these types of developments we're going to have to make plans for that so um i find this fascinating i hardly ever have time getting my word in and here i am let me in i appreciate everything i have done i actually have some questions um but i we want we have people waiting for us as i had told you why but i do want to give you one minute after i speak to treat to this and also this has to be sent to abby warren and the town union's office because it's dark and we'll have upload it to our packet so that it's available to the public um i am going to um say one thing you know i love your ideas but sometimes i'm not as much especially in love with your numbers and i ask you to go back and look at i think it's the second slide that shows me on the um alter oxborough i think it was river's edge i'll tell you financial view it shows the sale of the property it shows the building permits but does not show any of the costs that we had for the cleanup there which is the six million so i think that has to be you have to might want to adjust that slide slightly and the and i do want to also say that to the committee in general every time there's some tax thought everyone says okay we'll take that and we'll put this in the special fund we currently take every dime of meals tax and a lot of these other things and they're called local receipts and they are an offset to our taxes so if we move 50 or 25 or 92 to a special fund we have to then tax people to make that up there is not 50 or 92 sitting there in a fund waiting to be tapped for it as you as you progress and think about your your proposal for us so great work as usual did you want to take two minutes to tell us about this thank you everybody and i would say with the meals tax we know that anything that's there you wouldn't want to give up it's the new stuff that's coming in so it's still it's earmarked trust me and ultimately with the six million dollar in cost so overall the land value was 8.7 million the developer paid about six million dollars in cost and environmental next that too the next one there's no offset there just showing all profit anyway i don't yeah yeah it's just cash and cleanup right because we would have had to pay that six million dollars so i'm just saying check that slide before it becomes a public thing two minutes okay finish up thank you so yeah so we will go to
this there we go so to the left hand side just quick updates of where we are so the growth options we just talked about we're working with fincom we'll want to come back route 20 super exciting things going on so between the new tenants coming in between duncan that's coming in and also townhouse just got approved um but also new ownership huge at town center so we've met with jesse a couple times who came to edc last friday i think they're going to be great amazing so excited so route 20 task force i saw is on your agenda and i did see the draft um it was funny we went back and looked route 20 master plan has been on our agenda at edc since the beginning of 2020 and we were talking about it even before then um curb cuts and sidewalks we tried to get mass works funds back in 2012. sarki and i tried it twice we weren't able to do it because they wanted to see residential tied to it but there are some things that have been perking for a long time the route 20 task force would be huge advocates of for focus and targeting and getting things done the charge sounds like we haven't done any master planning yet there's been some done but we will be getting money from the state so we want to be ready when it does come in and then be able to take those little small steps in between until we do that so it sounded like almost like it was new planning but it's basically taking what's done and going that little step forward so we're huge advocates of that so we would absolutely recommend that um communication has been huge so you remember last year we did the polling over 1500 people submitted now over 1700 people on that list we use that to communicate we sent up the email blast once we heard about refito as a new owner um people we got tens of emails back to us saying thank you for telling us going up we're so happy to hear that this stuff is happening um so there's really good interface with the public and so we'd like to look ahead to spring and have another poll kind of like we did last year we worked with tom and we had worked with michael mccall it might be with uh the town center owners as they kind of look through what they're doing it might be the task force but spring is a good time because if we need anything at town meeting means we think about it over the summer get it to you guys in october for next you know it's like spring is a good time when everybody's focusing kind of coming out of their cocoon so we look ahead and do that we did just want to check in with you guys that was sort of the the mandate to check in as we're doing things the town green playground we wanted to basically get the green light to be able to work with catherine uh catherine brennett and recreation we talked with her a little clearly she's sort of the one who would be front and center in that but just want to make sure that we're able to work with her talk with her we need quick check-ins on the environmental and we also just want to know maintenance costs the playground it's not just the initial cost it's also the maintenance and then confirming land use requirements you know if we put a playground there is there a town meeting vote i don't think so but it's just thinking through all those zoning etc so we'd like to work with catherine and then have quick check-ins on environmental maintenance and land use requirements just so we can keep that along we did ask jesse at graffito we were baldly apparent about it and asked if he'd be willing to basically write a check they're not willing to write a check to do it but i think that they'll participate so i think that we just need to start putting those boundaries around it and figuring out that solution so we just need to do those things which means working a little bit with town staff but we want to be really everybody is super busy um shared streets grant implementation this is not really an ask but putting it on your guys's radar remember we have the shared streets grant graffito would really like to do it we have to get it through procurement again because we're out of time we have to redo it but would love to try to get it this summer so there will probably be a shared use agreement which a draft was done before anything that comes in front of you guys if you can kind of perk it and make it happen then hopefully we can get that shared streets furniture on elissa avenue to happen this summer so we'll kind of have to focus and do that route 20 cleanup so we um this is really a thing that katie is spearheaded in the route 20 quarter we have a lot of signage violations whether temporary or permanent we have abandoned vehicles we have things that are not so appealing we kind of inventory to all of those we would like to work with and we'll facilitate kind of letter writing to all the different property owners go out all at once we're not targeting one in particular but whether it's building department with nate or town manager's office how do we reach out in an organized fashion to the all the property owners so that they can all clean up their property for the spring so we want to be able to do that and again it's sort of that check-in and we'll do as much drafting we'll do as much as possible to try to keep that load i know that nate is super busy with being short staffed um and then the meals tax growth 2026 as we just talked about actually robert hummel is now a huge fan of this and is very interested in doing this so we can work with robert to just look and see what others have done to be able to come forward with recommendation i presume it's not a problem to work with robert but i don't know michael if you had um other inputs in that regard to check in with your office okay
all right so we're a little over the 30 minutes and i this is people waiting and our deal was 30 minutes so i'm gonna stop you here um i think what we need to do is take these items that you like under advisement and we'll put these on our agenda and talk about them when you come back in february with your proposal sooner how's that so part of it these are really simple apps so the question on the playground no and we there are other things about the playground that mr mccall may have some input on on that side on our agenda so i really would like to wait until february on that it's only i'm happy as a liaison ddc work with michael and see to kind of keep the communications going because if there are deadlines we need to meet um in order to accomplish things in a timely fashion you know maybe we can do it without the board great all right so thank you everybody for coming in we appreciate it right um so i am going to recommend the board that we uh pass over item number eight i'd like to discuss it after adjourn me yeah thank you have to adjourn me we're actually going to go over to coa okay and then we'll have any follow-up discussion if you need it no it's in there okay thank you um thank you i'm not tabling it i'm just skipping it till later we'll come back to you later coming back yes now i just wanted to bring up one more stuff as relevant created that policy liaison i just want to kind of use it because you and i talked about that i see it as a need so essentially in order to continue going you know tom essentially said hey i'm going to handle this and he essentially said that kind of to you but really to all of us and we all agree that that's a good plan of action communication yeah that's good i just like that as a pattern like you know that way you ask on behalf of the group hey i'm going to continue to do this with the group is that okay and we all said yeah correct it's a good structure so that you can do that more often when you feel like we have just such jam-packed agendas that i'm trying to keep them absolutely right yeah that's our whole purpose for doing it right and we also had wanted this meeting to talk about the charge but we didn't have it so we're working our way towards there all right so our next item will be a discussion and vote uh potential vote discussion and potential vote with the massachusetts water resource authority including but not limited to financing allocation of the pfas settlement funds and our next steps and we are inviting uh the director of the department of public works from holder our finance director brian kevenny and uh the board of public works to join us uh mike do you have anybody participating remotely are you aware of yes mike spellman oh hi mike i saw you so did you need to call to order i think we do okay so uh so the board knows that mr uvigas who is the chair is unable to attend tonight and mike as the vice chair is brilliant as chair for this discussion so why don't you call your your group together hi brian hi tom thank you evening uh okay um so i'd like to call to order the board of public works um this december 15th you just have to i've already done that so all you have to do is just do roll call okay so we can move to roll call uh head head duty here mike spellman here and weigabauer is here perfect thank you so we've got this big project coming down the to tell meeting this year that we've been working on for a few years and we'll be working on for a few years that's further and it's the connection to the mdmpora or our water because we run into some issues with the pfos problem um this is a probably this this is the second largest undertaking we've taken in my time of volunteering for the town the first being uh when we did the high school project and i think we have just done that and so this is a big project with a big cost and the board of public works has asked the select board to consider you know uh funding a portion of this cross project cost through what we call the general fund and so the proposal has included we've looked at four options so far one is all in the debt service in other words all in our taxes all in the water rates is on the table and then there's two versions of the hybrid model where a portion is funded through the water aids and a portion is funded through the through the to the taxes we would have a debt exclusion the board has not taken any vote yet but the general consensus i think on the board is that the vast project would have to be funded through what we call debt exclusion and we are leaning towards traditional debt exclusion versus the one that allows the board the five members to make a decision to add this to the tax rolls and the portion that we would pay we are also leaning towards um not not um waiting until after you submit your article to vote whether we would be co-sponsors i don't see problem there but we're just going to wait on that in case the board's wondering why we haven't responded to that request and then the final i think request at the moment is that we are leaning towards applying any funds we receive from the pfos litigation that we participate in towards debt service rather than awarding it you know i think you had asked for us to perhaps consider awarding it to the sort of water department we were just going to leave them in the debt service and apply it in the general fund and apply it to the debt service but it would be dedicated for that purpose it's not a huge it's not a huge amount of money uh at the moment but um certainly every bit will help so the last few meetings we've dedicated a lot of time to um you know the financing model really and i know you want us to make a decision and we would like to make one as well and um we've been we've been assisted by mr keveney who actually uh provided us with another proposal uh the other night and i'd like brian to walk through for the board of public works his his proposal so this would now be rather than three on the table this will be our fourth one and brian did you want to walk us through that sure so good evening so one of the options we have and it does have a side effect would be that the general fund uh fully appropriate the debt service in the general fund and every year the water enterprise fund would pay the general fund through their typical indirect payments each year reimbursing the general fund we would have to on the general fund side obviously have the debt service as excluded debt this all works except for the fact that by having the debt service voted as excluded debt creates the condition in the prop two and a half calculation that the town would have really excess levy capacity in the first year really about 1.9 million dollars that it's not going to use to pay the debt service because the payment that the water fund would make each year to the general fund takes the place of tax so under this scenario what it does it protects the general fund from ever making a payment to fund the debt service and have it as excluded debt the water farm would have to raise rates to make that indirect payment as if they were paying the debt itself so the indirect payment would be the debt service plus their normal what they do pay the general fund the side effect as i explained to the selectman is that you would be increasing the excluded portion of prop two and a half percent calculation by an amount that would not be used and as i said earlier future board members and future employees would have to be disciplined and never to use that excess surplus levy i hope i explained the the side effect of that properly so everyone sort of understand this is what one
okay let me try it um so brian's proposal is brian correct me when i get it wrong brian's proposal is rather than run the the debt service let's say two million dollars every year through the water rates directly the town would have would um have an election to support the entire 38 million dollars and through debt exclusion and that would be on the tax rolls however the debt service would be paid by the water rate so you would increase the water rates accordingly and then annually through the end when you pay your indirects you'd be paying that debt service so that we we would carry it but we don't pay it what's the purpose of that what what why for that reason brian why would we do that in the event the water fund appropriated the debt service in their fund and were unable to make the payment if they did not have enough revenue and the general fund had to step in and make the debt payment either by tax or by free cash in the form of a subsidy that tax or free cash would be not excluded and it would impede the town's prop two and a half calculation it would create stress on the general fund budget you would always want anytime the general fund makes a payment for the debt service the debts or debt service be covered by excluded debt so if we had to down the road provide the general the water fund with this subsidy the subsidy can be in the form of free cash or it can be in the form of tax if we have it give it by tax it would create tremendous pressure on the general fund's budget because it would not be excluded debt if we had to fund it by free cash other uses of free cash that we typically use like opeb you know sped the capital stabilization those different funds would be impacted simply because we had to divert some of our free cash over to the water enterprise fund in the form of a subsidy so would you like me to translate so the part and that all i understood
the spokesperson for the board obviously tonight everyone just kind of confirm everyone understands that mike that's okay i totally don't understand any of this so george had sent everybody out a really nice summary of this discussion and this explanation in an email uh to the board that he'd graciously cc'd me on as well so that i saw it but essentially is if the water fund if we funded all the 38 million through the water rates let's say we do that and for some reason or other you're not able to make a payment then you are in what we call default and if you default one two things will happen one it will detect money out of your retained earnings if you default so if you default by a million dollars for example a million of 800 it would take your whole 800 and then the tone would be for a lack of a better phrase on the hook for the balance we are having as i mentioned a couple times we are also having our own financial challenges because we've gotten a couple um things have come our way that we now have to add to our our operating budgets and so if to brian's point that if that would happen it would have happened after we went to town meeting and therefore that would be just be added to the taxes so i guess really what we're really trying to do tonight is to make sure that we all are on the same boat here that they find out how exactly you're going to be funding the the debt service so i know in the supplemental packet excuse me for a second there is your uh the sheet that you gave us and then refer everyone to that it shows how you do your finance so anyways bill do you want to add something first well say it correctly yeah uh i really had a question for brian because uh on on the last point uh the uh the need for discipline on a going forward basis no issue for this select work of course but uh so brian is the concern that uh should we go forward under this approach get a debt exclusion for roughly 1.9 million dollars for the first year of the or i guess uh for each year the the bonds are outstanding um to the extent that the water fund is sufficient to pay the annual debt service there would be no need for the general fund to advance money to the bondholders uh but it's but the concern i think you've raised is that this would uh add 1.9 million dollars to the prior year's levy is that right well we're not to the prayers levy so the prayers levy is basically the prop two and a half plus new growth right add to that the excluded debt total right you'd be doing we roughly have about four million dollars currently as excluded at most of that is the high school so what you'd be doing is taking the four million dollars and adding another 1.9 but 1.9 million would not be used so so you're effectively enabling the an increase of the allowable levy but you're suggesting that uh it would be well for the current and future select boards to essentially ignore that 1.9 for the purposes of budgeting is that right that's correct okay so i think that's true concern or that's the that's the rank just of it so again it's a big project i really think this is a great idea that we're having again another joint meeting so we're all really clear because you know let's get everything worked out before we get to town meeting so anyway um did you want to add something and then we'll yeah so the part i was having trouble understanding was the increased levy but as i understand that that will be the select board's challenge to manage in the future right it's not something we need to be concerned about we just need to be concerned with making sure that we can cover our expenses including the debt service um and and we're talking about whichever way we do it it sounds like we're talking about possibly putting 100 of the debt service obligation on water rates is that correct it's a consideration um but with the what i know the board had had suggested that we support 22 million dollars of the of the process um so did i did you i'm sorry i don't know if you're trying to stumble your time which would be uncomfortable if our board sought to become a lot of commissioners the reason is it would give us some peace of mind making sure that the rates that were being charged residents covered cover the debt year by year so the thing that concerned me about those comments is this we've been at this myself personally about 15 years we set targets for our retained earnings and we hit those targets and it's very difficult because we have to deal with weather we have to deal with equipment malfunction there's a lot of unknowns when we set our rates each year um we are expensive we pretty much know um and those can be adjusted if a plant shut down we're going to use like less chemicals in that plant but we have come in i would say tom you can correct me if i'm wrong but about 90 percent of the time or more we've come in above our targeted retained earnings and i know the retained earnings isn't where some others would like to see it but it's um where we've said it according to our consultant and our expert uh in this space so am i uncomfortable if uh select four takes that over to some degree because i think it may be i've felt some pressure to utilize retained earnings as a way to cover um our bonds or our you know our triple a rating and personally i i feel as though we're an enterprise fund we're trying to be efficient but safe but not sock away people's money so that's my concern right so that's a good point about the retained earnings when brian did the tax recap he informed us that moody's that's our bond rating agency um that we go to for loans um indicated that to maintain our triple a rating uh they now would like uh communities to have was it 25 to 40 percent right brian minimum of 25 minimum of 25 this was kind of new to us as a board as well and that means every fund in town not just the general fund so unfortunately this this could be a double whammy here because you've got to raise up those rates for the for the other so sorry go ahead that's consistent uh brian with the goals of the department of revenue correct relative to enterprise rooms that that's movies i know i don't i know it's a little movie yeah we were bringing enough to cover our costs i met with the dlr i i wrote to them separately and uh shared with them our process for setting rates they shared no concern at all with our retained earnings levels um they initially thought there was some concern with our revenue um but we showed them that we have a contingency line of 200 000 don't plan to expand every year it's just a safety valve and we cover that with a retained earnings uh note in the article um i explained that to them they said that's up to you how you do that that's a political call locally but they were very comfortable in fact i think the meeting would have been five minutes if we didn't want to present uh how we're going about things i think they were very comfortable with where we're at and they have no concerns about our retainers level do you think water use will go down um in a significant way because of the increased water bills people will receive and that's something you figure you figure into that you may figure in when you do your calculations um yeah we'll have to i i mean there are a lot of factors we factor in we're going to go to quarterly billing and hopefully monthly billing um with the with the letter so there's going to be a change in the cash flow um we factor in okay are we in a drought situation right now this year while we're setting rates how's that going to affect our revenue this year um we factor in the um onboarding of river's edge um you know how how's that going to affect so there are a lot of factors that go into but we spend a lot of time on the model um yeah and if i can ask where is our uh overall cash right now if we're supposed to be at about 25 million to 40 million in cash sorry i said yeah no i know oh but we're about 100 million dollar concern right so it's about 45 million to 40 million so where are we at currently did they say we're available you have to ask mr kevin but i think it's okay what's our free cash over 12 million that's more than that but there were a number of funds that contribute to that total just like the reason i ask and it's beyond maybe the scope of this here but do you want to pull from town town folks taxpayers another 12 million would it be better sitting in the towns at triple a rates and what's that difference versus we are going off but we don't do that information how's that on them um brian could probably provide something for us for that it's a number of funds contribute to what we call our it's uncommitted funds including your retained earnings but i think i want to stay on on the topic if we may um bill you've spoken tom um andy or something you want to ask or add here no i i think i get it i think i get it it's just a matter of getting the guarantee verse you know having it be um where the water fund could default on the interest payments well we're not anticipating they will but we're just talking about the what ifs what it was actually brought up what happens right question would you want to no you're soaking it all in you're soaking it all in okay um i'm going to ask mr mccall or mr holder if they would like to add anything here well the only thing i have in common i mean we did talk about whether or not you would try and implement a tiered debt service if you were doing this i did do a little research you could come up with a model if you came up with the base rate and then at your various tiers you gave a different you know factor that you paid is that something if we do this maybe we would charge the debt service accordingly with each rate reached here so our our rates are stratified across i think there's four four levels um the debt service would i i would think it would be allocated properly through that tiering automatically in our model i don't i don't think we'd have to do anything different in order to make sure that happens yeah that is one of the concerns of the board is that and i've heard you the board of public work speak about this as well the equity concept and you know how do we equitably distribute the construction costs um you know for this project i think that's what mccall's referring to i know we talked to tom about it when he was here the last time is that it is equitable on the amount of water that you use because it's a per gallon fee increases with your usage and it's a really terrific system to use this much you pay then you move it's not just all one one tier that you're in but this is we've spent a fair amount of time discussing how are we going to achieve some equity in the in the distribution of construction costs if that's possible and we are also concerned in that equity formula that those who don't pay real estate taxes in town also contribute to the the debt the construction costs so if you put everything through the water rates everyone who uses water in town it's going to pay so you know you know we thought splitting it might make sense because then it would add some equity to the larger um property owners in town they'd have a little bit bigger piece of a slice for that portion but then it would be distributed evenly based on water usage in the water rate um in the water rates so we thought that might kind of cover that uh it was a way to kind of get to that um target but you know if it all goes into water rates whoever uses water regardless of whether they're a non-profit or or not um
that's you know obviously that's been a i think that's been a fair amount of discussion spent on that topic um and certainly you aren't going to be establishing your water rates for next year until may but certainly even though this construction costs will not really totally start i know the consultant has recommended that you start increasing the water rates so that it's not one i don't know if they're planning on doing that come may no i i'm not sure we discussed that i'm not sure if people want us taking their money now so we can spend it less so so the increase won't feel as great later i know of my utility company to you know want to do that with me i'd say no thank you so i think i think this is a concern mike for the board is that we want to make sure there's some increase in the rates next year you know there was none this year and how are we getting how are we lining up our ducks if you will let's see where we end up and as i said for the past 15 years i've been on the board we've been we've been coming in above our targets so it is a very unpredictable and challenging type of guesswork that we go through but our results have been pretty good that's a good question sure michael when we met some time back in the large hearing room um we had a document before then that talked about if it all went on water rates the rates would go up nearly 75 percent over the course of the next five years and i remember also now in that discussion if nothing went on water rates the rates we're still going to go up some 30 percent is that still accurate did i remember that correctly yes yeah so it's really that delta is is like a 40 percent increase right because we have the water tower going in yeah okay others yeah i just want to confirm i want to make sure that um everyone's got all the questions out so just you're not limited to one today no and all honesty i'm not being fresh when i said this i'm hoping that we can get closer to closure so let's get every question we have out
i have one additional question uh mike your word provided us with a ppw analysis potential impact of water rate increases where the uh average water today is 623 dollars is that a quarterly number is that an annual number is that a monthly number uh tom 623 um is that is that our our um six month or an annual yes so those figures were used and applied to what we currently have and those are semi-annual bills yeah okay thank you maybe 1200 when we do the summer no that doesn't sound right and i was thinking it's a number of households up to black and number of houses up to thousands around well that's all right i think that's what i'm asking yeah i don't know what are we now correct i don't have a typical uh six months six months okay so let's use me for an example i think about 300 i think maybe 350 so i must be but i can six or two bills no the two anyway i'm like 167 or something yeah so oh really yeah yeah i'm about that too because it went um and so i think if i recall the spreadsheet something like the town's residential population are at the 500 or less level has there ever been a year a thousand and less right everyone's going to increase by 500. we just broke it up up to 500 thousand you know 15 and 2000 and over 15. that was sort of the breakout do you remember that one repeat that repeat that question judy please are you all sir it was a spreadsheet it had zero five hundred five oh minus a thousand thousand to fifteen we need to know excuse me go ahead they'll ask you a question again just curious again whether this is a semi-annual average or an annual average i've gotten two different answers and i don't know the answer myself so yeah so i think i i misunderstood the question you know i was saying we we bill semi-annually the figures that you are using tonight 500 um is would be for an annual bill that would be what the two semi-annual bills put together thank you so now do you have a follow-up question on okay mr fay sorry mike just so we're clear if if our board headed in the direction of having this having these expenses flow through the water rates so to speak that's something that your board would be okay with yeah i mean i've always been of the opinion that we're not making this decision we're only going to deal with the consequences of it right um so however uh whatever we have to do to set rates to cover the portion that is allocated to the water file is what we'll do that that will be a factor in our model and that's yeah
i would say the only thing i'm confused about is at one point i thought that um when we're looking at it that there were some groups that were not paying for water and i think that's not true i think it's everybody everybody pays for water just you you pay for i'll tell you who's my paying phone it's us you're talking you were talking about okay i'm sorry so you were talking about just when when you're just getting these funds through the general fund right okay we were talking about carrying i just want to make sure that i got it okay so originally we also if i got it you must have another another question okay um originally we were talking about this several discussions ago we thought gee if it went through the general fund and it's real estate taxes with the new salt limitations there might be a tax benefit to the residents yes you know the taxpayer um so that was part of that conversation but then when we said that you'd be getting the tax credit but there would be others not contributing if we went all through the general fund we've really worked on this um we're not there but we've really worked on this um one of the other things that i'm going to point out though has been pointed out repeatedly at board meetings if you went to them is that the town is paying across the boy at tier one level regardless of our usage and that is going to change um because we are not a tier one user and so i don't know um mr holder has shared this with you uh michael or not but um i think we probably need a sense of how much and i think it's on that sheet that bill has you know i think i think we haven't made that we haven't made that but it's a possibility to consider but uh that was not set with our current rates no but it could be something that you go forward with and i think the estimate was it would probably cost us about another 75 or whatever it was i saw something on some sheet so just a food for thought for us as well so um mike the mwra assessments town that are on either water or sewer or boat and you know when those assessments will begin relative to is it after we're hooked on or before uh let's see i know that there's a initiation fee with the state revolving fund loan um and that will be in i think 2027 um in regards to the assessments uh i can take that yeah mike and i'm happy to take that the way that the mwra bills is they on an annual basis a fiscal year basis they see what their operating costs are and then they assess member communities the following fiscal year for that prior calendar year's consumption so it's it's they'll bill us the year after we actually use the water we're scheduled to begin drawing water the summer of 2029 so we would in essence get a bill um fiscal 31. so if the board of public works continue to calculate its needs they'll know a year ahead of time what the assessment will be right based on that time yes the mwra they advertise what they're going to charge per million gallons so when we do our annual statistical report we have a pretty good sense of how much water we consumed or produced and then that is what we would be charged against thank you
there's one last question um i don't this is for tom or brian but uh we heard some public comment earlier on that there are contingencies that are built into the budget which makes complete sense given that you're doing underground work um i guess my question is whether the entire principal amount of 32 million or whatever the number is is borrowed at one time which includes obviously the contingencies of whether there's kind of a a serial borrowing uh based on construction draws or when you when you're actually need the money yeah so i i can take a a shot at this but uh i i will also say that uh brian is going to become the uh the fellow that's proficient you know in the state revolving fund uh so i know he and i have been working you know towards getting him uh familiar with this whole process we had learned when we met with the srf representative that come october of calendar year 26 we will contract with the state for the full 38 million dollars that will be our our loan amount we'll go through the process of borrowing that full amount because we're going to spend that 38 million dollars in the course of 24 months it's going to go relatively quickly we will not begin aside from mike weegebauer was just referencing the administrative uh cost of getting an srf loan we'll be uh needing to be paying that prior to the actual loan taking effect but we will not be incurring costs on that loan until after the construction is complete which would be the summer of 29 that's when we'll begin making payments i guess so tom what if you don't need that entire amount what if you have the better luck than you expect and there's uh you save a million dollars in contingencies yeah so we'll we'll apply the loan amount will be for the full amount including the contingencies and at the close of the project we'll know precisely what the actual cost was and then that is what the the loan would then and i'll work with brian uh on how to do that but that's what the loan amount would actually be reduced to and brian can you invest those proceeds and get some arbitrage interest yeah i'm not i'm not sure what you're going to invest because the construction starts we're going to have no money in the account the way that tom has described it we're going to have to probably spend what two three four million dollars and then do a reimbursement is that correct tom so we spend the money and then we get reimbursed we'll have the loan amount uh so i'm there's i'm not familiar let me rephrase that i am not aware of any srf loan where it was reimbursable we did this about five years ago when we replaced the water main at route 20 it was a standard srf srf loan it was two percent over a 20-year term and we had those funds up front so this is not like a uh so this isn't a drawback were they going to give us the whole 38 million dollars up front we're going to have we're going to have use of that 38 million dollars as we engage contractors when we sign those contracts my point is is that are we actually going to receive in the form of a payment the 38 million dollars up front or like chapter 90 we spend the money first and then get reimbursed i believe we get the money up front so we have to know that because if it was like chapter 90 a substantial amount of money will be spent up front and we need to have some cash available to cover those expenses up front in other words we just can't charge three million dollars to a capital account that has no money we may need to do the selectman the advanced um funding that we did very recently with the with the cut with their debt because at the end of the year this account is going to have to be in a positive balance if we get the money up front it's not a problem but this is a chapter 90 then we're going to have to seek reimbursement on a regular basis and we're going to have to possibly have some seed money to get the thing going yeah see chapter 90 is in essence a grant program this is a loan program so i you know like i said brian you're going to have to become the srf guy i'll be i'll be the construction management guy you be the finance guy all right um go ahead and go ahead mike typically the interest rate on the srf is up to two percent but for critical projects um like pfas for mediation they can be zero percent do we have an idea are we getting zero percent that's what i thought it's a question of when we get the funding versus when we have to begin so could i kind of direct this back a little bit you're not paying interest on that that's what i know but i i just think if they gave us 38 million dollars to put in the bank i would think it'd be more like a construction model okay so i'm thinking i'm getting we're getting close with and i don't see any more questions from the board you're welcome to hop in after i do this but um um mike spellman brian or tom do you have anything else you'd like to ask or add before i start winding this down no brian you all set i think i explained my opinion of this fund uh at the last meeting in its financial condition um i won't add any more to that my my concerns about uh its ongoing ability to make its payments to raise its revenue to set rates properly um to meet these expenses i think i made that clear to the board at my last meeting with you folks thank you brian i just have one thing i guess i would ask that a decision be made to finance this whether it's in rates whether it's taxes whether it's a hybrid where it's shared between the 22 and the 16 million dollars that a decision be made relatively soon because i know as we prepare for town meeting and we're working towards promoting this project we're going to need to demonstrate to voters that what the mechanism is going to be for the financing so that it's clear it's easy to understand so that the folks coming to town meeting on may 4th know directly how this is going to be financed and it's easy for them to understand so that they can make a a favorable vote on the construction funding that's what i would ask okay thank you mr mccall and mr holder and i have talked about this as well and we would want a unified support for that decision that everybody be on board so that you walk into town meaning everybody knows everybody stands i think that's what we're trying to accomplish now no no i know but you're all together i mean i i've expressed before i think it for purposes of equity it should come through the the water rates um if we do excluded debt and ensure that we have a debt service component that can be adjusted for the tiers i think that would work and be equitable and i think it would provide the safeguards that mr keveney has uh mentioned and he and i concur on those as well so i would like to finish with the questions so that i can let the board of public works um adjourn and then we're going to devote a few minutes discussing you know what our thoughts are see if we can possibly take a vote tonight if not hopefully soon so um mike to the ed anybody have any questions last comments yes of course okay so uh if we uh consider this new funding mechanism and wherever wherever it comes out if it's 100 out of the water rates or not will folks be able to write that off on their taxes it's not no that's part of it not some of the salt i don't think because it's okay you see that's what i said we went all through that and so you know if we do that then we're not how are we going to capture from those who are residential um taxpayers or taxpayers if you're not paying taxes and there's a fair amount of users there that wouldn't be contributing so okay so just the borrowing would go through the town it wouldn't be saying that again okay just the what just the borrowing would be through the town directly instead of okay right um and then secondly there was a um tom there was a uh powerpoint or a presentation that the state um revolving fund greg devine had presented at one of our meetings so we have that that we should probably send to the select board and it outlines and it does say that there's uh some small upfront fees five dollars for every thousand dollars um those are the like i don't know the lock-in fees or something like that zero percent interest during the interim a 14-month or 30-month construction period where we get the money up front the payments aren't due until after construction is completed in that construction period so that's good so we'll send that along thank you very much anybody else on the board have any other questions okay everyone thank you very much for coming i appreciate it uh i know you're waiting for us we are doing our due diligence which of course is that's our job to make sure that we've looked at every every angle i think we have looked at every angle and even some we didn't even know we were going to look at and i think we are getting close to making a decision so um i'm going to thank would you like to adjourn what's the time here somebody 804 okay so um do i just fall adjourn you just say we are we are adjourning motion a motion to adjourn i have a motion to adjourn so second and all in favor all costs all men hi do we do yes uh and what about our eye great thank you so much for your time appreciate it thanks for your help all right okay so now i'd like like thanks i'd like to you know direct the board now for a few minutes um mr bould is here so we can spend a few minutes on this um any thoughts now in discussion here is it our intention to have this on the next agenda next meeting's agenda i should have flowered that up i would really hope that we could come to a conclusion if possible receive am i be able to and if we can we can't excuse me sorry go ahead tom no so you want to vote tonight i want to have a discussion to see if we're close enough to voting and then if someone feels that we are ready i'm i would not be opposed to a motion and did you want to start the discussion or bill or somebody if we if we want uh if this was financial flow to water rates it sounds like the board of public works is thinking of billing monthly it's not at least at least forward totally so my question to you brian is can i want to be very blunt here can we look over their shoulder relative to revenues and expenses in other words they have a consultant they have the formula but i'd be more comfortable if there was some vehicle that the town has to watch the numbers so if we saw a problem
arising we could be advised of it and address it are you talking about during the course of the year or before the rate setting occurs well i guess both right because just to have a sense of how the financing is look how how the uh yeah so to give you an example through this through fiscal 26 they did not have a rate increase they were expecting that revenue would increase about nine maybe ten percent based on um a higher volume of um you know gallons being sold but really through five months they're almost at par they're up a little bit but not nine percent at the same time they're going to be spending um their full appropriation so there's a high probability that they're going to again have a loss since they became an enterprise fund 13 years ago they've had they've lost money nine times um so they've had nine of 13 years where there was it was a net loss in the fund so where we are today with tom is tom and i talk about this fund all the time and you know he's bought water from the mwa this year that's going to be probably maybe 150 000 200 000 so during the course of the year we'll start talking about where your revenue is going to fall and try to you know mitigate the loss that we're expecting at the end of 26 because of the no rate setting now as you go into the next fiscal year we go to town meeting in may or april we vote a budget town meeting votes a total revenue and a total expense budget town meeting does not vote the rate when the board of public works gets together in may or june they set the rate to achieve their water usage line item the water chargers line item is about 95 of the budget again that line item really for 13 years has only made its budget a few times so the majority of the years since an enterprise fund it has not obtained its revenue budget for water user charges well here's where the problem happens in may and june the board of public works sets a rate at their disposal they're not necessarily setting a rate that's going to bring in revenue that town meeting voted they bring in a rate that they feel is appropriate um by using a by using retained earnings you can only use retained earnings if town meeting voted it now we did have a meeting with dor where mike wigabar was part so it was in tom i don't know of any other meeting that there was with dor i've been dor has expressed their concern with this account for many many years um so to do your point tom how do you control it there's got to be some control in may and june they set the rates that the rate is set to achieve the revenue number that the town meeting voted and absent a bylaw change or a town meeting action they're at full authority to set any rate they want basically what they're doing is this in the general fund we have the finance committee reserve fund it's about two hundred thousand dollars we fund that with tax we hope that we never spend it we hope no other department needs a transfer but we raise the revenue to bring in money in case we need that appropriation what the water fund has been doing is they have a contingency fund and what they decide is well we're not going to raise revenue to cover this line in because we think we're not going to spend it and what tom holder said prior they actually do spend it so they're spending money out of a line item which they have no revenue for because they didn't raise rates properly so to set some kind of a control up i think it's difficult for michael mccall and i to mandate to them or force them to raise the rates properly because we have no no authority to do to do that you're probably looking at fiscal 27 with a 30 percent rate increase and if they don't do the rate increase you know they're probably going to have a fiscal 27 similar to fiscal 26 so i think absent any kind of action to enforce a certain um i wouldn't say policing but um oversight of the rate setting i think we're going to probably down the road get into trouble because rates unset properly if you think about it this way tom in a couple of years the water fund is going to have an eight million dollar budget 25 of that is two million dollars their fund balance right now is 1.4 they need to start building fund balance just to meet their future revenue budgets they're or they're right now at 1.4 million in just a couple of years they're going to have a revenue and expense budget of about eight million they need to be at a two million dollar fund balance level just to be at 25 so in a matter of three years they got to grow six hundred thousand dollars so there's there's a real need to ensure that rates are set properly thank you so um i'll ask this both you brian and the town manager is it from what you've seen and how other municipalities operate is it unreasonable for this warrant article to have a provision that says that more public work work shall remain water commissioners but but the ultimate rate setting must be approved as well by the select following and it is you see that as a as a good idea or a bad idea because i don't want to have i really don't want to have two sets of two consultants and two sets of number reviewing right but um i'm just concerned that that we're going to get ourselves into trouble based on what you're saying i would think that would be appropriate maybe something that the rates are set subject to the town manager approval that they they can vote them but the town manager ultimately needs to approve them in order for them to be um sent out to the residents some kind of a control like that you know we we don't want to have an adversarial relationship with the board of public works we're just trying to we're just trying to help them and that's what's best for the town that's right and and i i think maybe if the town manager was put as the ultimate authority to approve the right setting then i think we could be fine and i think the board of public works should be okay with that um they may maintain their control but the town manager ultimately approves it if the town manager does not approve it it would go back to the board of public works to reset it we're just giving good advice that we think is helpful to them and it's it's in the best interest of the town thank you why can't we just use this as a surcharge and not have it be specifically connected to usage but rather just a basic surcharge that's that is predictable and and passed to users but they have to set the rate they have to set the rate which brings it to us but we have no enforcement mechanism they are the water commissioners at the moment you can have surcharges and water so the interesting thing i just want to throw these little monkey wrench thoughts here is that i'm i'm going to answer your question a second but i want to uh yeah thanks sorry can't you do that um i don't think they have the authority to send it what a public works is submitting the article and we would be a co-sponsor so for us in order to get a change in the the language of the article they're sponsoring might not be might not go through so easily just looking for five they agree in language i think that i personally think that we've explained the situation here this is just me we are an elected board just as the board of public works is an elected board we are responsible to make sure the decisions that we make do no harm if you will to the town and we make sure that we do what's in the best interest of the town and the residents um but i think that we we have time a little time here to see what happens because this debt service expense is not really going to hit our books until around fy29 maybe even fy30 we're going into 27. so we go to town meeting and we approve this and then we see what they do with the rates next may and then we have a conversation say you know we have this conversation and then x happened when we thought y was going to happen and so we need to revisit and maybe that's the time to have a good look at it cheryl to your point uh i think though that mike articulated a kind of a different philosophy which is not to take money out of a great payer's hands and therefore keep the
fund balance comparatively low and not assess rates sufficient to pay the coming debt service on even the water tank much less the other so i i personally am more comfortable with an approach where the debt service comes or the the fund balance comes up and where you start to build the rates so that when the debt service hits it's not oh my god the rates are quite brutal but and so so i'm i'm a little concerned about holding off upon there's no debt due there's no bill due if you will in 27 on this and we're in 28 and so then we have time to make an adjustment in 28 just i personally feel a little comfortable being able to explain to the town and maybe here's the thing and what was your question if it was a fixed fee why um why would you have that fixed fee fixed fee so everyone would pay the same for what the construction costs it within the water within their water so that's what we're talking about this is the equity thing that the board has been discussing is that some board members feels very strongly that the cost of the construction should be in proportion to your water usage i know but if that if the concern is it's predictability of receiving those fees that's easy to do but also the water commissioners which is the board of part the works sets those fees right so all we would need to know is that they would set it if they have an obligation as an expense to service the debt at a specific number and then they do it based on a tiered system but a fixed tier system then they can allocate it in the way they need to as long as they're responsible for the payment so i think the board's concern is that that they set the rates enough whether it's a fixed fee or a not fixed fee or a tiered fee or in order to make sure they can make sure they cover it down mr when it's let's say what mike says he might be able to solve this for us the select board member fave raised an interesting point and so did uh mr kevin um i did share with you town council's opinion who did say that you could advance a bylaw if you wanted i believe mr holder although he's gone we already employed a consultant abrams um that looks at rates and proposes prospective rates and was recommended in the past that they'd be that the board of public work should have been incrementally increasing rates to accumulate some monies in their retained earnings anticipation of this 38 million dollars um the last town i was in as a town manager i was responsible for sitting down with the finance director and the ddw director and setting the rates and typically what would happen is you would have a consultant come in do some analysis um i hadn't contemplated a scenario where maybe the board of public works recommends a rate to me and i approve it you would have thrown out that scenario but i do think you might want to have a mechanism where a rate is established by an outside consultant and it's part of a bylaw or policy that they have to adhere to and that as town council mentioned that the select board is the enforcement mechanism to ensure that you're getting sufficient revenue through those rates to not only cover the principal and interest um for the loan but also to help build out that retained earnings for future does anybody else have any comments and discussion are we um i'm going to be eternally optimistic now when i say the next sentence do we think we could be ready for a motion we could well may i hear it so are we just focused on this motion about how we're paying i don't know you're making the motion um maybe we should have a little discussion what the motion should be because we also talked on the agenda about the the pfas settlement funds is that a separate something so mr time manager if you were in my seat what motion would you make if you wanted to have the financing go through water rates only is there any magic language that's what i'm getting very much i'm always thinking of phoning a friend mr kevin me up on this excuse me you already used to phone a friend now we've talked about the being financed the debt service through the water rates um mr kevin has proposed that we do the debt service ensure that there is an adequate debt service fee built into those rates using the tiered system to reimburse the town for that excluded debt that correct brian um yeah for the most part i'd have to think about that but for full disclosure even though i came up with that idea of the you know the general fund paying it and getting the you know the transfer i ultimately i was against it because it left the ability for future people to spend that unused um levy capacity but we're not on that at the moment we're on the setting of the rates huh okay so if we if we're excluding that portion i i think that the rates i would recommend that the board have the rates for no let's stop we just ask one quick question are we doing this for the full 38 million or are you doing work portion since the board is the whole amount right correct excuse me mr tell me as you were going for the whole enchilada here i would recommend to the board that they um that they seek that the board of public works raise the money through the rates using a debt service fee which would be adjusted relative to the four tier system that they have for the which so that there is equity built in it would be a smaller debt service fee for the tier one slightly larger for tier two tier three and tier four to ensure that they're covering the principal and interest in building up their retainer somebody want to make that or do we want to have some more conversation i have a question the specific way you worded that michael i cannot sure i understand it uh that there would be a surcharge on a debt service that is proportional based on the use why is it a surcharge why is it not part of the charge as i understood at the end of the day people were thinking of separating it rather than strictly on the rates but have the debt service fee that's all i'm suggesting here that was not my understanding that that's a new concept to me i don't think i've heard that before we're talking about some people do place a debt service fee on their bills on the utility bill but you could why would well it seems to me you don't have equity within each tier yes as opposed to having it be just part of the charge well you could certainly do that that would be the most equitable i think that i think that would be my preference okay and then i would just have it be part of the charge rather than have a separate surcharge that is x for tier one x plus strictly it usage it's tied entirely so it's just built into the break we don't set the rates so i think we are really just voting on like i said the whole thing so we're voting our vote in my opinion our motion is the action we're looking at is our how do we believe this project should be financed so we are saying what i'm hearing is we are saying that it should be financed the whole 100 through the water rates that's what we're really saying right now now we have these other questions and these other issues not sure they're in our purview but what is in our purview is we've been asked you know to doug's point do we want to add in here and say that the pfos funds they're not huge but we are we've already made that decision separately to apply them but i think we could do that separately i think we're saying we're saying we're effectively or we're we think that the that the customer should be paid effectively through the water rates the distinction being brian's scenario is a reimbursement to the general fund the general fund pays but it's it handles on the head of any kind of distinction now i think then separately we have these other couple questions which are minor and then we have this one large question is to how are we going to have assurance that the debts the rates are going to be raised and i thought that was the whole concept of the joint meeting was that we were raising that issue and then come may when they don't then i think we come back and say next time meeting this is what we're going to put forth then no would it be appropriate a sensitive board to take a vote that confirms the consensus as you've described it which is effectively the debt service for the entire combined project is paid for the water rights but a mechanism to be put in place to ensure that the water rates are sufficient to meet the debt service the operating expenses and the retained earnings is that in our program but i just don't know if if i'm quite there with brian's idea of the uh that exclusion so we have to do debt exclusion period because nobody has 38 million dollars and in their operating budgets to support the debts are uh 2.2 1.9 2.1 whatever so we have to do that exclusion for the 38 million well you don't know if it's entirely paid from the waterfront right but absolutely pay from the law yeah i think we've had that consensus but i'll see the consensus but i think we're mixing up a couple things here myself but why don't we do one at a time why don't i think one of them right that's a better idea excuse me am i supposed to do a consensus or we're going to do in a let's do it let's do a motion and then we'll have a discussion yes mr chick well in october they made a recommendation of the board that was in two parts so i think maybe you respond to the two parts the first being they asked for the 20.5 for the mwra connection via a um a debt exclusion instead you could take a vote on that and send back a recommendation uh akin to what mr whitney just indicated that's on page 39 the recommendation to us on page 39 of the packet the the main packet
my apologies to those who are waiting for us but i'm determined to get a vote you know so at this point they've asked us to fund it's the hybrid they want a hybrid this is the hybrid that they can recommend like this is the same this is the basic that they it was within like the first conversation right i don't know michael that we have to take that as two votes so it's just a recommendation from the board of public works we could still have that single motion on how it's paid for right yeah i think you can change we're going to recommend the entire thing just because the water running yeah tom go ahead yes i move that this book that this um board um support payment of the debt service for the um wra connection and happy hollow treatment facility together through water rates second so many further discussion so i'm i'm going to add one thing here is we could actually that about the thought that's in our mind we could actually say we want to draw up an mou with the board public works there's a lot of things but in the meantime i'm going to take a vote all those in favor of the motion say aye aye thank you everyone we will let the floor for the floor tomorrow now because we have these concerns we have a couple issues uh options in my opinion one is we could maybe ask them to do an mou with us so that we'd have an mou where they say they agree to raise the rates sufficiently um one is we expressed ourselves we can express it again maybe michael can send off the letter and say that we uh we make this motion with uh and our concerns that that they will raise the rates starting this year accordingly um or the other is we can wait and see what they do in may and if not then we can take an action for fy28 let's say this it's so much easier to codify structure in an article like this then to come back in a year or two and the addressing the point is if we do it come to a decision one or the other within this article it doesn't have to be before the end of the month but before the article goes to print and maybe that's where the mou discussions come about right maybe they'll be agreeable to it maybe what we should do michael is uh start wrapping up an mou with you know brian why and come up with something simple for the board and we could review that yes to throw a monkey yes please sir can can an mou find a future for the public works or a future selector no no why doesn't it we have one that they did with the fields it's from like 2017 or 14 and they use that all the time no they do i don't know i'm not does it say finding i don't use your not so put binding in us if we were to do uh except ryan's proposal would you thank you swear that you 1.9 million of excess capacity so we've been here too long i'm not gonna
no but i think you can use your pfas uh settlement money as a carrot uh here to ensure that they set the rates otherwise you know because you could give that money to the the project um or you could say you put it in retained earnings so they have that balance there but they need to uh set the rates according that could be you could do a few things i think i think we'll discuss something with that sorry sorry well um it seems to me that there are a couple of layers of comfort that one might seek one is an amelie dude or something but kind of the ultimate is ryan's proposal no so if you accept ryan's proposal that doesn't continue the option of coming to the agreement that is sort of defensive last resort the border public works of course is meeting tomorrow night and as their famous liaison i will probably be in attendance i could take a message if you wanted me to take such i'd like you to and tell them would you like me express our concerns right about this about the border yeah planning budgets annually given expected water revenues and expenses and that we're we're willing i don't speak for the board but i can't hear you we're willing to be uh involved in that process we're willing to be involved in that process our board okay and are they uncomfortable with that i mean we just it's a big issue like i said it's a big amount of money so all right thank you very much what do we want to do about brian's proposal um what do we want to do with brian's proposal i have a thing here that says next steps um is that something we have to resolve right now well that's what i'm asking because you want me to put that on the meeting for january 5th um we definitely have to do debt exclusion we've already agreed we're not going to do the section k we're going to do what we call a traditional debt exclusion so that's what we've decided so that's it so the question then because i mean i guess we are doing brian's proposal on my mind because if we're supporting the debt it was we're we're floating the bond and we're gathering the debt service in any event it's full faith and credit of the town it's hundreds full faith exactly
so i think then do we want to say that's why we're going to do it or i would move to this board accept the finance director's recommendation i move that the board accept the finance director's recommendation with respect to a debt exclusion article uh to be presented to the voters in order to ensure that the town has sufficient revenue should there be a shortfall of water water rights to meet the debt service obligations the second do i have any one second please you have your pinky swear up but hold on one second please um is anybody making amendments you looked confused uh you're all set you said are we in discussion at this point we're in discussion and then we're going to the pink over here my understanding this is a two-thirds vote at the ballot or majority of the ballot 50 of the ballot is about to require a two-thirds vote at town meeting this does require two this is borrowing i believe so the debt exclusion the debt exclusion is 50 plus more at the battle at all but it's two-thirds of telling me an article all right we're clear on that all right um does anybody else have any comments and discussion otherwise i'm going to mr mccall i'm just saying i will just one brian is this what you had in mind this motion so i'm confused i thought i just heard you guys vote to fund the the debt by water rates i did and so why would you then be entertaining what i mentioned previously about the old indirect thing use that use that mechanism versus having the water to fund uh float the bond we're going to float the bond to the general fund right i think we're saying that the ultimate source of repayment is the waterfall provided that we do it within the context of your proposal which is the water fund transfers sufficient revenue to pay the debt service to the town to enable it to make the debt service pay okay isn't that your proposal that that was my proposal is it still your proposal uh no i mean only because you leave the vulnerability of future people spending that unused levy right then you know you you're basically entrusting future town meetings and people making the budgets to not use that uh levy capacity that's uh targeted to um the water debt that you never ultimately use you're basically over inflating your max levy right so you know what we have voted this we come back we don't have to resolve this we don't have to resolve this tonight and this okay thank you i appreciate it i'd like to move on to the next i'm sorry we're late we are going to go to number 10 discussion of 195 main street including but the next steps to address site contamination i think we invite mr cool who's our licensed site professional from cmg and remote environmental before it was yours to talk about the latest um test results but i am going to just i'm going to recuse myself for a couple minutes i'm just going to be in charge so here's this gavels not easy to do go ahead school do have the floor and the information is in our packet on page um is it like 41 page 40. so thank you mr goal sorry and thank you for your patience ben can you hear us yep i can hear you all right um so we have you on our schedule right now to provide an update on the latest cleanup efforts at 195 main street in wheyland i know it's been some time since we've last connected um but if you want to give us an overall synopsis and then i'll open it up to the board for some questions okay overall um we found a problem at 195 main street we actually found three problems but the one that's concerning most is p fast contamination in groundwater so we have done uh four iterations now of putting in monitoring wells and assessing the groundwater for what is there as far as p fast goes um we found substantial contamination in the third round that we had done uh which was um back in in uh september or so uh we we had found quite a bit of p vas in some of the wells on 195 main street itself so the suspicion was it was coming from 201 main street the wayland middle school specifically the leaching fields of the middle school so the last iteration we did um we put in five more wells in at the end of october the beginning of november and we've got the groundwater results back and the good news is that the concentrations um in this last round are not as high as we had seen in previous ones uh if you look at the the table of results they kind of go through time uh we we um we have not done a comprehensive sampling round yet because pfs testing is quite expensive and i wanted to see if we can find the extent of this before we try to figure out uh what the time time time trends are for reduction um just from looking at what we have in the most recent round our highest result was about 35 parts per trillion in a previous round we had 500 plus parts per trillion so that's what i mean by it's not as high however the highest concentration was pretty much where i expected it to be which was the one well we put into the middle of the uh weyland middle school's leach fields so that supports our conceptual site model hypothesis that the primary source for this pfas contamination is actually coming or had to come from the weyland middle school to most likely to pass use of floor cleaners um getting washed on the drains and so forth i i don't think anybody's doing anything malicious there uh it's it's pfs was not a major thought in anyone's mind before about 2018 and has not been significantly regulated since 2020 so it's it's a historic usage that is supported by direction of groundwater flow and pattern we've seen in the concentrations if you just thumb through the different groundwater flow maps um there are different scales because we've started small and get bigger and bigger but overall we are seeing the groundwater flows towards the east on on the majority of what we'll call our study area in the last round we are now have a well that's on the east side i'm sorry did i say east i meant to say west it's westerly groundwater flow um towards doubly pond in general we now have a monitor well on the east side of the wayland middle school which has substantially lower groundwater elevation than the well we put in a septic leach field that tells me we found the groundwater divide in other words about right down the center of where the middle school is there appears to be a division whereas groundwater to the west is moving west groundwater to the east is moving east i don't have enough data points to get a real good handle on the easterly flow the good news is it's it's much lower concentrations of pfas than what's in the westerly side we attempted to put in a sixth well if you look at our map 6e there's a symbol there for b36 not mw36 we were not able to get water in that one we hit bedrock a couple different levels we tried a few spots we hit it at 28 feet moved around hit it 33 and a half feet moved around a little bit hit it 33 feet so it's somewhere between 30 35 feet down below grade there is a bedrock rise and i believe that the groundwater is splitting because of that bedrock rise that means groundwater is flowing to the west on the west half of the weyland middle school and on the 195 and 207 property groundwater is flowing to the east on the easterly half of the weyland middle school property now that's all you know fine and interesting to scientists that are looking at it i'm sure you would like to know much more about uh what does that mean for the town we are looking to complete a phase 2 comprehensive site assessment what we need to do for that is to identify the full extent of contamination i believe at this point we have not got the full extent of contamination but we do have enough to say where the real problem is and it seems to me that the real problem probably originated at the septic leach field in the whalen middle school but has been moving slowly to the west over time with groundwater flow so that we saw the highest concentrations on wells that are actually at 195 main street the highest is at well 21 mw21 so what does that mean that means that it's a historic release it's gradually moving away from the source gradually moving towards dudley pond um some of the ramifications of that are we would expect that the contribution of groundwater into dudley pond is going to increase pfas levels in dudley pond since the pond is so much larger than the amount of groundwater that gets fed into it i suspect we won't see very much change at all in in the happy hollow well fields um they'll probably stay about the same constant concentration they've been for a while eventually they will come down just by natural attenuation through groundwater movement and dilution by eventually we're talking decades possibly even longer than that but um it's encouraging from a scientific viewpoint that i believe we found that the smoking gun if you will and apparently that gun went off quite some time ago and what we're seeing now is the after effects of so hopefully that's understandable uh that's about all i have for now i'd be happy to answer any questions ben just briefly you're saying that where we are now is is coming to the end of the phase two part of the process and then we have we have another phase before us that yes correct on both counts uh we are coming to the end of the phase two process i have sufficient information now that i could write a phase two that will probably not fail a db audit um before this last iteration i i couldn't say that but now we have enough we do not know the full extent of the pfas contamination i don't believe it makes any sense to try to chase it at concentrations below the current drinking water standard which if you remember is 20 parts per trillion but where we where we did have you know 530 parts per trillion um in well 21 that's significant we had to find out where that source was
as i said i tried to say carefully we believe the the source is from the septic leach fields the primary source i don't believe that is the entire source i suspect that there is some contribution from private septic systems in the area um just from people washing clothes and so forth it gets into the groundwater through septic systems and then it's there as we've all heard pfas is a forever compound it does not degrade the only way it goes down is it gets washed through and diluted by additional groundwater coming into it it's extremely difficult to destroy pfas compounds there's been some advancement in in techniques on how to destroy them but for the levels we're looking at now it doesn't make sense to try to implement anything like that your second party question was have we do we have other phases yes after you complete your phase two um you then have one more year and you have to get to what they call a phase three that's a real action plan you have to evaluate what are your alternatives for how to address this problem and come up with a plan um for how to implement that at the same time the the mcp requirements the the dep's regulations say that you have to have a phase four remedy implementation plan um it's kind of the other side of the coin from the phase three phase three says what what is possible to address this problem phase four is okay we decided what we're going to do this is how we're going to address that particular problem from that point the regulations give you one more year to get to either a permanent solution or a temporary solution or a remedy operating status um i do not foresee this will reach a permanent solution in my lifetime um i know that's a pretty pessimistic way to look at it but we can reach a temporary solution based on natural attenuation provided that there's no one actually being directly impacted um as in their their groundwater is contaminated we've investigated and to our knowledge there are no private drinking wells within 500 feet of any of the areas that we've looked at so far but given the concentrations we have we may need to look further than 500 feet but that's the first level that you look at this area is all serviced by public water the public water is being controlled on pfas that they are treating it in such a way that it stays below the state standard of 20 parts per trillion the state has not lowered that standard yet um at some point they will i haven't heard any indication of when that might be dp has been pretty close to the chest about what they're going to do about this i believe they're waiting for epa to make a move before they do it um they've proposed proposed and enacted a rule for public drinking water supplies that says it has to be less than four parts per trillion for certain compounds they are not currently enforcing that that rule um so the town is able to and every town is able to distribute water water for drinking that's less than 20 parts per trillion they don't have to worry about the four number yet um i'm in my opinion that's a political move not a scientific one uh the science does support the four part trillion number eventually it will come down probably to about that number um but in the current political climate i don't foresee that happening for a few more years at least so um thank you man to answer the question more than you wanted but go ahead no that's all it's all helpful information i've been taking notes since we've been talking about this for the last couple of years and um one thing we talked about when you were with us on may 19th was about pfas contamination and our happy hollow wellhead uh you didn't really have at that time an extent of the understanding of the contamination now it seems like you have a better understanding yeah does it impact um your thoughts around how it will be treated at our happy hollow wellhead once we complete our p fast treatment plant there one thing you have to keep in mind is the relative volumes of water um i don't have that number handy in front of me but it there there are you know multiple millions of gallons of water in dudley pond that water is is being um is really the source for the happy hollow well field their well is extracting groundwater but that groundwater is pretty darn close to dudley pond and and what's in dudley pond is going to get into their wells the amount of contamination we're seeing in our groundwater is far higher than what's in dudley pond or showing up in the happy hollow well fields but the actual volume of water involved is moving very very slowly so the the amount of pfas itself that's moving from the groundwater into dudley pond is not enough to make a huge difference in the concentration in dudley pond that means that it's not going to make a huge difference in what the happy hollow well field is pulling i don't see that the happy hollow well field is going to get the big difference it will go up slightly probably it will not go up by a huge amount they're not going to see 500 parts per million in their well field that's that's just not going to happen there's far too much dilution before it gets there thank you thank you i'll back in yeah thank you yes do you have any questions for mr gold oh thank you that's that's good news but that's easy gentlemen i have two questions mr gould thanks for joining us tonight my first question is based on what you have learned does the town have to do anything relative to the leach fields at the middle school when if you remember we talked about a phase three to phase four i have to consider different alternatives there is certainly one alternative is to excavate the leach fields themselves dispose of the whatever is residual pfas contaminated material and replace it with new material so they can still have a leach field that will effectively remove the historic source i can tell you already that we're going to demonstrate that that alternative is not really viable because the bulk of the contamination has moved well beyond where the leach fields themselves are it's currently at the 195 main street parcel so that's where the main contamination is so i don't believe that there's any alternative that's going to make sense other than monitored natural attenuation we have to go through the exercise to demonstrate that you know come up with some hard numbers to to bolster it but having done enough of these in the past i i just my my gut feeling is it's going to be natural attenuation here which in one sense is the do nothing approach but you're not really doing nothing you do have to monitor it you have to pay attention to what's going on the monitoring will probably consist of annual checks on a few wells not all of them but we will track the worst part of the plume to make sure that we're not getting surprised over time and eventually we're going to have a temporary solution and that's going to be the action and my second question is um given that this these chemicals existence is below ground do you see any reason why the town can't develop 195 main street in some way with a structure even if it's a slab structure understood um as i've said before i don't believe there's any real impediment to developing 195 main street for whatever use you choose the only caveat is um besides the PFAS contamination you recall there is some metals contamination in the ground in the soil and there is some volatile contamination which appears to be weathered gasoline in the groundwater at 195 main street because of the weathered gasoline i suggest that you keep any development away from where the former DPW building is if you put it more more towards the easterly side of the site or even in the center of the site you should be away from that source of potential vapor migration into a building even if you did put it right on top of the worst spot as you said slab on grade with a sub slab depressurization system we can handle this level of of residual gasoline contamination such as that it will not be a game changer or a deal breaker or whatever type of building the town chooses to put there or whatever development the town chooses for that parcel um these those the metals problem and the volatile problem from gasoline um they're relatively minor and easy to deal with and it's something that existing technology has well in hand PFAS is another story but PFAS is not going to affect the buildings it's it's deep in the groundwater the groundwater depth um it's it's deeper than i would expect it's only about uh seven or eight feet or so at at the uh boundary with main street itself however by the time you get to where the middle school is the groundwater's um 30 feet and deeper which is pretty far down thank you very much all i have that was all set thank you mr gould appreciate you coming and and you know taking care of this testing for us i guess so i don't what's the next step here michael for this do you have one well i think mr gould has to go and summarize this and file the phase two report with the dep okay um and then talk about phase three and what we can do in mitigation is that about correct mr gould um i would also add that this is a public involvement plan site so before we can submit to phase two we have to put it out for public comment so there'll have to be a presentation of what we are going to do for the phase two report itself and they'll they'll be at a public meeting to discuss it um at this point um i don't know if it's going to be in person or virtual but we'll we'll definitely have one um i'll take those comments into consideration and we will get this in and we our deadline to do the phase two is november 1st of 26 so um we do have enough time to work this through i've i've in private conversation with with mr mccall i have mentioned that um i think that january perhaps february would be the right time frame to have this public involvement meeting so that we can explain this to the interested public and and uh get feedback all right thank you very much thank you appreciate it and um we look forward to seeing the report i guess all right um i'm going to um um number now um the liquor license items number 11 and 10 and we are going to now go to the energy and climate discussion this is on page now deal with the page number in the packet um please join us julie okay we're going to have um a review a discussion of potential vote on the election vehicle first policy and the decarbonation roadmap and potential vote to authorize um myself to sign a letter of support to accompany the town's climate leaders application we are going to because we have a lot to discuss we're going to defer the uh review the review of the uh the charge until the next time we meet so yeah so all right so we have a couple items before us um and i know you probably want to start with the zero emission vehicle policy first but i would i'm going to suggest we start with the decarbonization road map great idea yeah so you have any slide did you want to put your one slide up or probably do you have my one slide great slides by the way i was told to keep it brief impactful and clearly we follow our own instructions yes sorry about also the packet was about 180 pages so i figured yeah we're on a roll right so um i think the road the municipal building and vehicle decarbonation road page 90 i was just 96 96. thank you and um originally it was untitled but in order to be consistent with all the state reviews this and it requires a tri-annual review it's matched up to 25 to 28. that's why the date's on there and it's also that way on the agenda so um it was just two minutes on this one and then we'll have conversation with the board sure um so just to give context for the decarbonization roadmap um this is a one of the last criteria in order for us to apply for the department of energy and resources climate leaders program climate leaders is a step up from green communities we've been a designated green community since 2011. um green communities has provided us about seven hundred thousand dollars worth of funding over the last 14 years and that's in addition to utility incentives so you can probably get for close to a million dollars in funding for um building energy efficiency projects you know updating old equipment that kind of thing um it's been a really it's it's a very solid program um there aren't a lot of criteria to be a part of it um what we did pass back in 2011 um it was passed through a um a town meeting vote climate leaders is the next step beyond that once communities reach a certain level of funding through green communities there's really a lot less than we're able to do with that funding and so um climate leaders is the answer to that it gives us up to 1.15 million dollars for funding so now we're looking at um bigger energy um equipment replacement projects um you know things like investment in um electrification of our buildings um kind of think of what else i can give you in a in a two to two minute spiel um i think one of the things that's important to understand is that when you're looking at a building as a complex system we can't just replace with the electric alternative we have to do some studying we have to understand the energy systems within the building and we have to make smart choices that give us um a timeline that positions us to fully electrify a building over a period of time municipal buildings typically have a lifespan of 70 years equipment maximum lasts about 25 years and then it needs to be replaced so we're hitting that replacement cycle with a lot of our equipment what climate leaders will give us is the opportunity to electrify that equipment and position ourselves to be um to have our buildings electrified why does that matter the state has committed to um fully electrifying sector by sector by 2050. if you're looking at the lifespan of equipment that we bought purchased today if it's not electrified we're going to not be meeting the state greenhouse gas emissions goals in 2050 if we don't do that today
the roadmap really is a planning exercise i think that's important to understand there are so many details that need to be decided between putting this initial exercise together and what we actually make the decisions to do um when the time comes um we're not committing to doing anything beyond what we've already approved in our budget um really what we're opening up is the opportunity to leverage some additional capital to be able to replace our equipment um with the best alternative that positions the town in the long term to save money um we were focused on energy efficiency first um and replacing aging equipment we're not going to replace anything that doesn't need to be replaced there is enough that needs to be replaced and repaired um that we don't have to we don't need to invent projects um and i think more importantly the timeline as you all know um for grant cycles it takes a long time to get this stuff done so if we get um this decarbonization roadmap approved um and get support from select board to um apply for climate leaders by december 31st the first available time that we'll be able to actually receive funding is almost a year from now um so the longer we wait the more equipment that we have to pick out our you know out of our existing budget for and the less capital we have to leverage to be able to to do this work um what's more important and i think this to me is like the biggest carrot for this program it's one point one point one point one five million dollars per project so in theory we could apply multiple times we just have to get that we have to apply for the funding we have to have our project idea we have to get the equipment replaced submit all our grant documents and then we'll be able to do that again in the next grand cycle so and that's what we've done with green communities in the past that's what we can do with this funding as well it's a really big deal um there aren't any other programs available like this for communities of this scale and size um so it really is um a great opportunity i'm gonna pop in here so because everybody had a chance to read the roadmap to decarbonization and i'm going to hop in here and say i think this thing is so extremely well which is why i said we should start with this it's just as julie says it's a plan it accounts for all of equipment there's there's evaluation for every single building in here and these are some things we do in the years it also has what we've been looking for is the chart of the vehicles the year they would be they're up for replacement that kind of stuff um and all of these things does anyone have any comments or edits to this that they require make suggestions yes i just add that i had the opportunity to meet with julie and the chair of the energy and climate committee i was pleased to learn that it is a plan not a contract that it's a condition precedent to seeking funding and that to the extent that the town is in the queue earlier for a fixed amount of money our chances of getting the one point whatever is are improved as opposed to should we miss the deadline and going to the next annual round there are likely to be more communities uh that qualify and therefore more competition for the same model yes i agree with you mr fay um is it are there 13 other communities in the commonwealth that have adopted this program there are 24 communities that are currently climate leaders the program won't require us to spend uh any monies beyond the existing approved budget no that's all i have thank you um anybody else am i did do some research on this because i was most concerned about whether these grant funds are actually given out and they are there's plenty of it for years it looks like the budget's going up even more i do i have a lot of reservations about um just that the concept of it just because you're seeing a decline in um electric vehicles and there's multiple reasons why and there tends to be a lot of additional costs that towns are not prepared for um but you know just looking at it i think it's a cost positive for us so or benefit positive yeah so no other though i'm gonna i think we have to approve each one of these so i'd like to have a motion on approving this uh and first of all i want to apologize i didn't introduce you so don't ask yourself please hi everyone i'm julie um i'm the for them for the sustainability manager and project manager for the facilities department under my fam sorry i'm sorry once we get past three hours we lose so i would like a motion please to approve the decarbonization roadmap for 2025 to 2028. remove second okay any further discussion okay all those in favor say aye aye aye aye okay so we've got that so the next item is one we have seen a couple times which i think tell me what page it is on somebody uh page 89 page 89 please of the packet is the zero emissions vehicle first policy yeah i've seen a couple names in this zero emission vehicle first policy okay so we have seen this not from you but we've seen this about four times i think that um several of us on the board have uh tried to work on this and i'm i'm giving this because there are folks i think who believe that we don't support or we haven't been supportive of of um energy and sustainability and that of course is one of our overriding principles of fuel on our objectives that we try to act in that manner doesn't mean that we necessarily want to spend every time we have on it but it doesn't mean we do act in that manner however we have had some questions about this policy and i know the latest uh rendition has been through with some work we did with uh the chair of ecc with bill so i'm gonna send this over if you don't mind for bill to talk about that and where we are so if you can't move along here thank you bill um well julia's patiently walked through this with me again and uh i think some of the earlier concerns or questions about the board was the applicability and i think this draft makes it clear that this applies to light duty vehicles from a couple of sort of editorial suggestions but uh again i think this is uh consistent with what the town has been doing uh as far as replacing gas vehicles uh other than large vehicles such as fire trucks and payloaders and so forth uh but rather uh vehicles under i think 8 400 pounds um so i i think it's in pretty good shape i do have a couple of editorial suggestions and one question um to go through now or or else you want to do nothing mr mccall all i was going to comment on is i've worked with julie as well and i've gone through this and i and i think there have been enough modifications there are exemptions and considerations that would not really tie our hands allow us to continue to uh get the light duty vehicles being compliant with our own camp as well as um what the state is looking to do in order to be become uh green by 2050 so uh i i have no issue so back to the board's concerns mr whitney has the floor under uh definitions under excuse me for one second i'm sorry and you're amenable to these are not major changes in the last minor edits so that we can go all right thank you uh under the definition of exempt vehicles um the last line for a more detailed description see detention section in fact i think that section is called exempt vehicles good catch i hope there's no common problem i'm big on foreign revenue page two under purpose um there are four bullets first of which is the purpose of this policy is to accelerate adoption of the emissions reduction technologies um are we accelerating or are we maintaining codifying our current policy that's a really good question um because this is sort of standard language from other communities and other communities are looking to accelerate you're totally correct that this would just be continuing an existing policy um we are we're continuing um rather than accelerating yeah willing to make the edit for sure um is there a specific should we just get rid of the word accelerate to adoption continue adoption i agree with that as well thank you bill um page three applicability uh this policy applies to almost the departments of the town of wayland including the wayland public schools i don't know if this board has the authority to adopt a policy that's binding on the school committee or on the school board it's always a general policy you can't
the schools are supposed to sign off on this separately so to the extent of which it applies under the it's that board i don't know how the procurement works kelsey do you buy vehicles for the school committee i know i have no problem i have no but it's but they come to me for advice in the capital and they come to us for the capital this is one capital right that's campaign so i don't know if you want to go to the school committee has to sign off on it anyway
mr failing got to come up now sorry warmed your way right in
please thank you yes my director buildings um we do carry the in our capital budget on the facility so i think we one one way to handle it might be to just exclude the reference uh including wayland public schools so as to say it applies to all municipal departments of the town of wayland i like that works um vehicle procurement guidelines on that same page uh second complete paragraph all departments shall acquire the lowest missions vehicle and heavy equipment uh wonder if heavy equipment suggests something in excess of 8 400 pounds therefore it's which paragraph uh this it's after uh one two three four so it's all acquired those to mission vehicles and heavy equipment for municipal use i mean we could just remove the and heavy equipment that makes sense there are a couple of places where the policy talks about uh the town must do this and must do that um for policy i wonder if should is a better way to express um bill i highlighted the must because you mentioned this earlier today i do my homework there's a couple of shelves there are some shelves and there's some shoulds so i checked you had a word count going um at the top of page four i agree that that word should be should vehicle should be the most fuel efficient class not must um that is a little inflexible great um under implementation we use the word must um i would suggest that we keep that one specifically because we have reporting requirements through our current green communities program that requires us to explain when we are purchasing an internal combustion engine in replacement of a hybrid or electric so where's the must it's page four implementation departments procuring light duty ices must request an exemption in writing um and that's not a five page thesis that's just a you know two two lines of text that explain why could you go back to the third page under a white procurement under vehicle there's a there's a must there acquisition of the cev must be prioritized over a vehicle rather than it should i would suggest maybe a shell because it is a shell must or should you can um spin the wheel on that this is funny this is very important so happy it's only be careful we're not on the comments we hear all nice i've got a lawyer arguing with me with me i can't believe okay i think it's okay to soften the language but it is a zero emissions first vehicle policy so our other policies read a little softer so then it's more consistent yeah my last one is on the page five do we did we decide on the must shower often softer shower he must is out my skin i get the sense of there's no must i kind of like this must and shall are pretty much the same yeah there's good okay it should everywhere yeah no no we are on the next we moved back to page three oh tricked you um we're under electric first procurement three paragraphs under vehicle uh under electric oh all department shall acquire the lowest of the emissions vehicle is always one all right acquisition of a zev is the first should be prioritized overview by primarily second sentence last did you also hire this yes the concept is we'd like to be a little softer because that's all the rest of the policy degree there we go no someone else 30 page document there's no comments if it's five pages then bill i think i appreciate it um last is electric vehicle transition plan at the top of page five now we'll do that
under the town shall conduct a fleet baseline that's actually already been done but it's something that we will continuously do as part of facilities sustainability under the town manager
that actually to me this is when we did the formalize the finance michael knows what i'm going to say when we financialize the formal uh you formalize the financial policies you know when they were putting all this stuff and i kept saying to them do you really want that in there because that's process and then putting that before the board and i see a lot of process in this but i think these are kind of boilerplate that have come from yeah this is how everyone's accepting them there is a bit of you so you see the the once the board votes something they need to come back to us to make a change but if it's process it goes under like the town manager the department heads and so we were really careful otherwise do not have a lot of process in our policies so that it's easier to you know do the jobs the answer is facilities facilities yeah those are very substantive comments thank you anyone else have any comments on this policy am no i i have one about the surprise the financing in the most places it says in most places it says you know we'll work within the municipal budget but in a couple places and i think they're left over from the original or rafts it says in here that budgets will be adjusted accordingly and that that uh let's see near the end on the funding department should estimate up front investment requirements and budget accordingly in the capital budget requests it sounds like that if it's more they need to make that a priority the select board doesn't have the ability to prioritize capital projects we've delegated that now to the capital planning and improvement committee i want to make sure that we're saying working within the existing budget do you have it elsewhere and you have it in the road map so if you just check that one yeah um i'll give you a comment on that because electric vehicles although compare if you look at the example that i put on the slide which we don't get to see in view but you have in your packet um if you look on the the ford you know uh fleet website and e-transit which is the electric alternative is starting at about ten thousand dollars less than the internal combustion engine alternative right now that doesn't include incentives which would lower that initial cost um sometimes when we're looking at electric versus ice the numbers are slightly different when it comes to maintenance over the long term electric vehicles are far less maintenance we don't have oil changes we don't have filters to fix we don't have parts for our motors because there isn't a motor right um that being said there are there are um infrastructure costs because we have the charging infrastructure that we maintain so the reason it says accordingly is more to just say while now we have the budgets that we have and the vehicles that we have in the future there's going to be a shift in prioritization of how we we're not going to be um investing as much in technicians vehicle technicians but we may be investing in tech vehicle technology right i understand that but i still would like it to just be consistent that you know where it doesn't imply that the select board has now made policy for the capital plan they're like on a comic scene right so and if you're willing to do that then i will ask for a motion to approve so are you willing to change that finance or yeah i just i want to make sure that i understand where those references are before i right i don't want to miss you do you want to see uh the final copy before it goes out or would you like to look at us we can authorize we could authorize bill in the motion so i'd like a motion to approve and bill can have a look-see i move that the board approve the zero emission vehicle first policy with modifications discussed today as originally appearing in our packet and that we authorize select board member bill whitney to finalize any such modifications um with miscarriage do further uh uh authorize the chair to sign a letter of support that's match that's number three one at a time okay don't don't bother doug he makes good notes do i have a second please yes thank you all right any further discussion and all those in favor say aye all right um could you please also make sure you get the road map to the capital planning improvement committee they will want that data i can guarantee you um okay so then their holiday season homework carol this will be doing for the next couple of weeks okay great so the next item is that we have been asked as a letter in here for me for the board to authorize me to sign a letter of support to accompany the application there's no draft letter um going to ask the board is okay with that someone else who else drafts it for me and i just sign on our behalf and if you're okay with that motion please remove is there any second okay is there any further discussion okay all those in favor say hi could someone draft that letter for me yes there's an example in the packet so okay i'm sorry not in your packet in the department of energy resources packet for us all right thank you very much thank you thank you so much sorry for our tardiness thank you guys all right bye um so now i think we need to go back um i see some of them so i must have to go back to the um liquor licenses right
yeah okay so let's go back to the two liquor licenses so now we're going to have um discussion
potential vote to approve the amended on-premises retail annual all alcoholic beverages license for urban whalen village llc dba terrain located at 297 and 311 boston post road in whalen massachusetts 01778 we are inviting attendance by heather kranz hello good evening jennifer guss and is lily bianchi bianchini i don't believe she is on but our premises manager sabrina is on she's just on the attendee list sabrina moore here as well yes she is on the attendee list yeah okay so did we pull her over sorry for our delay we're obviously running late tonight but if you bring uh
he's gonna she's not an attendee yeah she's right there that's you know more madame chair yes uh we do not need a hearing for this right no no this is a um i will let them explain this but there has been the submitted hello welcome thank you for joining us sorry for the delay um i believe what happened was we approved this license and then when this paperwork was submitted to the state to the abcc right they had some uh edits and now we have to endorse those is that correct would somebody like to um verify what i'm saying yes that is correct so back in july you approved the license for 297 boston post road and 311 post road when we went to the state they said because there are two separate properties we actually couldn't put both of them under one license and so since 311 boston post road which is the smaller building we never intended to sell alcohol or sell food at that property we are just going to shift the license so only 297 is now going to be licensed okay so well our job here is to uh we lost you for a second there we are thank you our job tonight is to discuss this change and vote to approve the amended on premises so i think this is a pretty quick item someone want to make a motion and then we can have discussion it's item number 11 11 please what is the appropriate motion um it's to vote to approve an amended on-premises retail alcohol beverage
is that the correct motion is that all you need though is we the board moves to approve the amended version of the on-premises retail annual all alcoholic beverages licensed for urban wayland village llc doing businesses terrain located at 297 and 311 boston post road and wayland to reflect only 297 right the post road accepted okay do i have a second second thank you so many for the discussion okay all those in favor say aye aye all right i think we're all set there thank you is there anything else thank you so much thank you thank you so much for your time yeah probably we're so when it's so late but thank you you're good we just appreciate it okay all right thank you all right thank you i'm going to go right to number 12 now which is we need to approve the renewal of the 2026 thank you second okay the further discussion all those in favor say aye okay i want to go back now to number eight which i meant to say i was just skipping over and mr fay nearly jumped out of his seat we thought i was skipping it all together heaven never do that man uh can somebody tell me what page this is on so on the packet um what i had put here was in conjunction with the edc coming in and we've talked about this passing and other more time sensitive things kept popping up so we move this out but well thank you page 34 but i it says discussion of select board objectives but it's actually just the second select board objective or the third one which talks about us participating um develop and implement measure of progress on the route 20 corridor that promotes economic development and employment growth including integration of review functions and participating in the joint task force and we touched on this for like two minutes the last meeting and i asked mr fay if he would be kind enough to give us a draft um charge which is on page 36 in the packet so i'm going to let him speak to that please sure so one of our goals as a board is to take a close look at route 20 between unitarian church and the sunbury river in order to enhance its attractiveness and commercial success so many of our area towns have developed task forces just like these to improve their commercial districts so this is nothing new and so this uh proposed charge reflects participation from from keyboards and committees to look at everything from planning engineering that kind of economic development real estate development uh portable housing architectural design potential zoning changes that would be recommended to basically improve that district the individuals the appointees could be members of the boards and committees or simply be individuals could be designated by those boards and committees that we saw tonight we have some extraordinarily talented people in this town who i think would be terrific members of this task force to make recommendations to both uh to our board to uh get the process started uh there's an argument to suggest that this really should be initiated by the planning board but i have seen year after year how how hard the planning board works and their plate is simply full all every year all the time and i do think we have a little bit more bandwidth to initiate this um this task force and um i welcome any thoughts and uh proposed changes the only question i had was it um mentioned that the appointees were going to be um there were going to be voting members and i just wasn't sure what they'd be voting on well any board or committee um in town some more than some more often than others have to vote on to example we want to recommend this we want to recommend this we'll take a vote so that's essentially it um the charge that is submitted relative to zoning um doesn't call on this task force to sponsor to when it's so even to draft zoning articles rather make recommendations zoning is typically a planning board task um although the select board can initiate um zoning articles that's that's that's what's meant by voting members yeah comments or questions as you know as liaison to uh the planning board did discuss the discussion board appointing such a committee and the alternative having the planning board appoint such committee they declined those suggestions in the nicest possible way
citing the fact that they are presently working on route 20 zoning as well that being said i agree with mr fey that we have uh some terrifically talented and experienced people in town and in town and personally not sure that we would need a consultant rather withdrawing the expertise of those folks and specifically um the charge uh i had a question about uh this group advising on the selection of a curb cutting sidewalk engineer seems to me that's pretty straightforward civil engineering stuff and uh you know the location of the curb cuts is obviously important not sure that mr feya needs picking a civil engineer yes yes sir yeah so um thank you for doing this and i want to say this i tried to do it now and i tried documents for the board particularly where the public looks at our packets if we could write draft on things and you know i think the last couple times i did something at the bottom i put cm in the date so we knew i was the authoress or something um because i did get a lot of calls that's why i used that's why i used with proposed okay thank you i see that right um so i was hoping that um this couple things i was hoping that this charge could more follow like the extended charges we just put on the other advisory committees there's a lot of here where they're going to be reaching out to the town manager and i think we'd rather have them come back you know through us trying not to add to the town manager and the assistant tom and she's shaking her hand yes workflow that kind of stuff so i was hoping maybe we could give this another you know pass through and make it more consistent with the others and um i'm sorry just make that one so i can make a note make that point again can we more consistent with that extended expanded charge we had where you know they have to come back through the board for um approval to reach out to you know consultants and what have you and reach come through the the board versus the town manager first because michael only gets 100 emails a day doesn't need another 120. so i'm just i was just hoping we could be more consistent with what we're doing and that kind of stuff um and i'm a little bit concerned about this board doing zoning because i'm a big proponent and only one cook in the kitchen right because i noticed what we happened a few years ago someone a group just generously created zoning but then rather than looking at the picture what we want for zoning we ended up having to edit from that i think it took us longer to get where we were going so in the end i think maybe they could make zoning recommendations or something like that that would just be that's what and that's what this says basically but it says zoning if necessary and all uh whatever i just would like not to have those things and i think i think you know the idea is for example let's say there was an idea from mixed development on u20 where you'd have retail on the first floor and housing above it um that would be a uh something that need be done through zoning so that recommendation might be in their report yeah make a recommendation versus drafting it i think i saw some place in the right they might draft it and then i want to say something that's you're definitely going to jump out of the seat now get ready i would like to only because we are both equally elected boards i would like to reach out one final time because it's been about six months to the chair of the planning board to let her know that we're looking at this and that our our objective says we're going to we want to participate in a joint task force so see if they want to do a joint task force with us how they would envision it and then i expect to be able to report back on that at the next meeting i believe that the liaison just told us that he did that and they said they weren't interested that was about six months ago so i don't know bill do you think it's worth reaching out again sorry to put you on the spot you're much more persuasive is there going to be a liaison to this task force um yeah create one it's to me it's it's the most um i mean they're giving us a significant amount of power considered compared to other committees it says facilitate public tools as appropriate for public input and all of these are included but are not even limited in the scope that they're allowed so if you think about back to the edc when they just wanted to put out that one little questionnaire there was 12 questions not it wasn't even anything very serious like it requires like eight iterations and two board approvals trust me when i say i want to cut through all that red tape and i would i would have just let them do it i'm just pointing out the fact that this task force has more power than anything power is one word but how about ability to get things done right and learn what learn what residents really want when the library planning committee was organized you know they did i mean at least two surveys to to learn what people wanted so they could come up with a product that that did pass by maturity didn't get two-thirds but i think the task force most task forces there um the way they come up with recommendations is to learn what people want and what works you know in part and as well as what can work based on engineering and other other facts i'm just pointing out that this is so that was i'm okay with this almost across the board personally but i'm just saying that this is a precedent right yeah and that's why i said i think it should be more consistent with what we've done with good investments i'm sure tom will direct redrafted for us and so listen i'm going to volunteer since you all didn't agree to it now i'm going to volunteer i just feel i like to be respectful of other boards i think we've conducted ourselves very respectfully amongst ourselves and i think we do we've done a nice job with other boards let me just reach out one more time and the answer by next week just say this that many municipalities don't have a planning board do this by themselves and the reason is because they don't have the bandwidth right oh that's why we would have a joint group joint task force most of these task forces are created by select boards so this is not unique it's not rare and uh if the board doesn't like it that doesn't mean that this board shouldn't proceed with uh with it if if it's associated i've said last but again please one board doesn't like the idea it doesn't mean this board shouldn't pursue it if this is i didn't say we weren't going to pursue it i said i would like to just be nice i would really like to see uh select board liaison with us yeah so i think we have a little more work to do do you want me to help you with that yeah what i'll do is i'll i'll modify it based on your comment and i'll i'll pass it to you okay and you can um and i'll do my persuasive thing you didn't know what online is it is one of our objectives we do want to have some action on this we have agreed it's about a three to five year process is that what you said when we did these you have a couple years to get this done oh who knows all right um mr mccall um a couple things the assistant town manager and i'm wondering who you had in mind for a staff member staff liaison um you haven't got that far yet well just throwing it out there and then also with regard to selection responsibilities i would just throw in the caveat to the extent they aren't in conflict with procurement uh laws or any of my duties or obligations as the chief procurement officer because there are rules about delegating certain authorities and things yeah good point yeah yeah so many return we're running by calcia two yeah good good sound good you'll see okay with that yeah i mean they they can participate in processes but wherever it says you know been selected in that information that's typically good yeah good point not that i have to prove myself but i want you to see right there route 20 task force for one five i already knew it was probably gonna not too much all right so we've made some progress on that we're good um i think we can move on to i don't know what page you're on here i'm going to need help in the animal town meeting now what i wonder what we've done here is in the packet i think they're way down um look for kelsey and i've worked with galen and you know we're trying to get the town meeting thing articles in and the first group let me back up this up so we have about 25 i think we're going to have about 25 articles that we are going to submit to the warrant some of them are skipped articles and we not only submit them but consideration we know we're going to insert them so that is the first group this a and it's our article a through p these are all articles that we put in we're going we know we're going to put into the town warrant and they are standard articles the write-ups are in the packet if you've read them there were a couple um typos or wrong and i already spoke to um with jaylen earlier today and she's going to make those edits on those so if you saw anything in there that needed to be edited that will be done before they get submitted okay so what i'm looking for here is this is just an a motion to vote to submit and insert those articles a through p remove okay any further discussion okay all those in favor all right uh great that passes the second group we pull them out is these are articles that we might need they're standard articles but we don't know for sure yet because we need the information from someone usually it's the finance director so my suggestion is that we just vote to submit these so that's articles c h l m and n so moved thank you all those in favor all right thank you okay while we're on this on friday we will be having a meeting we're going to be talking about a couple items that will be new articles that we need to discuss and uh tom has a couple yeah i'll be brief um there's a need uh for the town to acquire a permanent easement from the new town room the new owner of the town center the section of boston post road and andrew avenue so that will be uh presented within the packet for our meeting on friday right and likely the second article that's related so it's it's uh less than 4 000 square feet and then the other one there's a construction easement that the town will have to give for the uh construction rail trail between sudbury and the whale mark and the other one that we're going to be discussing on friday is the pension obligation bond um i have brian kevin explain that to us it was on our packet a few weeks ago we didn't discuss it needs explaining so we're going to do that on friday morning as well what time is it set immediately starts at 10 10 30 isn't it 10 10 30. it's not 10 so i told tom it's 10 30 30. and i already told mr clinton she's 10 40.
it's all remote okay are you going to go 10 30. 90 minutes i think 90 minutes 90 minutes it's a data max 19 18. all right tell me energy report is next thank you oh great
just a couple items and i'll be brief um as many of you know we had a special election last week and the voters approved by 31 votes the question to convert the levy debt for the dpw facility into excluded debt i'm very thankful for everybody who came out and voted and for all those who supported um this suggestion that originally came from the budget working group um as you all know this provides us some additional cushion capacity in the event that the numbers don't break our way in terms of state aid or our health care numbers so we're we're hopeful at this point that we don't have to rely on this but time will tell there's a winter lights contest being sponsored by the recreation department people were allowed to make submissions uh through the rec department up until last week and as of today they should be posting out uh some of the locations to go check out home lighting displays and then you can vote on them through the rec department's webpage we will be having tom manager office hours i believe we decided on the 25th yeah i totally spaced it i i believe it has to be the 29th because um the last day of hanukkah is on the 22nd is that correct sounds right yeah so we moved it we moved it to the 20 we moved it to the 29th i want to stay yeah happy
for december holiday hours and new year's just a reminder that the town offices will be closed on thursday december 25th and january 1st uh 2026 which is a thursday as well a couple of items that just happened in the last week the several of us appeared at the weyland human rights day which was celebrated last week at coa jameel adams was the speaker um everybody uh recited the lines out of the u.n human rights declaration in various languages from the various residents in weyland who have cultural and ethnic backgrounds they read their lines out and it's a great presentation and i also want to mention the dpw has posted its snow and ice policy you can find it up on their webpage if you go to the dpw webpage on the town of weyland it's listed uh underneath their policies and speaking of the website we are still working towards um migration in a new platform to be released later this month for everybody and that's what i have madam chair thank you very much um remove the consent calendar i just want to go ahead second somebody so you do know that there is a supplemental packet and in the supplemental packet there is a revised consent calendar so the original agenda had um four items and they revised as six so just to make sure everybody knows what they're voting on i would ask that we pull out the the items that were added today okay so could you adjust your motion please as uh i'll withdraw the motion and move that we this board approve the consent calendar for the summer 15 2025 consent calendar being the amended consent calendar found in our supplemental packet items one two three and four only exactly okay any further discussion otherwise it's going to be all those in favor aye aye thank you motion passes five zero okay items number five uh five please my question pertains to each of those items uh we received an email 320 today with a 73 page supplemental packet i personally did not have an opportunity to review them i'm not comfortable voting on them unless there is an immediacy to um would you like to address that mr mcone i'm getting careful i don't know that it's a 73 page i think the first 43 was the original consent but the additional was about the um um what's that initial this sow something what do you do with fiber optic fiber optics and then number six is a gift that the talentless uh recreation has received because it's just the very last minute nature of the thing uh you know we all try to be diligent review our material it's just uh difficult to be responsible there's a little opportunity to respond and i may have told the fib here there are three items added so let's can we start with number seven would you mind if we started with number seven that that came in and it's a request from the planning board and i'm gonna have to have michael help me with this this actually is a good thing ordinarily what happens the articles come in and then once the board uh gets all the articles are packet of all the articles we look and see there are some zonings we send them back to the planning board and ask for a report the planning board is trying to do and then what happens is by the time they they post their hearing they hold the hearing and they should report opt-in it's either just before we're closing the warrant after the warrants closed or they don't make it at all so this year to be in a timely manner or more timely like they're asking for us to authorize michael as the signatory for except uh excuse me where was these things uh can we to refer the zoning articles on number five for the zoning articles for them for review you know so we would authorize him to do it all we do is receive them and review them but i would like michael to speak to this was a bit of going back and forth on this today so but i do agree with you bill i don't like late packets our state statute the select board has to refer zoning articles to the planning board so that they can conduct a public hearing and make a recommendation back we did this last year and unfortunately well i won't say unfortunately most of those were by petitioning came in late and forced the planning board to scramble to fit in the public hearings um in a timely manner so as to get reports back to the board so i think what you have here is any board is trying to be proactive and ask that this review process and the referral happen earlier but does not have come friday instead of on monday okay and is that the words which these three items to consent on friday then you're going to be there 93 minutes why don't we do that
no problem i don't i don't have a substantive issue i suspect with the material since i have i haven't read it but it's just i have i have to tell you that this year i have had in general tried to get supplemental packet time in advance this one just bounced so i do apologize because i do have control but i think if there's if we create the expectation right it's is it then uh oh you just want me right you'll be there start reading it now okay let's go to the minutes please we have the minutes from november 17 and december 1st you want to do remember 17 does anyone have any well do we have a motion number one move approval of the minutes from november 17 25. okay great does anybody have any edits is that amended that motion it is and did somebody second it second thank you now let's have discussion with the edits and the edits okay i guess there aren't any then so what about the minutes did the motion include both sets did not okay so let's take a vote on these please all those in favor of the minutes on the 17th say aye aye thank you okay i didn't intend would you want to abstain okay move approval of the second i have to finish this so five zero one go ahead your court package i'm sorry you've just packed the court you added to select
what is he saying three lawyers in the room and look what i'm doing here with approval of the minutes of december 1st 25 has amended okay any edits i think i had some in another packet but i wasn't nice okay
anybody have any edits on this one
under the discussion of the water resource thing done very bad last sentence it says it was the sense of the board to continue to consider the hybrid funding approach is that what we were doing i thought we were considering the all water rate we considered all options consider all options okay great um anybody else have anything right most in favor say aye okay correspondence yes um michael i'm going to ask you to speak on this one correspondence anybody have any comments so um we have received okay first of all i want to mention in my exciting life now i've had my town emails months and i sent out an email to 435 my nearest india was correspondence which has created a number of problems including they not only did that but somehow i seem to be missing some emails oh but so i don't know if i've responded to everybody who has written us but if i've missed one let me know because i'm a couple popped up today from last week i don't know what's going on here nonetheless um we are getting a lot of correspondence about the sherman bridge brood uh bridge repair project it's not a renovation project is that i didn't sorry nothing he hasn't heard about shannon oh you haven't heard about that i'll call you tomorrow put me on the camera for about 40 minutes um and one of the things that's coming up now that concerned me and i asked michael if he would address and i had my um um holder wrote me a little uh spiel today too is this reference to this 1971 agreement and so i'd like michael to speak to it you know on the tape and then i will be addressing for the ones with this spiel so if you don't mind michael tom holder responded to it as well today yes it really would uh uh plan is here to try and explain it on camera for those who weren't party to the the question we've received several pieces of correspondence the board and my office relative to um a letter that came out in 1991 about sherman's bridge making reference to a meeting and an agreement with residents um and the agreement being between the then select board or board of selectmen and the residents um and supposedly agreeing to a bullet list of items and so it's been raised a couple times i i believe it may have appeared at one point mr stott's fact book um and several people have shared slides uh in their correspondence to us saying we need to adhere to that and so my office uh um working with the clerks went through the archives and we went through the meeting minutes for the border selectmen and we look for anything from the road commissioners back in 1971 and 72 we found minutes that talked about the residents coming in there's a list of residents that came in and spoke and that they said that they would talk about um this and there was a question about the takings and that uh the select board said they would work to change the layout of the takings but there is no agreement memorialized anywhere in any of those minutes or in any other document nor in the taking documents themselves are there any references to these list of conditions that mr stouffer alluded to in this 1991 letter we actually located where he was living mr holder did have a conversation with him at one point and he said you won't find it because it was a a verbal agreement between the residents and the select board that they would try and adhere to this uh further we did speak with town council that said you know absent any writing in a 51 year old verbal agreement does not really bear any weight at this point in time so i had given all the meeting minutes that we found from that era that mentioned sherman's bridge i've scanned them i provided the town clerk because we did receive a public records request so they will be sent to the you know some of the people that are concerned um in that neighborhood but there is no agreement that we were able to find no actual written agreement binding agreement so i'll forget any more of those i'm going to respond accordingly to that but any anyone else have any comments of anything from the correspondence just that we uh heard from gene millburn today about exploring the idea of an updated master plan since the last one was done over 20 years ago um i'm just wondering if at some point we should have a discussion about the pros and cons of the concept i think it's on my list too it's kind of in so doug has segued into select board reports and concerns does anyone you are you having any others i know it's okay um two items i noticed in the vacancies tom board the committee said i think there are four vacancies for the human rights diversity equity and inclusion committee and i'm wondering whether that committee might want to entertain reducing the numbers of that committee i think the idea should come from them not from us but uh maybe something they want they may want to consider um number two richard turner made a comment um many many meetings ago about a flagpole at the cocc i didn't know whether where that stood probably not a good time of year now to deal with a flagpole at the cocc but that's yeah we know what's been ordered and it's just as soon as we get it there i believe mr fey has plans to get it right up because mr turner uh he makes it well known that he would like us to expedite this in a good way in a good way we like richard i do not have no okay um i have a couple here um i booked the schedule for through january it was in the packet and it's also on the web page i am working on the february schedule i'm trying to coordinate with the the chair of the finance committee because there's some things we have to do together and i don't want to book us and then end up with extra meetings and so as soon as i get that we'll give it to you um i also went to the united nations um program the the hrd i put up and which is lovely february inspiring um evening and of course there was michael reading his little thing last year he did it in german this year he did it in celtic irish i can hardly wait to see what it comes up with next year i'm doing mine in english i mean i could be spanish but like 10 other people are doing spanish so i mean this is so just want to let you know just to throw me up all the time um i did represent us last week uh saturday at the holiday stroll as well we the select board have been invited um to the america's 250 and february and i'm supposed to ask i think i thought you're going to get an invite but it's february 8th on 2026 at the village green in preemingham there's going to be a presentation um regarding the knox trail and we're going to be commemorating the 250 anniversary henry knox and his noble train of artillery so we have been asked to speak so i myself and michael will give it something to say but i'm supposed to tell you please put it on your calendars i think we're getting a plaque okay um and i think um at the moment that's more than enough so happy to move to adjourn this week at 1004 1004 thank you sorry about that all those in favor hi thank you see some of you recording stopped
and like which we will meet with the at a joint meeting with um the energy and climate committee for a discussion of the end review and uh look at the electric vehicle first policy and their proposed decarbonization roadmap for years 25 to 28 855 hopefully we will turn our attention to the 2026 annual town meeting and look at potential articles that the select board plans to intend uh submit town meetings report the consent calendar minutes of november 17 and december 1st 2025 review correspondence select board members reports and concerns there are no topics not reasonably anticipated by the chair 48 hours in advance and at approximately 9 30 we will adjourn so having said all that is there are other any announcements from the board no um i do have two announcements one is that we obviously were concerned um very much so about the the audio that was not as effective it should be at the last meeting and also miscommunication on them because we have gone into an executive session that the about the timing of the farm we apologize for any missed communications and we are going to take steps to be sure that we are more clearly um communicate the timings of the forums i believe we have also taken some measures this week uh worked with i.t and the town manager's office have worked diligently to see if we can improve the audio in this room so hopefully i'll get a lot more calls this week saying they could hear me so all right um we also are going to as part of our annual town meeting calendar on january 5th which is the first monday in january and approximately 7 45 we will be holding a petitioner's article workshop this will be advertised um in the newsletter and um to our other channels but want to announce it here as well so all right now anybody have any public comment
fresh investments 155 main street um i was one b or one who uh wrote in about um audio i understand that you've worked with uh wacom and trying to improve that i also um just learned that part of the problem is is maybe some of the heating in the building that there's one unit and it's really loud even just listening it was hard to hear so i guess my request would be that you know i understand that you're working on both the way cam and the audio in here and that sound and that gets resolved if it would be possible to meetings back to the old council of agent um room so that you know public can hear and participate it's just really difficult to hear in here thank you thank you thank you a public comment on online yes please gene i recognize you thank you can you hear me yes great i'm gene milburn i live at 281 concord road and i'm um hoping to speak to you about master planning uh and it i it's the end of the year it's the time to think about what we're going to tackle in the coming year and our master plan is now 21 years old here in wayland uh early in my residency here i served on a committee that did a five-year review of the wayland master plan and at that time we found it to be an excellent document and uh urged the select board at that time to implement more of the things that had been in the master plan but now it's very old and uh you have all worked in planning roles all your life you know how important it is to have a guidance document uh and the discussion that produces a guidance document brings in the entire community to try to achieve some level of consensus about the direction that one wants to go uh and i urge you to undertake it in 2026. thank you thank you any um ellen does ellen has her hand raised yes okay ellen tone yes hi ellen i i recognize you hey carol uh and crew ellen tone five fields lane and chair of the energy and climate committee i'm not a panelist for that part of the discussion so just wanted to relay the energy and climate committee voted at our last meeting just last week to support um the revised zero energy vehicle policy and the decarbonization roadmap as presented by julie in your packet you will discuss and it's a huge opportunity for us to approve those to be eligible for state capital funds up to as you know over a million dollars which will desperately needed to help us improve our facilities these two policies should not add annual significant annual operating costs and the the planning document the decarbonization roadmap actually has no real commitments in it it's just a plan of how we might proceed so i will join you at eight i'm not a panelist but should any questions come up that uh for some reason julie or mike can't answer i would be available thank you ellen um sure dave i recognize you on mute um dave bernstein 25 please in lane uh i have a suggestion regarding the uh decarbonization roadmap we'll be discussing later and that is uh to pilot the use of electric electric school buses uh school buses electric school buses don't have a tailpipe that exhaust diesel combustion byproducts into the air they don't drip pollutants onto the ground from their engine and therefore can be parked near environmentally sensitive areas they have silent engines that don't require a warm-up and thus can be parked near residential areas and the best part is they're available from first student which provides wayland school buses so i strongly suggest that you start a pilot program with first student maybe evaluate three to five school buses with a temporary charger and see how they do um shouldn't be a whole lot of money and would save a whole lot of pollution thank you thank you um which like marjorie lee marjorie i recognize you uh marjorie lee 14 brooks road and i am also calling um about the zero emissions uh vehicle first policy and decarbonization road map um i did send a letter to you all uh which was acknowledged by uh chair carol martin um explaining why this would be really advantageous to wayland financially and also in addressing climate change um what i didn't mention is that as of may 2nd of this year there were uh 19 cities and towns um that had applied for uh being in climate leader communities um and they applied for and met the requirements and several of them are nearby communities um certified communities um certified communities now include um actin carlisle um nadick wellesley uh stow um in addition cambridge in addition to um the in all there are 19 of these uh climate leader communities um so uh they're all eligible as as ellen said for grants of up to 1.15 million dollars for projects each for projects that reduce municipal emissions and for technical uh support ahead of those projects um so i can't see any reason why we shouldn't do this and um i hope you will um expedite this because time is of the essence thank you thank you um looks like mr delman michael i recognize you
great thank you very much uh carol and the board um michael delman 192 stonebridge road wayland obviously and um but just on a similar vein but maybe another point here um this is an increasingly competitive pool when we apply for these funds these uh the decarbonization plan and the ev first policy so my wife often jokes if she lives long enough she'll win the senior olympics in skating because there just won't be anyone else left to compete against her this is exact opposite uh phenomenon where if we wait long enough we absolutely will not get the funds if we act early we're in the early group to even be aware of the opportunity so i say strike uh strike now while the iron's hot and and uh let's go wayland thank you thank you michael are you all set robbie um i've had some other people come in the room and before i close public comment is there anyone who wants to speak to public comment yes hey that was what the slang was for i was being subtle i recognize miss plum uh carol plum bob record um having looked at the slides for the edc presentation and my first comment was how does this fit into a town-wide master plan and that you know we're a high capital high labor organization 120 million dollars and you need to have long-term planning to keep it going and i guess i'm just um see all the committees i watch that are stuck trying to prioritize how to put in their capital because we can't actually say gee where this is where we're moving the town building should we put more money into the roof or should we put more money into that and should we where should we move the schools should we move schools and i guess um i would really like to have seen the select board sit down with a map of wayland a list of the properties and things people want to do and their limitations and pin down some plausible scenarios for how we're going to cover everything and to do that perhaps before we go off and try to do more projects considering we have still something probably less than 125 open capital projects before we move on to something else um we have left employees in decrepit um conditions at the old dpw and then at the fire station too and then we finally get out the coa and now we still have the town building to go and if you aren't pushing your own children into being municipal government service you might want to think about how you want to give them a decent place to work so we can hire competent people because people aren't going into government now right it's not a a sexy position or whatever you want to call it or maybe profitable um so we don't have enough land for the town and i think if we spent more time figuring out what we're going to do with town building and where the land is going to come for both the school and for the town we'd be better off than moving on to more new projects um i guess the other thing i would point out is that um sewer and septic should be our top infrastructure problems because the um wastewater facility at town center was built without having sufficient permit to i put water out in the 2012 whalen high school wastewater committee we start wastewater treatment plant um you know worked for two years and died that's not helpful so you can't activate or leverage anything if the fulcrum of the infrastructure which is your septic can't carry the load and until that problem is solved all the rest are certainly not worth prioritizing they're definitely there and they need to be addressed but they're not the biggest thing so um i just wanted to wrap it up on the page so um i want to point out ebc has already spent 95 000 on the beta's route 20 corridor without counting staff time and uh the way finding and it feels like we're still chasing the route 20 revenue pipe dream that we never ever do so i guess i'm just asking you until the open capital list is winnowed down and that we've got scenarios that you've brought to the whole town saying this is what we all want to do and we all kind of agree to it and we all have prioritized these are the things we're doing please do not give on to new things okay thank you appreciate right i'm now going to assume that we are all set on public comment and close public comment thank you everybody second mike okay i'm moving that the select board enters the executive session a pursuant to massachusetts general laws chapter 30 a section 21 a3 to discuss strategy with respect to the real and firefighters local 1978 grievance number 2025 dash 0002 step three is there a second to the motion to enter into executive session second thank you the chair declares that a public discussion of these matters may have a detrimental effect on the litigating negotiating or bargaining position of the town we'll take a roll call vote ian yeah tom yes yes yes yes yes and carol yes so it's five zero the chair invites attendance by michael mccall town manager kelsey powers for lab assistant talent manager kate ryan human resource director and dave jenkins town council kp law the committee will rejoin the public meeting in from executive session and we anticipate we will return to open session approximately 10 minutes thank you the select board is back in open session at 6 32 pm thank you so now um we're going to interview mr williams i see mr williams is there so can we take him off mute who's offering you hello how are you good how are you good thank you you've applied for a position on the personnel board would you like to just briefly tell the board uh we've read your materials would you like to you know kind of give us some overview as to what's your motivation to apply with really you've applied yeah yeah no sure so i'm a wayland resident of seven years now and uh ever since moving here i was hoping to participate in some capacity um wherever it would be uh within the town and for me with my background in hr and recruiting when i saw this opportunity it just felt like it was one of those chances for me to to put my step uh my best foot forward and hopefully uh bring some of my expertise to support the board in the town uh which this position seems like it involves is a lot of that from the human resources standpoint thank you um for our processes the board members will each have an opportunity to ask you a question and then we'll take a vote sure who would like to start mr fay does not have any questions for you uh nor do i just want to thank you uh for your willingness to step forward um i see that you spent some time at uh simpson gumpert's and uh wondered if uh based on forensic engineering work that is done there if you uh can apply those skills to uh the personal process here i can't do the work but i can help with uh helping to recruit for anyone that needs to do the work uh but no i had a great experience there for five years really good people actually couple residents here in wayland that are employees there but i could take whatever skills i gained from leading their talent acquisition team to help wayland just can't do the hands-on work sounds good thank you thank you mr levine um dave i just wanted to also echo my gratitude for stepping forward we have a good number of boards and committees in this town and we're powered by a lot of volunteers so always grateful when people especially who have relevant experience come forward so thank you especially uh yeah i just wanted to echo the same thing one thing i would say is that um there is some some modifications being done to some of the policies to update it um due to the town manager app so you got some work ahead again it's good work so thank you for uh being willing to uh volunteer definitely and i also want to thank you um your experience dovetails with as ann has mentioned number of the initiatives that the personnel board is undertaking at the time so i think your timing is is excellent so appreciate it very much um unless you have anything else to add i'm going to ask for a motion here so may i have a motion please i move that we appoint dave williams to the personnel board for a term ending june 30th 2028 second thank you um all those in favor say aye aye motion carries 5-0 thank you and doug's going to give you a little explanation now here um dave in order to be uh an official member of the personnel board um you'll need to swear in at the town clerk's office but you should receive a letter in the coming days from the town manager's office with specific information and then you'll go you'll come into town building see the town clerk and make it official okay thank you outstanding i'm happy to help and look forward to working with you thank you
thank you everyone take care so now we're going to there's a candidate for the economic development committee and would you like to step forward sir thank you for coming in person i appreciate it so much for your time thank you um would you like to introduce yourself and as you see how fast these interviews are so right in depth my name is soydan alihan polat i'm a wayland resident with my family since 2024 summer i am an urban planner and an architect by training and i work in academia and i have my own consulting business and i work with a lot of community boards and organizations predominantly in new york city and also upstate communities around new york and long island so the reason i wanted to be part of this is i have three young kids we're here to stay we love wayland and since i do this professionally i want some some input on the community and i want to be able to part of that um and i believe i have good skills on urban planning um urban resource management and um master planning as well so i i i have strong confidence that i would be a good asset okay so i'm going to open it to questions from the voice star and miss bransley uh i didn't have any uh questions i just wanted to thank you for being arrested yeah thank you i consider one of the most important committees in my life thank you so much so levine uh sure thank you for stepping forward um so i think it's an exciting time to join the economic development committee i think that we're on the cusp of some exciting changes potentially in the next 12 plus months um but my question for you especially as somebody with a background as an urban planner is you've been here for a little while now what do you see as some of the challenges for the commercial side of town to be able to flourish thank you so much well one of the things that actually got my attention um for the last year and a half is lack of pedestrian activity for the commercial activity i mean it's very car centric community it's understandable our zoning laws and planning criteria for the past decades always was on the side of car centric and now we're having hard time switching it back um so that's definitely one of the um most important things and then the other thing is variety uh especially looking at um the 20 corridor we have a lot of kind of post-industrial commercial so hard to define if they're actually commercial or light industrial manufacturing i think you know maybe we develop some distinction and try to revitalize without letting them go so people can adapt you know things change in retail things changing commercial i mean after the pandemic we have completely a new set of roof or the retail activity right so uh i would say we plan ahead to make sure that um we have an active retail commercial availability for residents and it would help the economic development for sure for the time thank you okay thank you you have a very impressive background mr palat um i i wonder if you had considered joining uh the design review advisory board uh as an architect i think there are two vacancies one for i think uh a landscape architect and another for someone with a design background but is that something you've given any thought to um i didn't but maybe in future i can sure great and uh also i noticed you have particularly strong background in zoning correct i wonder if you would uh have the ability to to work with uh our planning board as uh uh proposals are developed uh as you know i think the responsibility for actually drafting zoning resides with the planning board but i think it could be very helpful in working with them absolutely yes and if you'd like to leave your job and work on multiple boards
i think the tricky part is not the job but i have three kids so i'm going to be honest yeah they're all young but i would love to put more input as you know as you see necessary you know we laugh but doug is so right you start out one spot and then you find others that have interest to you as well tom thank you mr paul for submitting your name and uh as doug mentioned we're in a time where we're looking at change positive change to make this town more vibrant more successful more successful commercially we're going to be discussing both charge for the task force to look at route 20 and uh it seems to be a background is ideal for that uh that task force if this were established but thanks very much for stepping up and uh as bill whitney said your resume is extraordinary thank you so much thank you very much for replying let's wait about going last as everyone's already asked you questions all i have to say is thank you we appreciate it welcome to weyland as well and may i have a motion please i moved that the board appoint alahan polat to a term on the economic development committee ending june 30th 2027. you have a second thank you all those in favor say aye aye great thank you and you may have heard the spew but would you like to say it again sure a quick quick version um you will receive some information from the town manager's office in the coming days and we'll direct you to come back to town building to the town clerk's office to take the oath and swear in and she'll give you some information also about conflict of interest training that you'll need to complete thank you all right welcome aboard thank you thank you for your time thank you all right and i'm going to have a motion um a number item six is to confirm the appointment of phyllis dean milburn for retirement in june 30 2027 to the conservation commission and the excuse me the appointing board is a conservation commission to the whale and housing partnership in june 30 2027. thank you thank you oh hello is in favor all right okay motion passes five zero great so now you know only seven minutes
excuse me they gave me this tonight it's a bad idea okay i'd like to invite um becky stanisi to join us please we're going to have another 25 30 minute discussion with the economic development committee um we wanted to talk about briefly michael we could give a quick update on the town center amenity project that the committee brought before us in august we said we would um reach out to the new owners i think that they just got here so it's not too much of an update but i did want to put that on the agenda um so i think um the committee has some slides with the finance committee some overview thoughts and some directions where we might go next year so we want to have a quick look at those and then allow the um the board to ask some questions would be great um i did have on here the annual review of the charge but i think you want to come back the beginning of february i'm going to defer that till then so we can have a look see it up then so part of it is to review the income presentation then we'll talk about the goals a little bit but we'll be coming back we'll explain that coming back like you asked this is actually a joint meeting so i'd like to bring up the rest of the meetings everybody can come up i've only going to have one speak because you only it's fine okay thank you so technically you have to call a meeting to order you called your meeting to order yeah so we'll call our meeting to order now it is we don't know the clock in here it's 44. it's 44. we will call the meeting of edc to order we have four people in person at least not quite yet right i don't know if we probably can you tell if there is uh jeff becky
attendee no he wasn't able to make it okay okay you want to be the whole preamble i don't know you do have to say uh present in the room with us is present in the room is karen kelly myself rebecca stanizzi katie harris and david galari perfect thank you so can i plug in robbie can i have a uh cord to be able to get to the screen you can't do you have to you have to either email it to him or have him on flash drive and then he can put it up on the screen or alternatively you can join the meeting at like zoom meeting and then we'll update oh well yeah okay so copy the slides under in our packet and they start on page 18 for those who are following along either in the room or elsewhere these are the slides that the economic development committee presented to the finance committee on november 17th and we're going to go through them much more quickly than
than the 45-minute presentation that they did for the finance committee and i'm looking at mr whitley was going to love that idea 45 minutes wants to see it again oh there is oh yeah like the fourth quarter all right ready can you raise me as a
am i able to share my beautiful yeah okay i think when i do this i'm not able to slideshow but
let me see if i can do a slideshow does rick have a microphone down there because i'm not hearing it that well well that doesn't amplify in the room okay it just picks it up for people online okay
it doesn't oh it does okay good all right um so in the first hour of this meeting we said we'd go on turbo overdrive so you had the slides ahead of time we met with robbie can you move the there you go thank you so we met with the fincom and with them we walked them through the slide presentation a lot of this was news to them you guys have heard a lot of this already um we literally walked through it and it was almost 45 minutes to an hour so we're just going to zip through it mostly to present ideas we are going to be meeting again with the fincom on january 5th and then discussing through i don't know if that meeting or a substitute one to come to the select board with a recommendation but we wanted to just present some of the topics because this is sort of this is a menu of options right if we don't have a recommendation right now that slide is who what where and how how are we going to do this this is what we're going to figure out but given that we are one of the slowest growing towns in the commonwealth and we have a huge budget prices facing us ahead here are some potential ideas to be able to grow in different ways so this is the most depressing slide we realize commercial tax base is only 2.8 percent of our entire tax base i think when we started edc we were like four to five percent it's progressively shrunk just because our residential values have skyrocketed and our commercial really hasn't so it just keeps getting smaller so we have to think about things differently um three different things one is alta oxbow which you guys are all very aware of this huge amount of benefits across the board both cash and then also being able to get affordable housing hitting 20 affordability etc but from the fincom's perspective it really is what about the dollars right so from the fincom's point of view we permitted the land we sold it um ultimately we then also got a building permit fee we got over four million dollars in massworks funds we did spend some money remember we got funds way back in 2012 um to due diligence there were some legal costs these are sort of again this is like ballpark to get a general sense of what it is so from the land itself because we owned it we were able to get these benefits and then the big one is the annual tax benefits going forward so it's the 1.1 million dollars every year as a fiscal year 24 if you put down a cash flow stream or if you floated a bond on that that's in the 20s in terms of million dollars so it's you know 40 million all from 80 acres of underutilized land the key this year alta oxbow just sold for 98.4 million they should be reassessed their draft recommendation assessment is 98 million typically when a building sells it always gets reassessed typically it's not always up to the sale value would not be surprised if they came back and asked for a little bit of a haircut but we should watch this really carefully and i don't know who does the tax abatement applications but making sure it should be in you know sort of the 80 million range or no plus yeah because you just don't for some reason and i show the fiscal year 24 we were at 72 million dollars it dropped back down in the 60s for fiscal year 25 i don't know why it shouldn't have because it just sold for 98 million so we need to be sure that we get all the value second and this always this surprise the fincom surprises a lot of people our commercial districts typically you look to a commercial district to get a lot of tax revenues and it doesn't really cost you a whole lot as a town we have townhomes and they have a lot of the attributes that commercial districts typically have high assessment values efficient land use digestible density high value per acre low town cost when townhomes is primarily retirees there are some school kids but not a lot so it's pretty amazing when you look at it our entire commercial tax base is 160 million dollars alta oxbow was 73 so with one residential project we created the equivalent of half our entire commercial tax base but when you look at the townhomes townhomes this is mainstone this is uh river trope place this is wayland commons this is willow band our willowbrook they're three and a half times our commercial tax base all hidden away tastefully done not huge density this is not alta oxbow we are very good as a community of building really expensive towns and they're beautiful river trail place are going for a million too they're assessed at a million apiece so when you look at it overall it's huge tax benefits and when you look at purely town center town center the commercial side alone is assessed at 43 million dollars which that's probably going to go down because their sale price was less than that river trail place alone on six acres instead of 21 acres is worth that same amount and then you put in whalen commons which is the other condominiums like beyond stop and shop along 126 it's almost double so it's a really efficient way to create value without necessarily going all the way to an alta oxbow level um so that's a question of how could we use this tool so right now we have conservation cluster development it's very difficult it's special permit you have to jump through all kinds of hoops etc etc there's a reason why the state has done adus and nbta is as of right because things get done right but if you draft it properly that you have the setbacks and the citing and all the things you're typically looking for in a special permit if you bake it in then you can make these a lot more palatable um to people that live thereby so it's a question how can we streamline because right now our permitting process is very unwieldy
so third big topic and these again just three big topics one is all to oxbow as a lesson then you have uh townhomes and then nbta communities this is what was approved so it's 50 acres to get to basically 750 units doing the math we're actually above it um there's more units at town center if you do the math than i can we all anticipated but basically we're supposed to get to 750 units we're about at 904. there's value here right so to the left is the approved zoning if you try to tie in again just relative values but if you take alta oxbow average units about 334 000 a unit we have roughly in the mbta communities about 300 million dollars if it were all built out right annual tax revenues that's in the range of four to five million dollars every year but part of this is what's already been built is right now alta oxbow has already been built it's already on our books so you kind of have to pull that one off and the other ones colt's way at mainstone it's a theoretical district we know it's a paper district you're never really going to build it you know you would never tear down all the condominiums just to do a high density apartment build so that's really theoretical and then i'll play town center as a funky deed restriction we need to either figure that out or that zoning is also worthless to us so we're losing out on 2.9 million dollars of potential um tax revenues so we need to look at that as a potential tool so this is just overview so then we get into commercial districts these are sort of medium impact right still important the commercial districts you know like rue 20 center hasn't worked in a long time town center hasn't worked to its ultimate participation or its ultimate uh ultimate potential but say that we look at our commercial districts and we add 25 density that's a lot like we're never going to completely double our commercial districts we don't have the sewer for it we don't have the capacities for it but if you added like 25 that might be a milestone that we reach for if you think we have a lot of empty parking lots if you think about it we have very high parking requirements which everyone always knows it's too high if you drag it back a little bit then you could get some infill and potentially get 25 more as a goal um the self storage idea was one site with nothing on it right now really kind of slingshotting and trying to get to that but it might be more palatable that you can get it 25 incremental um across the districts and then it's adding value to the districts the districts we have how do we make them better how do we make them more appealing more valuable um so there's a lot of different ways that you could do that so with that you know commercial districts and we'll talk about new revenues and creation of value a little bit but putting it in perspective kind of high medium and low high impact are a lot of those big three we talked about right so just revisiting mbta community zoning could get you potentially 2.9 million just and this is just kind of order of magnitude to get a sense the interesting thing townhomes if we encouraged 350 unit townhome pods this is not a massive mainstone exercise but literally taking six seven acre parcel with some setbacks you could actually get pretty much the same impact from three townhouse developments modestly sized it's really interesting so both of those are ways that you could get significant tax revenues each year over time and also there's been suggested potentially using town run like we used um the alta oxbow site something was singing um using orchard lane it's 13 acres it's under the purview of the schools it's too small for a school just sitting there do we potentially do something there similar to alta oxbow put the permitting in place we control what gets built there and then we ultimately get the land value and we're able to establish a long-term task revenue stream so these are high impact medium impact is really more of the commercial districts right even if we added 25 density of commercial districts it's really only about 625 000 a year so if you add it to the density and you add it to the value if you did it together very robust and you're like working it out those commercial districts getting to be more productive it's still like a million two together if you were able to do both right and part of it too adding the value to the commercial districts that actually boost the home values as well which is great right but then it basically kind of shoulders the that value on top of the residential it's shared across the same party of users so if anything it might actually skew it in a different direction it's kind of interesting so it's that's a median impact should we ignore it no is it a tool in the toolbox yes low impact um meals tax right now we have about 300 000 a year with new meals tax coming online 2026 terrain duncan townhouse those are three new that we are not collecting any revenues right now that might be 50 60 70 000 for 2027 a lot of communities use those short funds targeted for signage for business grants for helping commercial districts something to think about so it's it's not that it's suddenly going to make a difference in overall budget but it could absolutely make a difference in how our commercial districts look and feel same thing we do not have a wounds tax right now airbnb brbo's there are some in weyland taxes can be up to six percent it adds up but they're not allowed they're not allowed well oh really oh there you go oh interesting all right so if they were then you get short dollars and you know again it's not going to suddenly adopt the excise tax on them so it might be a little bit of money again it's going to be a drop in the bucket but if it can be focused be quite interesting and then the indirect impact is looking at things a little bit differently in three different ways how do we build smarter consider not building because when we build a town it is so expensive how do we help offset costs when we want to do something if we wanted to do a new town building how do we craft it together with different uses and pieces and growth so that it basically pays for itself or helps offset a lot of the costs and how do we find creative solutions so again these are sort of outside the box thinking it's working with whether it's capital improvements committee select board whatever but it's kind of just rethinking of you know town offices if we were to build we spend at coacc a thousand bucks a foot if we're building 30 000 square feet for new offices that's 30 million dollars that's a huge price tag right that's why 14 west plain was really interesting and i know it was tough time etc but when you can get land and building for 283 bucks a foot that's huge the schools if you're building new at seven to 800 bucks a foot lexington just proved theirs at fifteen hundred dollars a foot but with elementary schools they're typically simpler they don't have the lab spaces all the tricky stuff of high schools do we refurbish what we have is there a way to do that and reuse some of those functional spaces and just like everybody's home you have a home that grows over time affordable housing we should absolutely zone and not build we should not own or build because it costs us four or five hundred thousand dollars to do that if we just zone just like we did at alta oxville we get 55 units and it didn't cost us a dime so how do we offset costs next playing field carve off a little extra piece of land do some townhomes that would pay for the playing field and the ongoing tax revenues would pay for the maintenance do we you know new town offices how do you wrap together some kind of clever solution creating value at the same time as you're spending money and creative solutions trying to talk about the proposed playground at town green public private fundraising the proposed sports center we don't build it do a public private the town pool was similar to that it used some cpa funds but essentially has been standalone you could even be creating teacher affordable housing there's a lot of different ways that you could work together to have the private sector either contributions or helping the market having the market help get those things that we would like to do as a town so it's all about these are all a bunch of different pieces and parts who what where when and how do we want to do this so that we can figure it out and what we're trying to do is we can look at our tax curve and our tax curve with no growth goes like this your tax rate is going to go like that so if we had low growth medium high growth looking at that what's the acceptable level of taxation and what's the acceptable level of growth it's trying to figure that out because if we do nothing we're going to we know we're going to end up we can all look at those trajectories and they're tough so it's really a question of what makes reasonable sense so part of that we're going to try to put it in context with the fincom get their input because they're always looking at it from the other side and come back to you guys with a recommendation but in as much as you have thoughts definitely send them to us so as we're kind of perking through with the fincom um we're happy to do that we'd love to come back probably in february if we had to guess so i'm getting on the agenda now um but yeah we'd love to come back with you made a reservation already
thank you so that just gives a broad brush overview what we're actually doing see is it switching now it's not switching this year again so i'm going to open it up to push into to the board yeah go ahead if you want to anybody want to start on that discussion here other questions should becky during public comment yes comment was made that before our board explores development such as this that we should complete a new master plan uh do you agree with that and if if not why not um well the master plan basically is a guiding document but when's the last time you looked at the master plan it's done 20 years ago i mean ultimately one of the few things that came out of that as evc was created it was one of the recommendations but there was no zoning there was no you know long-term growth it was really kind of how do we want to look in fields of town it's a piece but it's not really the guiding document should we do it i had seen gene milburn she had put together this really compelling we should we should revisit it but we've seen all the financial picture we know what's out there right do we want to have root 20 looking exactly the way it looks for the next 10 years or the next three or four years while we do a master plan probably not like there are certain things that you would do um can they run in parallel absolutely would you wait until it's completely done no no good advice not just because we are in the usual straits right now we need to figure out how we want to grow and we have some good opportunities that are coming up thank you um i think one of the only comments i had i looked at this um when when it was in our packet and then quickly then before the meeting and then just now and i think i see the same thing every time because
so much of this is dependent on the owners of these projects themselves so wouldn't it make more sense threats to just work with them to figure out what they're willing to do and then kind of accommodate versus maybe trying to put a master plan that is so reliant on other owners and i only say that because i know some like when i look at this the most realistic stuff i see are the ones where we're not the developers right we're just trying to assist already existing groups so from a prioritization standpoint i feel like that's what we should be doing and not necessarily so like the feedback on the master plan after reading this i was like we should not be doing the master plan because the reality is that there's there's a very strong partnership that we essentially need with all these developers so we kind of need their buy-in to really have a feasible master plan that's a lot of outside feedback but i think it aligns with kind of what i see you i see your brain in here yeah all of it it's like the master plan itself somebody we one of the issues we've talked about is given terrain and given like the green quarter room 20 that is a long-term plan but if we create this identity as a green quarter that could completely that's like a master plan thing right that's not something we're going to institute tomorrow but that is really getting the buy-in from some of these tenants etc that's how we grow in a long term right and so again they sort of work in parallel but to your point i mean we can put all the zoning in the world like we just did the pre-order pickup window right hasn't been used yet is it a tool could it be useful we're not the private property owner so some of the things we want to do and people may or may not do it like one of the things we recommended is people and we heard very strongly from the polling people like the village standard they want to have signage that's more subtle they want to have more tasteful things happening in that root 20 quarter you could write some very simple things into zoning and we actually wrote those into the pre-order pickup window if you exercise that you had to do those we should just write those into zoning make it easy don't bait and switch people and people will see i think you're going to see terrain getting done duncan getting done some of these other property owners like oh wow it's starting to look good maybe i'll put some money in my property if those rules aren't in place they don't know any better they'll just do they want to do something that looks like a village design or they'll have a sign that's 15 feet tall type because that's what it's allowed right now like some of the things we should do so those those guideposts are there for the private property owners as it you know the bigger like root 20 master plan we'll talk about the task force in a second that is really that task force is really about working with some of the property owners and figuring out if you added density in certain places how would you do that so this you know this whole recommendation of the fincom really that's a longer term thing everything in that fincom is what could we be doing from you know the townhome zoning how do we deal with you know just these very simple things with the with the um design criteria things like that things that are doable but the a master planning process will take longer and you'll want that buy-in from some of these property owners because otherwise you know some of them are motivated and some we've met some that just will never do anything right some but some are the fastest way i see is getting money in the most um efficient way possible is to help fast track the fast track terrain train when it's done is not going to add a whole lot to the tax base it's already being taxed at whole foods so it was fresh market at full market rates they're actually taking out square footage right so we're going to get some meals tax but it's not like we're starting from nothing and getting terrain some license yeah but it's not it's not going to move that needle really you need to add you know part of it is increasing the value over time that activity will help other property owners right but that'll take time and what do you think is the fastest that's what we want to talk with income about and talk through with them and see what some of those things are so time is absolutely one of those things thank you for saying the word time and for example though we we have with the edc and even independently worked with some of the owners for example we worked closely with zurich when they were here on the town center and there was just things external barriers to us getting that moving that 1.6 million dollars which would be huge you know if we could get the mvta in time there so um a lot of times we're willing we sit down and talk with these folks for those circle member friends and say a lot of it is determined by the owner of the property and how willing they are to uh move some of these things forward okay so if anyone wants to speaks and one of the last two board members to speak first so um i haven't been on edc for some time but almost 10 years but i do remember i think we had somebody come in and sit down and meet with us back then who was an economic development director because i stopped you cited that ashland had done that i don't remember if it was ashland yeah so it it begs the question from me have you guys reached out to other colleagues and other edcs or spoken with folks in ashland just for some of their best practices as we're tackling some of this because i feel like others have gone before yeah so part of that is in the economic development bond bill we got awarded a thousand dollars for an economic development director the sad thing is in in town government it kind of falls between the cracks it's not necessarily a town planner because it's part of how do you get a business going how do you help that business how do you encourage people to come to town it's hard to talk with the brokers who are all over the place you kind of need that centralized point and they can suddenly make things happen because they can pull the different town parties together we do that somewhat but you really do need that to be a person inside and that's what axland found and they did some really interesting things right so it's kind of that one person in town building with that is their responsibility so you see that as a prototype and it's often with meals tax they set that aside and they have that pay for that person because then it can again slick slingshot that effect so there are a ton of different things that could be done some of them you know are bigger communities and it's a grant program and there's a lot of different things that you can do we're a smaller commercial tax base we're smaller and what we can do but we could absolutely you know if we had an extra fifty thousand dollars a year from the meals tax to encourage some of these businesses to upgrade their signs help them out like pay for 25 percent of it to get them to pay the other 75 that would make a huge difference right so there are a lot of programs and there's a ton of stuff the more urban you get the more resources you have so our hands are tied a little bit but ashland i think is a great example although i have heard that they cut theirs back i don't know when budget times get tight they're like well look there's yeah so but that's something we definitely want to look at did you want to hop back sure well i just want to thank the edc for their work on this uh you know to ann's point about the fastest thing out of the box i completely agree that additional multi-family residential would be great for enhancing the tax base following the model of the alt l expo we do have this uh large parcel at uh holiday road um we have an upcoming annual town meeting uh if we were to uh seek uh transfer of that property from the school committee uh we would need a two-thirds vote from the town meeting it might also be appropriate to put in some money to do some site planning uh so as to uh then inform zoning uh that could signal the development community as was done at all times so i think that's a particular priority to michael's point you know unfortunately we weren't able to elicit the cooperation of raytheon about the town's standard property but uh this is uh property that's within the town's ownership and the school community control and if we want to do something with it go ahead mike one other thing i think we also have to think about it's also the it's kind of infrastructure because if we're referring in certain properties in multi-family in certain areas we are challenged by our wastewater here especially with our all the wetlands around us so that's another consideration that we need to think about if we want to attract more of these types of developments we're going to have to make plans for that so um i find this fascinating i hardly ever have time getting my word in and here i am let me in i appreciate everything i have done i actually have some questions um but i we want we have people waiting for us as i had told you why but i do want to give you one minute after i speak to treat to this and also this has to be sent to abby warren and the town union's office because it's dark and we'll have upload it to our packet so that it's available to the public um i am going to um say one thing you know i love your ideas but sometimes i'm not as much especially in love with your numbers and i ask you to go back and look at i think it's the second slide that shows me on the um alter oxborough i think it was river's edge i'll tell you financial view it shows the sale of the property it shows the building permits but does not show any of the costs that we had for the cleanup there which is the six million so i think that has to be you have to might want to adjust that slide slightly and the and i do want to also say that to the committee in general every time there's some tax thought everyone says okay we'll take that and we'll put this in the special fund we currently take every dime of meals tax and a lot of these other things and they're called local receipts and they are an offset to our taxes so if we move 50 or 25 or 92 to a special fund we have to then tax people to make that up there is not 50 or 92 sitting there in a fund waiting to be tapped for it as you as you progress and think about your your proposal for us so great work as usual did you want to take two minutes to tell us about this thank you everybody and i would say with the meals tax we know that anything that's there you wouldn't want to give up it's the new stuff that's coming in so it's still it's earmarked trust me and ultimately with the six million dollar in cost so overall the land value was 8.7 million the developer paid about six million dollars in cost and environmental next that too the next one there's no offset there just showing all profit anyway i don't yeah yeah it's just cash and cleanup right because we would have had to pay that six million dollars so i'm just saying check that slide before it becomes a public thing two minutes okay finish up thank you so yeah so we will go to
this there we go so to the left hand side just quick updates of where we are so the growth options we just talked about we're working with fincom we'll want to come back route 20 super exciting things going on so between the new tenants coming in between duncan that's coming in and also townhouse just got approved um but also new ownership huge at town center so we've met with jesse a couple times who came to edc last friday i think they're going to be great amazing so excited so route 20 task force i saw is on your agenda and i did see the draft um it was funny we went back and looked route 20 master plan has been on our agenda at edc since the beginning of 2020 and we were talking about it even before then um curb cuts and sidewalks we tried to get mass works funds back in 2012. sarki and i tried it twice we weren't able to do it because they wanted to see residential tied to it but there are some things that have been perking for a long time the route 20 task force would be huge advocates of for focus and targeting and getting things done the charge sounds like we haven't done any master planning yet there's been some done but we will be getting money from the state so we want to be ready when it does come in and then be able to take those little small steps in between until we do that so it sounded like almost like it was new planning but it's basically taking what's done and going that little step forward so we're huge advocates of that so we would absolutely recommend that um communication has been huge so you remember last year we did the polling over 1500 people submitted now over 1700 people on that list we use that to communicate we sent up the email blast once we heard about refito as a new owner um people we got tens of emails back to us saying thank you for telling us going up we're so happy to hear that this stuff is happening um so there's really good interface with the public and so we'd like to look ahead to spring and have another poll kind of like we did last year we worked with tom and we had worked with michael mccall it might be with uh the town center owners as they kind of look through what they're doing it might be the task force but spring is a good time because if we need anything at town meeting means we think about it over the summer get it to you guys in october for next you know it's like spring is a good time when everybody's focusing kind of coming out of their cocoon so we look ahead and do that we did just want to check in with you guys that was sort of the the mandate to check in as we're doing things the town green playground we wanted to basically get the green light to be able to work with catherine uh catherine brennett and recreation we talked with her a little clearly she's sort of the one who would be front and center in that but just want to make sure that we're able to work with her talk with her we need quick check-ins on the environmental and we also just want to know maintenance costs the playground it's not just the initial cost it's also the maintenance and then confirming land use requirements you know if we put a playground there is there a town meeting vote i don't think so but it's just thinking through all those zoning etc so we'd like to work with catherine and then have quick check-ins on environmental maintenance and land use requirements just so we can keep that along we did ask jesse at graffito we were baldly apparent about it and asked if he'd be willing to basically write a check they're not willing to write a check to do it but i think that they'll participate so i think that we just need to start putting those boundaries around it and figuring out that solution so we just need to do those things which means working a little bit with town staff but we want to be really everybody is super busy um shared streets grant implementation this is not really an ask but putting it on your guys's radar remember we have the shared streets grant graffito would really like to do it we have to get it through procurement again because we're out of time we have to redo it but would love to try to get it this summer so there will probably be a shared use agreement which a draft was done before anything that comes in front of you guys if you can kind of perk it and make it happen then hopefully we can get that shared streets furniture on elissa avenue to happen this summer so we'll kind of have to focus and do that route 20 cleanup so we um this is really a thing that katie is spearheaded in the route 20 quarter we have a lot of signage violations whether temporary or permanent we have abandoned vehicles we have things that are not so appealing we kind of inventory to all of those we would like to work with and we'll facilitate kind of letter writing to all the different property owners go out all at once we're not targeting one in particular but whether it's building department with nate or town manager's office how do we reach out in an organized fashion to the all the property owners so that they can all clean up their property for the spring so we want to be able to do that and again it's sort of that check-in and we'll do as much drafting we'll do as much as possible to try to keep that load i know that nate is super busy with being short staffed um and then the meals tax growth 2026 as we just talked about actually robert hummel is now a huge fan of this and is very interested in doing this so we can work with robert to just look and see what others have done to be able to come forward with recommendation i presume it's not a problem to work with robert but i don't know michael if you had um other inputs in that regard to check in with your office okay
all right so we're a little over the 30 minutes and i this is people waiting and our deal was 30 minutes so i'm gonna stop you here um i think what we need to do is take these items that you like under advisement and we'll put these on our agenda and talk about them when you come back in february with your proposal sooner how's that so part of it these are really simple apps so the question on the playground no and we there are other things about the playground that mr mccall may have some input on on that side on our agenda so i really would like to wait until february on that it's only i'm happy as a liaison ddc work with michael and see to kind of keep the communications going because if there are deadlines we need to meet um in order to accomplish things in a timely fashion you know maybe we can do it without the board great all right so thank you everybody for coming in we appreciate it right um so i am going to recommend the board that we uh pass over item number eight i'd like to discuss it after adjourn me yeah thank you have to adjourn me we're actually going to go over to coa okay and then we'll have any follow-up discussion if you need it no it's in there okay thank you um thank you i'm not tabling it i'm just skipping it till later we'll come back to you later coming back yes now i just wanted to bring up one more stuff as relevant created that policy liaison i just want to kind of use it because you and i talked about that i see it as a need so essentially in order to continue going you know tom essentially said hey i'm going to handle this and he essentially said that kind of to you but really to all of us and we all agree that that's a good plan of action communication yeah that's good i just like that as a pattern like you know that way you ask on behalf of the group hey i'm going to continue to do this with the group is that okay and we all said yeah correct it's a good structure so that you can do that more often when you feel like we have just such jam-packed agendas that i'm trying to keep them absolutely right yeah that's our whole purpose for doing it right and we also had wanted this meeting to talk about the charge but we didn't have it so we're working our way towards there all right so our next item will be a discussion and vote uh potential vote discussion and potential vote with the massachusetts water resource authority including but not limited to financing allocation of the pfas settlement funds and our next steps and we are inviting uh the director of the department of public works from holder our finance director brian kevenny and uh the board of public works to join us uh mike do you have anybody participating remotely are you aware of yes mike spellman oh hi mike i saw you so did you need to call to order i think we do okay so uh so the board knows that mr uvigas who is the chair is unable to attend tonight and mike as the vice chair is brilliant as chair for this discussion so why don't you call your your group together hi brian hi tom thank you evening uh okay um so i'd like to call to order the board of public works um this december 15th you just have to i've already done that so all you have to do is just do roll call okay so we can move to roll call uh head head duty here mike spellman here and weigabauer is here perfect thank you so we've got this big project coming down the to tell meeting this year that we've been working on for a few years and we'll be working on for a few years that's further and it's the connection to the mdmpora or our water because we run into some issues with the pfos problem um this is a probably this this is the second largest undertaking we've taken in my time of volunteering for the town the first being uh when we did the high school project and i think we have just done that and so this is a big project with a big cost and the board of public works has asked the select board to consider you know uh funding a portion of this cross project cost through what we call the general fund and so the proposal has included we've looked at four options so far one is all in the debt service in other words all in our taxes all in the water rates is on the table and then there's two versions of the hybrid model where a portion is funded through the water aids and a portion is funded through the through the to the taxes we would have a debt exclusion the board has not taken any vote yet but the general consensus i think on the board is that the vast project would have to be funded through what we call debt exclusion and we are leaning towards traditional debt exclusion versus the one that allows the board the five members to make a decision to add this to the tax rolls and the portion that we would pay we are also leaning towards um not not um waiting until after you submit your article to vote whether we would be co-sponsors i don't see problem there but we're just going to wait on that in case the board's wondering why we haven't responded to that request and then the final i think request at the moment is that we are leaning towards applying any funds we receive from the pfos litigation that we participate in towards debt service rather than awarding it you know i think you had asked for us to perhaps consider awarding it to the sort of water department we were just going to leave them in the debt service and apply it in the general fund and apply it to the debt service but it would be dedicated for that purpose it's not a huge it's not a huge amount of money uh at the moment but um certainly every bit will help so the last few meetings we've dedicated a lot of time to um you know the financing model really and i know you want us to make a decision and we would like to make one as well and um we've been we've been assisted by mr keveney who actually uh provided us with another proposal uh the other night and i'd like brian to walk through for the board of public works his his proposal so this would now be rather than three on the table this will be our fourth one and brian did you want to walk us through that sure so good evening so one of the options we have and it does have a side effect would be that the general fund uh fully appropriate the debt service in the general fund and every year the water enterprise fund would pay the general fund through their typical indirect payments each year reimbursing the general fund we would have to on the general fund side obviously have the debt service as excluded debt this all works except for the fact that by having the debt service voted as excluded debt creates the condition in the prop two and a half calculation that the town would have really excess levy capacity in the first year really about 1.9 million dollars that it's not going to use to pay the debt service because the payment that the water fund would make each year to the general fund takes the place of tax so under this scenario what it does it protects the general fund from ever making a payment to fund the debt service and have it as excluded debt the water farm would have to raise rates to make that indirect payment as if they were paying the debt itself so the indirect payment would be the debt service plus their normal what they do pay the general fund the side effect as i explained to the selectman is that you would be increasing the excluded portion of prop two and a half percent calculation by an amount that would not be used and as i said earlier future board members and future employees would have to be disciplined and never to use that excess surplus levy i hope i explained the the side effect of that properly so everyone sort of understand this is what one
okay let me try it um so brian's proposal is brian correct me when i get it wrong brian's proposal is rather than run the the debt service let's say two million dollars every year through the water rates directly the town would have would um have an election to support the entire 38 million dollars and through debt exclusion and that would be on the tax rolls however the debt service would be paid by the water rate so you would increase the water rates accordingly and then annually through the end when you pay your indirects you'd be paying that debt service so that we we would carry it but we don't pay it what's the purpose of that what what why for that reason brian why would we do that in the event the water fund appropriated the debt service in their fund and were unable to make the payment if they did not have enough revenue and the general fund had to step in and make the debt payment either by tax or by free cash in the form of a subsidy that tax or free cash would be not excluded and it would impede the town's prop two and a half calculation it would create stress on the general fund budget you would always want anytime the general fund makes a payment for the debt service the debts or debt service be covered by excluded debt so if we had to down the road provide the general the water fund with this subsidy the subsidy can be in the form of free cash or it can be in the form of tax if we have it give it by tax it would create tremendous pressure on the general fund's budget because it would not be excluded debt if we had to fund it by free cash other uses of free cash that we typically use like opeb you know sped the capital stabilization those different funds would be impacted simply because we had to divert some of our free cash over to the water enterprise fund in the form of a subsidy so would you like me to translate so the part and that all i understood
the spokesperson for the board obviously tonight everyone just kind of confirm everyone understands that mike that's okay i totally don't understand any of this so george had sent everybody out a really nice summary of this discussion and this explanation in an email uh to the board that he'd graciously cc'd me on as well so that i saw it but essentially is if the water fund if we funded all the 38 million through the water rates let's say we do that and for some reason or other you're not able to make a payment then you are in what we call default and if you default one two things will happen one it will detect money out of your retained earnings if you default so if you default by a million dollars for example a million of 800 it would take your whole 800 and then the tone would be for a lack of a better phrase on the hook for the balance we are having as i mentioned a couple times we are also having our own financial challenges because we've gotten a couple um things have come our way that we now have to add to our our operating budgets and so if to brian's point that if that would happen it would have happened after we went to town meeting and therefore that would be just be added to the taxes so i guess really what we're really trying to do tonight is to make sure that we all are on the same boat here that they find out how exactly you're going to be funding the the debt service so i know in the supplemental packet excuse me for a second there is your uh the sheet that you gave us and then refer everyone to that it shows how you do your finance so anyways bill do you want to add something first well say it correctly yeah uh i really had a question for brian because uh on on the last point uh the uh the need for discipline on a going forward basis no issue for this select work of course but uh so brian is the concern that uh should we go forward under this approach get a debt exclusion for roughly 1.9 million dollars for the first year of the or i guess uh for each year the the bonds are outstanding um to the extent that the water fund is sufficient to pay the annual debt service there would be no need for the general fund to advance money to the bondholders uh but it's but the concern i think you've raised is that this would uh add 1.9 million dollars to the prior year's levy is that right well we're not to the prayers levy so the prayers levy is basically the prop two and a half plus new growth right add to that the excluded debt total right you'd be doing we roughly have about four million dollars currently as excluded at most of that is the high school so what you'd be doing is taking the four million dollars and adding another 1.9 but 1.9 million would not be used so so you're effectively enabling the an increase of the allowable levy but you're suggesting that uh it would be well for the current and future select boards to essentially ignore that 1.9 for the purposes of budgeting is that right that's correct okay so i think that's true concern or that's the that's the rank just of it so again it's a big project i really think this is a great idea that we're having again another joint meeting so we're all really clear because you know let's get everything worked out before we get to town meeting so anyway um did you want to add something and then we'll yeah so the part i was having trouble understanding was the increased levy but as i understand that that will be the select board's challenge to manage in the future right it's not something we need to be concerned about we just need to be concerned with making sure that we can cover our expenses including the debt service um and and we're talking about whichever way we do it it sounds like we're talking about possibly putting 100 of the debt service obligation on water rates is that correct it's a consideration um but with the what i know the board had had suggested that we support 22 million dollars of the of the process um so did i did you i'm sorry i don't know if you're trying to stumble your time which would be uncomfortable if our board sought to become a lot of commissioners the reason is it would give us some peace of mind making sure that the rates that were being charged residents covered cover the debt year by year so the thing that concerned me about those comments is this we've been at this myself personally about 15 years we set targets for our retained earnings and we hit those targets and it's very difficult because we have to deal with weather we have to deal with equipment malfunction there's a lot of unknowns when we set our rates each year um we are expensive we pretty much know um and those can be adjusted if a plant shut down we're going to use like less chemicals in that plant but we have come in i would say tom you can correct me if i'm wrong but about 90 percent of the time or more we've come in above our targeted retained earnings and i know the retained earnings isn't where some others would like to see it but it's um where we've said it according to our consultant and our expert uh in this space so am i uncomfortable if uh select four takes that over to some degree because i think it may be i've felt some pressure to utilize retained earnings as a way to cover um our bonds or our you know our triple a rating and personally i i feel as though we're an enterprise fund we're trying to be efficient but safe but not sock away people's money so that's my concern right so that's a good point about the retained earnings when brian did the tax recap he informed us that moody's that's our bond rating agency um that we go to for loans um indicated that to maintain our triple a rating uh they now would like uh communities to have was it 25 to 40 percent right brian minimum of 25 minimum of 25 this was kind of new to us as a board as well and that means every fund in town not just the general fund so unfortunately this this could be a double whammy here because you've got to raise up those rates for the for the other so sorry go ahead that's consistent uh brian with the goals of the department of revenue correct relative to enterprise rooms that that's movies i know i don't i know it's a little movie yeah we were bringing enough to cover our costs i met with the dlr i i wrote to them separately and uh shared with them our process for setting rates they shared no concern at all with our retained earnings levels um they initially thought there was some concern with our revenue um but we showed them that we have a contingency line of 200 000 don't plan to expand every year it's just a safety valve and we cover that with a retained earnings uh note in the article um i explained that to them they said that's up to you how you do that that's a political call locally but they were very comfortable in fact i think the meeting would have been five minutes if we didn't want to present uh how we're going about things i think they were very comfortable with where we're at and they have no concerns about our retainers level do you think water use will go down um in a significant way because of the increased water bills people will receive and that's something you figure you figure into that you may figure in when you do your calculations um yeah we'll have to i i mean there are a lot of factors we factor in we're going to go to quarterly billing and hopefully monthly billing um with the with the letter so there's going to be a change in the cash flow um we factor in okay are we in a drought situation right now this year while we're setting rates how's that going to affect our revenue this year um we factor in the um onboarding of river's edge um you know how how's that going to affect so there are a lot of factors that go into but we spend a lot of time on the model um yeah and if i can ask where is our uh overall cash right now if we're supposed to be at about 25 million to 40 million in cash sorry i said yeah no i know oh but we're about 100 million dollar concern right so it's about 45 million to 40 million so where are we at currently did they say we're available you have to ask mr kevin but i think it's okay what's our free cash over 12 million that's more than that but there were a number of funds that contribute to that total just like the reason i ask and it's beyond maybe the scope of this here but do you want to pull from town town folks taxpayers another 12 million would it be better sitting in the towns at triple a rates and what's that difference versus we are going off but we don't do that information how's that on them um brian could probably provide something for us for that it's a number of funds contribute to what we call our it's uncommitted funds including your retained earnings but i think i want to stay on on the topic if we may um bill you've spoken tom um andy or something you want to ask or add here no i i think i get it i think i get it it's just a matter of getting the guarantee verse you know having it be um where the water fund could default on the interest payments well we're not anticipating they will but we're just talking about the what ifs what it was actually brought up what happens right question would you want to no you're soaking it all in you're soaking it all in okay um i'm going to ask mr mccall or mr holder if they would like to add anything here well the only thing i have in common i mean we did talk about whether or not you would try and implement a tiered debt service if you were doing this i did do a little research you could come up with a model if you came up with the base rate and then at your various tiers you gave a different you know factor that you paid is that something if we do this maybe we would charge the debt service accordingly with each rate reached here so our our rates are stratified across i think there's four four levels um the debt service would i i would think it would be allocated properly through that tiering automatically in our model i don't i don't think we'd have to do anything different in order to make sure that happens yeah that is one of the concerns of the board is that and i've heard you the board of public work speak about this as well the equity concept and you know how do we equitably distribute the construction costs um you know for this project i think that's what mccall's referring to i know we talked to tom about it when he was here the last time is that it is equitable on the amount of water that you use because it's a per gallon fee increases with your usage and it's a really terrific system to use this much you pay then you move it's not just all one one tier that you're in but this is we've spent a fair amount of time discussing how are we going to achieve some equity in the in the distribution of construction costs if that's possible and we are also concerned in that equity formula that those who don't pay real estate taxes in town also contribute to the the debt the construction costs so if you put everything through the water rates everyone who uses water in town it's going to pay so you know you know we thought splitting it might make sense because then it would add some equity to the larger um property owners in town they'd have a little bit bigger piece of a slice for that portion but then it would be distributed evenly based on water usage in the water rate um in the water rates so we thought that might kind of cover that uh it was a way to kind of get to that um target but you know if it all goes into water rates whoever uses water regardless of whether they're a non-profit or or not um
that's you know obviously that's been a i think that's been a fair amount of discussion spent on that topic um and certainly you aren't going to be establishing your water rates for next year until may but certainly even though this construction costs will not really totally start i know the consultant has recommended that you start increasing the water rates so that it's not one i don't know if they're planning on doing that come may no i i'm not sure we discussed that i'm not sure if people want us taking their money now so we can spend it less so so the increase won't feel as great later i know of my utility company to you know want to do that with me i'd say no thank you so i think i think this is a concern mike for the board is that we want to make sure there's some increase in the rates next year you know there was none this year and how are we getting how are we lining up our ducks if you will let's see where we end up and as i said for the past 15 years i've been on the board we've been we've been coming in above our targets so it is a very unpredictable and challenging type of guesswork that we go through but our results have been pretty good that's a good question sure michael when we met some time back in the large hearing room um we had a document before then that talked about if it all went on water rates the rates would go up nearly 75 percent over the course of the next five years and i remember also now in that discussion if nothing went on water rates the rates we're still going to go up some 30 percent is that still accurate did i remember that correctly yes yeah so it's really that delta is is like a 40 percent increase right because we have the water tower going in yeah okay others yeah i just want to confirm i want to make sure that um everyone's got all the questions out so just you're not limited to one today no and all honesty i'm not being fresh when i said this i'm hoping that we can get closer to closure so let's get every question we have out
i have one additional question uh mike your word provided us with a ppw analysis potential impact of water rate increases where the uh average water today is 623 dollars is that a quarterly number is that an annual number is that a monthly number uh tom 623 um is that is that our our um six month or an annual yes so those figures were used and applied to what we currently have and those are semi-annual bills yeah okay thank you maybe 1200 when we do the summer no that doesn't sound right and i was thinking it's a number of households up to black and number of houses up to thousands around well that's all right i think that's what i'm asking yeah i don't know what are we now correct i don't have a typical uh six months six months okay so let's use me for an example i think about 300 i think maybe 350 so i must be but i can six or two bills no the two anyway i'm like 167 or something yeah so oh really yeah yeah i'm about that too because it went um and so i think if i recall the spreadsheet something like the town's residential population are at the 500 or less level has there ever been a year a thousand and less right everyone's going to increase by 500. we just broke it up up to 500 thousand you know 15 and 2000 and over 15. that was sort of the breakout do you remember that one repeat that repeat that question judy please are you all sir it was a spreadsheet it had zero five hundred five oh minus a thousand thousand to fifteen we need to know excuse me go ahead they'll ask you a question again just curious again whether this is a semi-annual average or an annual average i've gotten two different answers and i don't know the answer myself so yeah so i think i i misunderstood the question you know i was saying we we bill semi-annually the figures that you are using tonight 500 um is would be for an annual bill that would be what the two semi-annual bills put together thank you so now do you have a follow-up question on okay mr fay sorry mike just so we're clear if if our board headed in the direction of having this having these expenses flow through the water rates so to speak that's something that your board would be okay with yeah i mean i've always been of the opinion that we're not making this decision we're only going to deal with the consequences of it right um so however uh whatever we have to do to set rates to cover the portion that is allocated to the water file is what we'll do that that will be a factor in our model and that's yeah
i would say the only thing i'm confused about is at one point i thought that um when we're looking at it that there were some groups that were not paying for water and i think that's not true i think it's everybody everybody pays for water just you you pay for i'll tell you who's my paying phone it's us you're talking you were talking about okay i'm sorry so you were talking about just when when you're just getting these funds through the general fund right okay we were talking about carrying i just want to make sure that i got it okay so originally we also if i got it you must have another another question okay um originally we were talking about this several discussions ago we thought gee if it went through the general fund and it's real estate taxes with the new salt limitations there might be a tax benefit to the residents yes you know the taxpayer um so that was part of that conversation but then when we said that you'd be getting the tax credit but there would be others not contributing if we went all through the general fund we've really worked on this um we're not there but we've really worked on this um one of the other things that i'm going to point out though has been pointed out repeatedly at board meetings if you went to them is that the town is paying across the boy at tier one level regardless of our usage and that is going to change um because we are not a tier one user and so i don't know um mr holder has shared this with you uh michael or not but um i think we probably need a sense of how much and i think it's on that sheet that bill has you know i think i think we haven't made that we haven't made that but it's a possibility to consider but uh that was not set with our current rates no but it could be something that you go forward with and i think the estimate was it would probably cost us about another 75 or whatever it was i saw something on some sheet so just a food for thought for us as well so um mike the mwra assessments town that are on either water or sewer or boat and you know when those assessments will begin relative to is it after we're hooked on or before uh let's see i know that there's a initiation fee with the state revolving fund loan um and that will be in i think 2027 um in regards to the assessments uh i can take that yeah mike and i'm happy to take that the way that the mwra bills is they on an annual basis a fiscal year basis they see what their operating costs are and then they assess member communities the following fiscal year for that prior calendar year's consumption so it's it's they'll bill us the year after we actually use the water we're scheduled to begin drawing water the summer of 2029 so we would in essence get a bill um fiscal 31. so if the board of public works continue to calculate its needs they'll know a year ahead of time what the assessment will be right based on that time yes the mwra they advertise what they're going to charge per million gallons so when we do our annual statistical report we have a pretty good sense of how much water we consumed or produced and then that is what we would be charged against thank you
there's one last question um i don't this is for tom or brian but uh we heard some public comment earlier on that there are contingencies that are built into the budget which makes complete sense given that you're doing underground work um i guess my question is whether the entire principal amount of 32 million or whatever the number is is borrowed at one time which includes obviously the contingencies of whether there's kind of a a serial borrowing uh based on construction draws or when you when you're actually need the money yeah so i i can take a a shot at this but uh i i will also say that uh brian is going to become the uh the fellow that's proficient you know in the state revolving fund uh so i know he and i have been working you know towards getting him uh familiar with this whole process we had learned when we met with the srf representative that come october of calendar year 26 we will contract with the state for the full 38 million dollars that will be our our loan amount we'll go through the process of borrowing that full amount because we're going to spend that 38 million dollars in the course of 24 months it's going to go relatively quickly we will not begin aside from mike weegebauer was just referencing the administrative uh cost of getting an srf loan we'll be uh needing to be paying that prior to the actual loan taking effect but we will not be incurring costs on that loan until after the construction is complete which would be the summer of 29 that's when we'll begin making payments i guess so tom what if you don't need that entire amount what if you have the better luck than you expect and there's uh you save a million dollars in contingencies yeah so we'll we'll apply the loan amount will be for the full amount including the contingencies and at the close of the project we'll know precisely what the actual cost was and then that is what the the loan would then and i'll work with brian uh on how to do that but that's what the loan amount would actually be reduced to and brian can you invest those proceeds and get some arbitrage interest yeah i'm not i'm not sure what you're going to invest because the construction starts we're going to have no money in the account the way that tom has described it we're going to have to probably spend what two three four million dollars and then do a reimbursement is that correct tom so we spend the money and then we get reimbursed we'll have the loan amount uh so i'm there's i'm not familiar let me rephrase that i am not aware of any srf loan where it was reimbursable we did this about five years ago when we replaced the water main at route 20 it was a standard srf srf loan it was two percent over a 20-year term and we had those funds up front so this is not like a uh so this isn't a drawback were they going to give us the whole 38 million dollars up front we're going to have we're going to have use of that 38 million dollars as we engage contractors when we sign those contracts my point is is that are we actually going to receive in the form of a payment the 38 million dollars up front or like chapter 90 we spend the money first and then get reimbursed i believe we get the money up front so we have to know that because if it was like chapter 90 a substantial amount of money will be spent up front and we need to have some cash available to cover those expenses up front in other words we just can't charge three million dollars to a capital account that has no money we may need to do the selectman the advanced um funding that we did very recently with the with the cut with their debt because at the end of the year this account is going to have to be in a positive balance if we get the money up front it's not a problem but this is a chapter 90 then we're going to have to seek reimbursement on a regular basis and we're going to have to possibly have some seed money to get the thing going yeah see chapter 90 is in essence a grant program this is a loan program so i you know like i said brian you're going to have to become the srf guy i'll be i'll be the construction management guy you be the finance guy all right um go ahead and go ahead mike typically the interest rate on the srf is up to two percent but for critical projects um like pfas for mediation they can be zero percent do we have an idea are we getting zero percent that's what i thought it's a question of when we get the funding versus when we have to begin so could i kind of direct this back a little bit you're not paying interest on that that's what i know but i i just think if they gave us 38 million dollars to put in the bank i would think it'd be more like a construction model okay so i'm thinking i'm getting we're getting close with and i don't see any more questions from the board you're welcome to hop in after i do this but um um mike spellman brian or tom do you have anything else you'd like to ask or add before i start winding this down no brian you all set i think i explained my opinion of this fund uh at the last meeting in its financial condition um i won't add any more to that my my concerns about uh its ongoing ability to make its payments to raise its revenue to set rates properly um to meet these expenses i think i made that clear to the board at my last meeting with you folks thank you brian i just have one thing i guess i would ask that a decision be made to finance this whether it's in rates whether it's taxes whether it's a hybrid where it's shared between the 22 and the 16 million dollars that a decision be made relatively soon because i know as we prepare for town meeting and we're working towards promoting this project we're going to need to demonstrate to voters that what the mechanism is going to be for the financing so that it's clear it's easy to understand so that the folks coming to town meeting on may 4th know directly how this is going to be financed and it's easy for them to understand so that they can make a a favorable vote on the construction funding that's what i would ask okay thank you mr mccall and mr holder and i have talked about this as well and we would want a unified support for that decision that everybody be on board so that you walk into town meaning everybody knows everybody stands i think that's what we're trying to accomplish now no no i know but you're all together i mean i i've expressed before i think it for purposes of equity it should come through the the water rates um if we do excluded debt and ensure that we have a debt service component that can be adjusted for the tiers i think that would work and be equitable and i think it would provide the safeguards that mr keveney has uh mentioned and he and i concur on those as well so i would like to finish with the questions so that i can let the board of public works um adjourn and then we're going to devote a few minutes discussing you know what our thoughts are see if we can possibly take a vote tonight if not hopefully soon so um mike to the ed anybody have any questions last comments yes of course okay so uh if we uh consider this new funding mechanism and wherever wherever it comes out if it's 100 out of the water rates or not will folks be able to write that off on their taxes it's not no that's part of it not some of the salt i don't think because it's okay you see that's what i said we went all through that and so you know if we do that then we're not how are we going to capture from those who are residential um taxpayers or taxpayers if you're not paying taxes and there's a fair amount of users there that wouldn't be contributing so okay so just the borrowing would go through the town it wouldn't be saying that again okay just the what just the borrowing would be through the town directly instead of okay right um and then secondly there was a um tom there was a uh powerpoint or a presentation that the state um revolving fund greg devine had presented at one of our meetings so we have that that we should probably send to the select board and it outlines and it does say that there's uh some small upfront fees five dollars for every thousand dollars um those are the like i don't know the lock-in fees or something like that zero percent interest during the interim a 14-month or 30-month construction period where we get the money up front the payments aren't due until after construction is completed in that construction period so that's good so we'll send that along thank you very much anybody else on the board have any other questions okay everyone thank you very much for coming i appreciate it uh i know you're waiting for us we are doing our due diligence which of course is that's our job to make sure that we've looked at every every angle i think we have looked at every angle and even some we didn't even know we were going to look at and i think we are getting close to making a decision so um i'm going to thank would you like to adjourn what's the time here somebody 804 okay so um do i just fall adjourn you just say we are we are adjourning motion a motion to adjourn i have a motion to adjourn so second and all in favor all costs all men hi do we do yes uh and what about our eye great thank you so much for your time appreciate it thanks for your help all right okay so now i'd like like thanks i'd like to you know direct the board now for a few minutes um mr bould is here so we can spend a few minutes on this um any thoughts now in discussion here is it our intention to have this on the next agenda next meeting's agenda i should have flowered that up i would really hope that we could come to a conclusion if possible receive am i be able to and if we can we can't excuse me sorry go ahead tom no so you want to vote tonight i want to have a discussion to see if we're close enough to voting and then if someone feels that we are ready i'm i would not be opposed to a motion and did you want to start the discussion or bill or somebody if we if we want uh if this was financial flow to water rates it sounds like the board of public works is thinking of billing monthly it's not at least at least forward totally so my question to you brian is can i want to be very blunt here can we look over their shoulder relative to revenues and expenses in other words they have a consultant they have the formula but i'd be more comfortable if there was some vehicle that the town has to watch the numbers so if we saw a problem
arising we could be advised of it and address it are you talking about during the course of the year or before the rate setting occurs well i guess both right because just to have a sense of how the financing is look how how the uh yeah so to give you an example through this through fiscal 26 they did not have a rate increase they were expecting that revenue would increase about nine maybe ten percent based on um a higher volume of um you know gallons being sold but really through five months they're almost at par they're up a little bit but not nine percent at the same time they're going to be spending um their full appropriation so there's a high probability that they're going to again have a loss since they became an enterprise fund 13 years ago they've had they've lost money nine times um so they've had nine of 13 years where there was it was a net loss in the fund so where we are today with tom is tom and i talk about this fund all the time and you know he's bought water from the mwa this year that's going to be probably maybe 150 000 200 000 so during the course of the year we'll start talking about where your revenue is going to fall and try to you know mitigate the loss that we're expecting at the end of 26 because of the no rate setting now as you go into the next fiscal year we go to town meeting in may or april we vote a budget town meeting votes a total revenue and a total expense budget town meeting does not vote the rate when the board of public works gets together in may or june they set the rate to achieve their water usage line item the water chargers line item is about 95 of the budget again that line item really for 13 years has only made its budget a few times so the majority of the years since an enterprise fund it has not obtained its revenue budget for water user charges well here's where the problem happens in may and june the board of public works sets a rate at their disposal they're not necessarily setting a rate that's going to bring in revenue that town meeting voted they bring in a rate that they feel is appropriate um by using a by using retained earnings you can only use retained earnings if town meeting voted it now we did have a meeting with dor where mike wigabar was part so it was in tom i don't know of any other meeting that there was with dor i've been dor has expressed their concern with this account for many many years um so to do your point tom how do you control it there's got to be some control in may and june they set the rates that the rate is set to achieve the revenue number that the town meeting voted and absent a bylaw change or a town meeting action they're at full authority to set any rate they want basically what they're doing is this in the general fund we have the finance committee reserve fund it's about two hundred thousand dollars we fund that with tax we hope that we never spend it we hope no other department needs a transfer but we raise the revenue to bring in money in case we need that appropriation what the water fund has been doing is they have a contingency fund and what they decide is well we're not going to raise revenue to cover this line in because we think we're not going to spend it and what tom holder said prior they actually do spend it so they're spending money out of a line item which they have no revenue for because they didn't raise rates properly so to set some kind of a control up i think it's difficult for michael mccall and i to mandate to them or force them to raise the rates properly because we have no no authority to do to do that you're probably looking at fiscal 27 with a 30 percent rate increase and if they don't do the rate increase you know they're probably going to have a fiscal 27 similar to fiscal 26 so i think absent any kind of action to enforce a certain um i wouldn't say policing but um oversight of the rate setting i think we're going to probably down the road get into trouble because rates unset properly if you think about it this way tom in a couple of years the water fund is going to have an eight million dollar budget 25 of that is two million dollars their fund balance right now is 1.4 they need to start building fund balance just to meet their future revenue budgets they're or they're right now at 1.4 million in just a couple of years they're going to have a revenue and expense budget of about eight million they need to be at a two million dollar fund balance level just to be at 25 so in a matter of three years they got to grow six hundred thousand dollars so there's there's a real need to ensure that rates are set properly thank you so um i'll ask this both you brian and the town manager is it from what you've seen and how other municipalities operate is it unreasonable for this warrant article to have a provision that says that more public work work shall remain water commissioners but but the ultimate rate setting must be approved as well by the select following and it is you see that as a as a good idea or a bad idea because i don't want to have i really don't want to have two sets of two consultants and two sets of number reviewing right but um i'm just concerned that that we're going to get ourselves into trouble based on what you're saying i would think that would be appropriate maybe something that the rates are set subject to the town manager approval that they they can vote them but the town manager ultimately needs to approve them in order for them to be um sent out to the residents some kind of a control like that you know we we don't want to have an adversarial relationship with the board of public works we're just trying to we're just trying to help them and that's what's best for the town that's right and and i i think maybe if the town manager was put as the ultimate authority to approve the right setting then i think we could be fine and i think the board of public works should be okay with that um they may maintain their control but the town manager ultimately approves it if the town manager does not approve it it would go back to the board of public works to reset it we're just giving good advice that we think is helpful to them and it's it's in the best interest of the town thank you why can't we just use this as a surcharge and not have it be specifically connected to usage but rather just a basic surcharge that's that is predictable and and passed to users but they have to set the rate they have to set the rate which brings it to us but we have no enforcement mechanism they are the water commissioners at the moment you can have surcharges and water so the interesting thing i just want to throw these little monkey wrench thoughts here is that i'm i'm going to answer your question a second but i want to uh yeah thanks sorry can't you do that um i don't think they have the authority to send it what a public works is submitting the article and we would be a co-sponsor so for us in order to get a change in the the language of the article they're sponsoring might not be might not go through so easily just looking for five they agree in language i think that i personally think that we've explained the situation here this is just me we are an elected board just as the board of public works is an elected board we are responsible to make sure the decisions that we make do no harm if you will to the town and we make sure that we do what's in the best interest of the town and the residents um but i think that we we have time a little time here to see what happens because this debt service expense is not really going to hit our books until around fy29 maybe even fy30 we're going into 27. so we go to town meeting and we approve this and then we see what they do with the rates next may and then we have a conversation say you know we have this conversation and then x happened when we thought y was going to happen and so we need to revisit and maybe that's the time to have a good look at it cheryl to your point uh i think though that mike articulated a kind of a different philosophy which is not to take money out of a great payer's hands and therefore keep the
fund balance comparatively low and not assess rates sufficient to pay the coming debt service on even the water tank much less the other so i i personally am more comfortable with an approach where the debt service comes or the the fund balance comes up and where you start to build the rates so that when the debt service hits it's not oh my god the rates are quite brutal but and so so i'm i'm a little concerned about holding off upon there's no debt due there's no bill due if you will in 27 on this and we're in 28 and so then we have time to make an adjustment in 28 just i personally feel a little comfortable being able to explain to the town and maybe here's the thing and what was your question if it was a fixed fee why um why would you have that fixed fee fixed fee so everyone would pay the same for what the construction costs it within the water within their water so that's what we're talking about this is the equity thing that the board has been discussing is that some board members feels very strongly that the cost of the construction should be in proportion to your water usage i know but if that if the concern is it's predictability of receiving those fees that's easy to do but also the water commissioners which is the board of part the works sets those fees right so all we would need to know is that they would set it if they have an obligation as an expense to service the debt at a specific number and then they do it based on a tiered system but a fixed tier system then they can allocate it in the way they need to as long as they're responsible for the payment so i think the board's concern is that that they set the rates enough whether it's a fixed fee or a not fixed fee or a tiered fee or in order to make sure they can make sure they cover it down mr when it's let's say what mike says he might be able to solve this for us the select board member fave raised an interesting point and so did uh mr kevin um i did share with you town council's opinion who did say that you could advance a bylaw if you wanted i believe mr holder although he's gone we already employed a consultant abrams um that looks at rates and proposes prospective rates and was recommended in the past that they'd be that the board of public work should have been incrementally increasing rates to accumulate some monies in their retained earnings anticipation of this 38 million dollars um the last town i was in as a town manager i was responsible for sitting down with the finance director and the ddw director and setting the rates and typically what would happen is you would have a consultant come in do some analysis um i hadn't contemplated a scenario where maybe the board of public works recommends a rate to me and i approve it you would have thrown out that scenario but i do think you might want to have a mechanism where a rate is established by an outside consultant and it's part of a bylaw or policy that they have to adhere to and that as town council mentioned that the select board is the enforcement mechanism to ensure that you're getting sufficient revenue through those rates to not only cover the principal and interest um for the loan but also to help build out that retained earnings for future does anybody else have any comments and discussion are we um i'm going to be eternally optimistic now when i say the next sentence do we think we could be ready for a motion we could well may i hear it so are we just focused on this motion about how we're paying i don't know you're making the motion um maybe we should have a little discussion what the motion should be because we also talked on the agenda about the the pfas settlement funds is that a separate something so mr time manager if you were in my seat what motion would you make if you wanted to have the financing go through water rates only is there any magic language that's what i'm getting very much i'm always thinking of phoning a friend mr kevin me up on this excuse me you already used to phone a friend now we've talked about the being financed the debt service through the water rates um mr kevin has proposed that we do the debt service ensure that there is an adequate debt service fee built into those rates using the tiered system to reimburse the town for that excluded debt that correct brian um yeah for the most part i'd have to think about that but for full disclosure even though i came up with that idea of the you know the general fund paying it and getting the you know the transfer i ultimately i was against it because it left the ability for future people to spend that unused um levy capacity but we're not on that at the moment we're on the setting of the rates huh okay so if we if we're excluding that portion i i think that the rates i would recommend that the board have the rates for no let's stop we just ask one quick question are we doing this for the full 38 million or are you doing work portion since the board is the whole amount right correct excuse me mr tell me as you were going for the whole enchilada here i would recommend to the board that they um that they seek that the board of public works raise the money through the rates using a debt service fee which would be adjusted relative to the four tier system that they have for the which so that there is equity built in it would be a smaller debt service fee for the tier one slightly larger for tier two tier three and tier four to ensure that they're covering the principal and interest in building up their retainer somebody want to make that or do we want to have some more conversation i have a question the specific way you worded that michael i cannot sure i understand it uh that there would be a surcharge on a debt service that is proportional based on the use why is it a surcharge why is it not part of the charge as i understood at the end of the day people were thinking of separating it rather than strictly on the rates but have the debt service fee that's all i'm suggesting here that was not my understanding that that's a new concept to me i don't think i've heard that before we're talking about some people do place a debt service fee on their bills on the utility bill but you could why would well it seems to me you don't have equity within each tier yes as opposed to having it be just part of the charge well you could certainly do that that would be the most equitable i think that i think that would be my preference okay and then i would just have it be part of the charge rather than have a separate surcharge that is x for tier one x plus strictly it usage it's tied entirely so it's just built into the break we don't set the rates so i think we are really just voting on like i said the whole thing so we're voting our vote in my opinion our motion is the action we're looking at is our how do we believe this project should be financed so we are saying what i'm hearing is we are saying that it should be financed the whole 100 through the water rates that's what we're really saying right now now we have these other questions and these other issues not sure they're in our purview but what is in our purview is we've been asked you know to doug's point do we want to add in here and say that the pfos funds they're not huge but we are we've already made that decision separately to apply them but i think we could do that separately i think we're saying we're saying we're effectively or we're we think that the that the customer should be paid effectively through the water rates the distinction being brian's scenario is a reimbursement to the general fund the general fund pays but it's it handles on the head of any kind of distinction now i think then separately we have these other couple questions which are minor and then we have this one large question is to how are we going to have assurance that the debts the rates are going to be raised and i thought that was the whole concept of the joint meeting was that we were raising that issue and then come may when they don't then i think we come back and say next time meeting this is what we're going to put forth then no would it be appropriate a sensitive board to take a vote that confirms the consensus as you've described it which is effectively the debt service for the entire combined project is paid for the water rights but a mechanism to be put in place to ensure that the water rates are sufficient to meet the debt service the operating expenses and the retained earnings is that in our program but i just don't know if if i'm quite there with brian's idea of the uh that exclusion so we have to do debt exclusion period because nobody has 38 million dollars and in their operating budgets to support the debts are uh 2.2 1.9 2.1 whatever so we have to do that exclusion for the 38 million well you don't know if it's entirely paid from the waterfront right but absolutely pay from the law yeah i think we've had that consensus but i'll see the consensus but i think we're mixing up a couple things here myself but why don't we do one at a time why don't i think one of them right that's a better idea excuse me am i supposed to do a consensus or we're going to do in a let's do it let's do a motion and then we'll have a discussion yes mr chick well in october they made a recommendation of the board that was in two parts so i think maybe you respond to the two parts the first being they asked for the 20.5 for the mwra connection via a um a debt exclusion instead you could take a vote on that and send back a recommendation uh akin to what mr whitney just indicated that's on page 39 the recommendation to us on page 39 of the packet the the main packet
my apologies to those who are waiting for us but i'm determined to get a vote you know so at this point they've asked us to fund it's the hybrid they want a hybrid this is the hybrid that they can recommend like this is the same this is the basic that they it was within like the first conversation right i don't know michael that we have to take that as two votes so it's just a recommendation from the board of public works we could still have that single motion on how it's paid for right yeah i think you can change we're going to recommend the entire thing just because the water running yeah tom go ahead yes i move that this book that this um board um support payment of the debt service for the um wra connection and happy hollow treatment facility together through water rates second so many further discussion so i'm i'm going to add one thing here is we could actually that about the thought that's in our mind we could actually say we want to draw up an mou with the board public works there's a lot of things but in the meantime i'm going to take a vote all those in favor of the motion say aye aye thank you everyone we will let the floor for the floor tomorrow now because we have these concerns we have a couple issues uh options in my opinion one is we could maybe ask them to do an mou with us so that we'd have an mou where they say they agree to raise the rates sufficiently um one is we expressed ourselves we can express it again maybe michael can send off the letter and say that we uh we make this motion with uh and our concerns that that they will raise the rates starting this year accordingly um or the other is we can wait and see what they do in may and if not then we can take an action for fy28 let's say this it's so much easier to codify structure in an article like this then to come back in a year or two and the addressing the point is if we do it come to a decision one or the other within this article it doesn't have to be before the end of the month but before the article goes to print and maybe that's where the mou discussions come about right maybe they'll be agreeable to it maybe what we should do michael is uh start wrapping up an mou with you know brian why and come up with something simple for the board and we could review that yes to throw a monkey yes please sir can can an mou find a future for the public works or a future selector no no why doesn't it we have one that they did with the fields it's from like 2017 or 14 and they use that all the time no they do i don't know i'm not does it say finding i don't use your not so put binding in us if we were to do uh except ryan's proposal would you thank you swear that you 1.9 million of excess capacity so we've been here too long i'm not gonna
no but i think you can use your pfas uh settlement money as a carrot uh here to ensure that they set the rates otherwise you know because you could give that money to the the project um or you could say you put it in retained earnings so they have that balance there but they need to uh set the rates according that could be you could do a few things i think i think we'll discuss something with that sorry sorry well um it seems to me that there are a couple of layers of comfort that one might seek one is an amelie dude or something but kind of the ultimate is ryan's proposal no so if you accept ryan's proposal that doesn't continue the option of coming to the agreement that is sort of defensive last resort the border public works of course is meeting tomorrow night and as their famous liaison i will probably be in attendance i could take a message if you wanted me to take such i'd like you to and tell them would you like me express our concerns right about this about the border yeah planning budgets annually given expected water revenues and expenses and that we're we're willing i don't speak for the board but i can't hear you we're willing to be uh involved in that process we're willing to be involved in that process our board okay and are they uncomfortable with that i mean we just it's a big issue like i said it's a big amount of money so all right thank you very much what do we want to do about brian's proposal um what do we want to do with brian's proposal i have a thing here that says next steps um is that something we have to resolve right now well that's what i'm asking because you want me to put that on the meeting for january 5th um we definitely have to do debt exclusion we've already agreed we're not going to do the section k we're going to do what we call a traditional debt exclusion so that's what we've decided so that's it so the question then because i mean i guess we are doing brian's proposal on my mind because if we're supporting the debt it was we're we're floating the bond and we're gathering the debt service in any event it's full faith and credit of the town it's hundreds full faith exactly
so i think then do we want to say that's why we're going to do it or i would move to this board accept the finance director's recommendation i move that the board accept the finance director's recommendation with respect to a debt exclusion article uh to be presented to the voters in order to ensure that the town has sufficient revenue should there be a shortfall of water water rights to meet the debt service obligations the second do i have any one second please you have your pinky swear up but hold on one second please um is anybody making amendments you looked confused uh you're all set you said are we in discussion at this point we're in discussion and then we're going to the pink over here my understanding this is a two-thirds vote at the ballot or majority of the ballot 50 of the ballot is about to require a two-thirds vote at town meeting this does require two this is borrowing i believe so the debt exclusion the debt exclusion is 50 plus more at the battle at all but it's two-thirds of telling me an article all right we're clear on that all right um does anybody else have any comments and discussion otherwise i'm going to mr mccall i'm just saying i will just one brian is this what you had in mind this motion so i'm confused i thought i just heard you guys vote to fund the the debt by water rates i did and so why would you then be entertaining what i mentioned previously about the old indirect thing use that use that mechanism versus having the water to fund uh float the bond we're going to float the bond to the general fund right i think we're saying that the ultimate source of repayment is the waterfall provided that we do it within the context of your proposal which is the water fund transfers sufficient revenue to pay the debt service to the town to enable it to make the debt service pay okay isn't that your proposal that that was my proposal is it still your proposal uh no i mean only because you leave the vulnerability of future people spending that unused levy right then you know you you're basically entrusting future town meetings and people making the budgets to not use that uh levy capacity that's uh targeted to um the water debt that you never ultimately use you're basically over inflating your max levy right so you know what we have voted this we come back we don't have to resolve this we don't have to resolve this tonight and this okay thank you i appreciate it i'd like to move on to the next i'm sorry we're late we are going to go to number 10 discussion of 195 main street including but the next steps to address site contamination i think we invite mr cool who's our licensed site professional from cmg and remote environmental before it was yours to talk about the latest um test results but i am going to just i'm going to recuse myself for a couple minutes i'm just going to be in charge so here's this gavels not easy to do go ahead school do have the floor and the information is in our packet on page um is it like 41 page 40. so thank you mr goal sorry and thank you for your patience ben can you hear us yep i can hear you all right um so we have you on our schedule right now to provide an update on the latest cleanup efforts at 195 main street in wheyland i know it's been some time since we've last connected um but if you want to give us an overall synopsis and then i'll open it up to the board for some questions okay overall um we found a problem at 195 main street we actually found three problems but the one that's concerning most is p fast contamination in groundwater so we have done uh four iterations now of putting in monitoring wells and assessing the groundwater for what is there as far as p fast goes um we found substantial contamination in the third round that we had done uh which was um back in in uh september or so uh we we had found quite a bit of p vas in some of the wells on 195 main street itself so the suspicion was it was coming from 201 main street the wayland middle school specifically the leaching fields of the middle school so the last iteration we did um we put in five more wells in at the end of october the beginning of november and we've got the groundwater results back and the good news is that the concentrations um in this last round are not as high as we had seen in previous ones uh if you look at the the table of results they kind of go through time uh we we um we have not done a comprehensive sampling round yet because pfs testing is quite expensive and i wanted to see if we can find the extent of this before we try to figure out uh what the time time time trends are for reduction um just from looking at what we have in the most recent round our highest result was about 35 parts per trillion in a previous round we had 500 plus parts per trillion so that's what i mean by it's not as high however the highest concentration was pretty much where i expected it to be which was the one well we put into the middle of the uh weyland middle school's leach fields so that supports our conceptual site model hypothesis that the primary source for this pfas contamination is actually coming or had to come from the weyland middle school to most likely to pass use of floor cleaners um getting washed on the drains and so forth i i don't think anybody's doing anything malicious there uh it's it's pfs was not a major thought in anyone's mind before about 2018 and has not been significantly regulated since 2020 so it's it's a historic usage that is supported by direction of groundwater flow and pattern we've seen in the concentrations if you just thumb through the different groundwater flow maps um there are different scales because we've started small and get bigger and bigger but overall we are seeing the groundwater flows towards the east on on the majority of what we'll call our study area in the last round we are now have a well that's on the east side i'm sorry did i say east i meant to say west it's westerly groundwater flow um towards doubly pond in general we now have a monitor well on the east side of the wayland middle school which has substantially lower groundwater elevation than the well we put in a septic leach field that tells me we found the groundwater divide in other words about right down the center of where the middle school is there appears to be a division whereas groundwater to the west is moving west groundwater to the east is moving east i don't have enough data points to get a real good handle on the easterly flow the good news is it's it's much lower concentrations of pfas than what's in the westerly side we attempted to put in a sixth well if you look at our map 6e there's a symbol there for b36 not mw36 we were not able to get water in that one we hit bedrock a couple different levels we tried a few spots we hit it at 28 feet moved around hit it 33 and a half feet moved around a little bit hit it 33 feet so it's somewhere between 30 35 feet down below grade there is a bedrock rise and i believe that the groundwater is splitting because of that bedrock rise that means groundwater is flowing to the west on the west half of the weyland middle school and on the 195 and 207 property groundwater is flowing to the east on the easterly half of the weyland middle school property now that's all you know fine and interesting to scientists that are looking at it i'm sure you would like to know much more about uh what does that mean for the town we are looking to complete a phase 2 comprehensive site assessment what we need to do for that is to identify the full extent of contamination i believe at this point we have not got the full extent of contamination but we do have enough to say where the real problem is and it seems to me that the real problem probably originated at the septic leach field in the whalen middle school but has been moving slowly to the west over time with groundwater flow so that we saw the highest concentrations on wells that are actually at 195 main street the highest is at well 21 mw21 so what does that mean that means that it's a historic release it's gradually moving away from the source gradually moving towards dudley pond um some of the ramifications of that are we would expect that the contribution of groundwater into dudley pond is going to increase pfas levels in dudley pond since the pond is so much larger than the amount of groundwater that gets fed into it i suspect we won't see very much change at all in in the happy hollow well fields um they'll probably stay about the same constant concentration they've been for a while eventually they will come down just by natural attenuation through groundwater movement and dilution by eventually we're talking decades possibly even longer than that but um it's encouraging from a scientific viewpoint that i believe we found that the smoking gun if you will and apparently that gun went off quite some time ago and what we're seeing now is the after effects of so hopefully that's understandable uh that's about all i have for now i'd be happy to answer any questions ben just briefly you're saying that where we are now is is coming to the end of the phase two part of the process and then we have we have another phase before us that yes correct on both counts uh we are coming to the end of the phase two process i have sufficient information now that i could write a phase two that will probably not fail a db audit um before this last iteration i i couldn't say that but now we have enough we do not know the full extent of the pfas contamination i don't believe it makes any sense to try to chase it at concentrations below the current drinking water standard which if you remember is 20 parts per trillion but where we where we did have you know 530 parts per trillion um in well 21 that's significant we had to find out where that source was
as i said i tried to say carefully we believe the the source is from the septic leach fields the primary source i don't believe that is the entire source i suspect that there is some contribution from private septic systems in the area um just from people washing clothes and so forth it gets into the groundwater through septic systems and then it's there as we've all heard pfas is a forever compound it does not degrade the only way it goes down is it gets washed through and diluted by additional groundwater coming into it it's extremely difficult to destroy pfas compounds there's been some advancement in in techniques on how to destroy them but for the levels we're looking at now it doesn't make sense to try to implement anything like that your second party question was have we do we have other phases yes after you complete your phase two um you then have one more year and you have to get to what they call a phase three that's a real action plan you have to evaluate what are your alternatives for how to address this problem and come up with a plan um for how to implement that at the same time the the mcp requirements the the dep's regulations say that you have to have a phase four remedy implementation plan um it's kind of the other side of the coin from the phase three phase three says what what is possible to address this problem phase four is okay we decided what we're going to do this is how we're going to address that particular problem from that point the regulations give you one more year to get to either a permanent solution or a temporary solution or a remedy operating status um i do not foresee this will reach a permanent solution in my lifetime um i know that's a pretty pessimistic way to look at it but we can reach a temporary solution based on natural attenuation provided that there's no one actually being directly impacted um as in their their groundwater is contaminated we've investigated and to our knowledge there are no private drinking wells within 500 feet of any of the areas that we've looked at so far but given the concentrations we have we may need to look further than 500 feet but that's the first level that you look at this area is all serviced by public water the public water is being controlled on pfas that they are treating it in such a way that it stays below the state standard of 20 parts per trillion the state has not lowered that standard yet um at some point they will i haven't heard any indication of when that might be dp has been pretty close to the chest about what they're going to do about this i believe they're waiting for epa to make a move before they do it um they've proposed proposed and enacted a rule for public drinking water supplies that says it has to be less than four parts per trillion for certain compounds they are not currently enforcing that that rule um so the town is able to and every town is able to distribute water water for drinking that's less than 20 parts per trillion they don't have to worry about the four number yet um i'm in my opinion that's a political move not a scientific one uh the science does support the four part trillion number eventually it will come down probably to about that number um but in the current political climate i don't foresee that happening for a few more years at least so um thank you man to answer the question more than you wanted but go ahead no that's all it's all helpful information i've been taking notes since we've been talking about this for the last couple of years and um one thing we talked about when you were with us on may 19th was about pfas contamination and our happy hollow wellhead uh you didn't really have at that time an extent of the understanding of the contamination now it seems like you have a better understanding yeah does it impact um your thoughts around how it will be treated at our happy hollow wellhead once we complete our p fast treatment plant there one thing you have to keep in mind is the relative volumes of water um i don't have that number handy in front of me but it there there are you know multiple millions of gallons of water in dudley pond that water is is being um is really the source for the happy hollow well field their well is extracting groundwater but that groundwater is pretty darn close to dudley pond and and what's in dudley pond is going to get into their wells the amount of contamination we're seeing in our groundwater is far higher than what's in dudley pond or showing up in the happy hollow well fields but the actual volume of water involved is moving very very slowly so the the amount of pfas itself that's moving from the groundwater into dudley pond is not enough to make a huge difference in the concentration in dudley pond that means that it's not going to make a huge difference in what the happy hollow well field is pulling i don't see that the happy hollow well field is going to get the big difference it will go up slightly probably it will not go up by a huge amount they're not going to see 500 parts per million in their well field that's that's just not going to happen there's far too much dilution before it gets there thank you thank you i'll back in yeah thank you yes do you have any questions for mr gold oh thank you that's that's good news but that's easy gentlemen i have two questions mr gould thanks for joining us tonight my first question is based on what you have learned does the town have to do anything relative to the leach fields at the middle school when if you remember we talked about a phase three to phase four i have to consider different alternatives there is certainly one alternative is to excavate the leach fields themselves dispose of the whatever is residual pfas contaminated material and replace it with new material so they can still have a leach field that will effectively remove the historic source i can tell you already that we're going to demonstrate that that alternative is not really viable because the bulk of the contamination has moved well beyond where the leach fields themselves are it's currently at the 195 main street parcel so that's where the main contamination is so i don't believe that there's any alternative that's going to make sense other than monitored natural attenuation we have to go through the exercise to demonstrate that you know come up with some hard numbers to to bolster it but having done enough of these in the past i i just my my gut feeling is it's going to be natural attenuation here which in one sense is the do nothing approach but you're not really doing nothing you do have to monitor it you have to pay attention to what's going on the monitoring will probably consist of annual checks on a few wells not all of them but we will track the worst part of the plume to make sure that we're not getting surprised over time and eventually we're going to have a temporary solution and that's going to be the action and my second question is um given that this these chemicals existence is below ground do you see any reason why the town can't develop 195 main street in some way with a structure even if it's a slab structure understood um as i've said before i don't believe there's any real impediment to developing 195 main street for whatever use you choose the only caveat is um besides the PFAS contamination you recall there is some metals contamination in the ground in the soil and there is some volatile contamination which appears to be weathered gasoline in the groundwater at 195 main street because of the weathered gasoline i suggest that you keep any development away from where the former DPW building is if you put it more more towards the easterly side of the site or even in the center of the site you should be away from that source of potential vapor migration into a building even if you did put it right on top of the worst spot as you said slab on grade with a sub slab depressurization system we can handle this level of of residual gasoline contamination such as that it will not be a game changer or a deal breaker or whatever type of building the town chooses to put there or whatever development the town chooses for that parcel um these those the metals problem and the volatile problem from gasoline um they're relatively minor and easy to deal with and it's something that existing technology has well in hand PFAS is another story but PFAS is not going to affect the buildings it's it's deep in the groundwater the groundwater depth um it's it's deeper than i would expect it's only about uh seven or eight feet or so at at the uh boundary with main street itself however by the time you get to where the middle school is the groundwater's um 30 feet and deeper which is pretty far down thank you very much all i have that was all set thank you mr gould appreciate you coming and and you know taking care of this testing for us i guess so i don't what's the next step here michael for this do you have one well i think mr gould has to go and summarize this and file the phase two report with the dep okay um and then talk about phase three and what we can do in mitigation is that about correct mr gould um i would also add that this is a public involvement plan site so before we can submit to phase two we have to put it out for public comment so there'll have to be a presentation of what we are going to do for the phase two report itself and they'll they'll be at a public meeting to discuss it um at this point um i don't know if it's going to be in person or virtual but we'll we'll definitely have one um i'll take those comments into consideration and we will get this in and we our deadline to do the phase two is november 1st of 26 so um we do have enough time to work this through i've i've in private conversation with with mr mccall i have mentioned that um i think that january perhaps february would be the right time frame to have this public involvement meeting so that we can explain this to the interested public and and uh get feedback all right thank you very much thank you appreciate it and um we look forward to seeing the report i guess all right um i'm going to um um number now um the liquor license items number 11 and 10 and we are going to now go to the energy and climate discussion this is on page now deal with the page number in the packet um please join us julie okay we're going to have um a review a discussion of potential vote on the election vehicle first policy and the decarbonation roadmap and potential vote to authorize um myself to sign a letter of support to accompany the town's climate leaders application we are going to because we have a lot to discuss we're going to defer the uh review the review of the uh the charge until the next time we meet so yeah so all right so we have a couple items before us um and i know you probably want to start with the zero emission vehicle policy first but i would i'm going to suggest we start with the decarbonization road map great idea yeah so you have any slide did you want to put your one slide up or probably do you have my one slide great slides by the way i was told to keep it brief impactful and clearly we follow our own instructions yes sorry about also the packet was about 180 pages so i figured yeah we're on a roll right so um i think the road the municipal building and vehicle decarbonation road page 90 i was just 96 96. thank you and um originally it was untitled but in order to be consistent with all the state reviews this and it requires a tri-annual review it's matched up to 25 to 28. that's why the date's on there and it's also that way on the agenda so um it was just two minutes on this one and then we'll have conversation with the board sure um so just to give context for the decarbonization roadmap um this is a one of the last criteria in order for us to apply for the department of energy and resources climate leaders program climate leaders is a step up from green communities we've been a designated green community since 2011. um green communities has provided us about seven hundred thousand dollars worth of funding over the last 14 years and that's in addition to utility incentives so you can probably get for close to a million dollars in funding for um building energy efficiency projects you know updating old equipment that kind of thing um it's been a really it's it's a very solid program um there aren't a lot of criteria to be a part of it um what we did pass back in 2011 um it was passed through a um a town meeting vote climate leaders is the next step beyond that once communities reach a certain level of funding through green communities there's really a lot less than we're able to do with that funding and so um climate leaders is the answer to that it gives us up to 1.15 million dollars for funding so now we're looking at um bigger energy um equipment replacement projects um you know things like investment in um electrification of our buildings um kind of think of what else i can give you in a in a two to two minute spiel um i think one of the things that's important to understand is that when you're looking at a building as a complex system we can't just replace with the electric alternative we have to do some studying we have to understand the energy systems within the building and we have to make smart choices that give us um a timeline that positions us to fully electrify a building over a period of time municipal buildings typically have a lifespan of 70 years equipment maximum lasts about 25 years and then it needs to be replaced so we're hitting that replacement cycle with a lot of our equipment what climate leaders will give us is the opportunity to electrify that equipment and position ourselves to be um to have our buildings electrified why does that matter the state has committed to um fully electrifying sector by sector by 2050. if you're looking at the lifespan of equipment that we bought purchased today if it's not electrified we're going to not be meeting the state greenhouse gas emissions goals in 2050 if we don't do that today
the roadmap really is a planning exercise i think that's important to understand there are so many details that need to be decided between putting this initial exercise together and what we actually make the decisions to do um when the time comes um we're not committing to doing anything beyond what we've already approved in our budget um really what we're opening up is the opportunity to leverage some additional capital to be able to replace our equipment um with the best alternative that positions the town in the long term to save money um we were focused on energy efficiency first um and replacing aging equipment we're not going to replace anything that doesn't need to be replaced there is enough that needs to be replaced and repaired um that we don't have to we don't need to invent projects um and i think more importantly the timeline as you all know um for grant cycles it takes a long time to get this stuff done so if we get um this decarbonization roadmap approved um and get support from select board to um apply for climate leaders by december 31st the first available time that we'll be able to actually receive funding is almost a year from now um so the longer we wait the more equipment that we have to pick out our you know out of our existing budget for and the less capital we have to leverage to be able to to do this work um what's more important and i think this to me is like the biggest carrot for this program it's one point one point one point one five million dollars per project so in theory we could apply multiple times we just have to get that we have to apply for the funding we have to have our project idea we have to get the equipment replaced submit all our grant documents and then we'll be able to do that again in the next grand cycle so and that's what we've done with green communities in the past that's what we can do with this funding as well it's a really big deal um there aren't any other programs available like this for communities of this scale and size um so it really is um a great opportunity i'm gonna pop in here so because everybody had a chance to read the roadmap to decarbonization and i'm going to hop in here and say i think this thing is so extremely well which is why i said we should start with this it's just as julie says it's a plan it accounts for all of equipment there's there's evaluation for every single building in here and these are some things we do in the years it also has what we've been looking for is the chart of the vehicles the year they would be they're up for replacement that kind of stuff um and all of these things does anyone have any comments or edits to this that they require make suggestions yes i just add that i had the opportunity to meet with julie and the chair of the energy and climate committee i was pleased to learn that it is a plan not a contract that it's a condition precedent to seeking funding and that to the extent that the town is in the queue earlier for a fixed amount of money our chances of getting the one point whatever is are improved as opposed to should we miss the deadline and going to the next annual round there are likely to be more communities uh that qualify and therefore more competition for the same model yes i agree with you mr fay um is it are there 13 other communities in the commonwealth that have adopted this program there are 24 communities that are currently climate leaders the program won't require us to spend uh any monies beyond the existing approved budget no that's all i have thank you um anybody else am i did do some research on this because i was most concerned about whether these grant funds are actually given out and they are there's plenty of it for years it looks like the budget's going up even more i do i have a lot of reservations about um just that the concept of it just because you're seeing a decline in um electric vehicles and there's multiple reasons why and there tends to be a lot of additional costs that towns are not prepared for um but you know just looking at it i think it's a cost positive for us so or benefit positive yeah so no other though i'm gonna i think we have to approve each one of these so i'd like to have a motion on approving this uh and first of all i want to apologize i didn't introduce you so don't ask yourself please hi everyone i'm julie um i'm the for them for the sustainability manager and project manager for the facilities department under my fam sorry i'm sorry once we get past three hours we lose so i would like a motion please to approve the decarbonization roadmap for 2025 to 2028. remove second okay any further discussion okay all those in favor say aye aye aye aye okay so we've got that so the next item is one we have seen a couple times which i think tell me what page it is on somebody uh page 89 page 89 please of the packet is the zero emissions vehicle first policy yeah i've seen a couple names in this zero emission vehicle first policy okay so we have seen this not from you but we've seen this about four times i think that um several of us on the board have uh tried to work on this and i'm i'm giving this because there are folks i think who believe that we don't support or we haven't been supportive of of um energy and sustainability and that of course is one of our overriding principles of fuel on our objectives that we try to act in that manner doesn't mean that we necessarily want to spend every time we have on it but it doesn't mean we do act in that manner however we have had some questions about this policy and i know the latest uh rendition has been through with some work we did with uh the chair of ecc with bill so i'm gonna send this over if you don't mind for bill to talk about that and where we are so if you can't move along here thank you bill um well julia's patiently walked through this with me again and uh i think some of the earlier concerns or questions about the board was the applicability and i think this draft makes it clear that this applies to light duty vehicles from a couple of sort of editorial suggestions but uh again i think this is uh consistent with what the town has been doing uh as far as replacing gas vehicles uh other than large vehicles such as fire trucks and payloaders and so forth uh but rather uh vehicles under i think 8 400 pounds um so i i think it's in pretty good shape i do have a couple of editorial suggestions and one question um to go through now or or else you want to do nothing mr mccall all i was going to comment on is i've worked with julie as well and i've gone through this and i and i think there have been enough modifications there are exemptions and considerations that would not really tie our hands allow us to continue to uh get the light duty vehicles being compliant with our own camp as well as um what the state is looking to do in order to be become uh green by 2050 so uh i i have no issue so back to the board's concerns mr whitney has the floor under uh definitions under excuse me for one second i'm sorry and you're amenable to these are not major changes in the last minor edits so that we can go all right thank you uh under the definition of exempt vehicles um the last line for a more detailed description see detention section in fact i think that section is called exempt vehicles good catch i hope there's no common problem i'm big on foreign revenue page two under purpose um there are four bullets first of which is the purpose of this policy is to accelerate adoption of the emissions reduction technologies um are we accelerating or are we maintaining codifying our current policy that's a really good question um because this is sort of standard language from other communities and other communities are looking to accelerate you're totally correct that this would just be continuing an existing policy um we are we're continuing um rather than accelerating yeah willing to make the edit for sure um is there a specific should we just get rid of the word accelerate to adoption continue adoption i agree with that as well thank you bill um page three applicability uh this policy applies to almost the departments of the town of wayland including the wayland public schools i don't know if this board has the authority to adopt a policy that's binding on the school committee or on the school board it's always a general policy you can't
the schools are supposed to sign off on this separately so to the extent of which it applies under the it's that board i don't know how the procurement works kelsey do you buy vehicles for the school committee i know i have no problem i have no but it's but they come to me for advice in the capital and they come to us for the capital this is one capital right that's campaign so i don't know if you want to go to the school committee has to sign off on it anyway
mr failing got to come up now sorry warmed your way right in
please thank you yes my director buildings um we do carry the in our capital budget on the facility so i think we one one way to handle it might be to just exclude the reference uh including wayland public schools so as to say it applies to all municipal departments of the town of wayland i like that works um vehicle procurement guidelines on that same page uh second complete paragraph all departments shall acquire the lowest missions vehicle and heavy equipment uh wonder if heavy equipment suggests something in excess of 8 400 pounds therefore it's which paragraph uh this it's after uh one two three four so it's all acquired those to mission vehicles and heavy equipment for municipal use i mean we could just remove the and heavy equipment that makes sense there are a couple of places where the policy talks about uh the town must do this and must do that um for policy i wonder if should is a better way to express um bill i highlighted the must because you mentioned this earlier today i do my homework there's a couple of shelves there are some shelves and there's some shoulds so i checked you had a word count going um at the top of page four i agree that that word should be should vehicle should be the most fuel efficient class not must um that is a little inflexible great um under implementation we use the word must um i would suggest that we keep that one specifically because we have reporting requirements through our current green communities program that requires us to explain when we are purchasing an internal combustion engine in replacement of a hybrid or electric so where's the must it's page four implementation departments procuring light duty ices must request an exemption in writing um and that's not a five page thesis that's just a you know two two lines of text that explain why could you go back to the third page under a white procurement under vehicle there's a there's a must there acquisition of the cev must be prioritized over a vehicle rather than it should i would suggest maybe a shell because it is a shell must or should you can um spin the wheel on that this is funny this is very important so happy it's only be careful we're not on the comments we hear all nice i've got a lawyer arguing with me with me i can't believe okay i think it's okay to soften the language but it is a zero emissions first vehicle policy so our other policies read a little softer so then it's more consistent yeah my last one is on the page five do we did we decide on the must shower often softer shower he must is out my skin i get the sense of there's no must i kind of like this must and shall are pretty much the same yeah there's good okay it should everywhere yeah no no we are on the next we moved back to page three oh tricked you um we're under electric first procurement three paragraphs under vehicle uh under electric oh all department shall acquire the lowest of the emissions vehicle is always one all right acquisition of a zev is the first should be prioritized overview by primarily second sentence last did you also hire this yes the concept is we'd like to be a little softer because that's all the rest of the policy degree there we go no someone else 30 page document there's no comments if it's five pages then bill i think i appreciate it um last is electric vehicle transition plan at the top of page five now we'll do that
under the town shall conduct a fleet baseline that's actually already been done but it's something that we will continuously do as part of facilities sustainability under the town manager
that actually to me this is when we did the formalize the finance michael knows what i'm going to say when we financialize the formal uh you formalize the financial policies you know when they were putting all this stuff and i kept saying to them do you really want that in there because that's process and then putting that before the board and i see a lot of process in this but i think these are kind of boilerplate that have come from yeah this is how everyone's accepting them there is a bit of you so you see the the once the board votes something they need to come back to us to make a change but if it's process it goes under like the town manager the department heads and so we were really careful otherwise do not have a lot of process in our policies so that it's easier to you know do the jobs the answer is facilities facilities yeah those are very substantive comments thank you anyone else have any comments on this policy am no i i have one about the surprise the financing in the most places it says in most places it says you know we'll work within the municipal budget but in a couple places and i think they're left over from the original or rafts it says in here that budgets will be adjusted accordingly and that that uh let's see near the end on the funding department should estimate up front investment requirements and budget accordingly in the capital budget requests it sounds like that if it's more they need to make that a priority the select board doesn't have the ability to prioritize capital projects we've delegated that now to the capital planning and improvement committee i want to make sure that we're saying working within the existing budget do you have it elsewhere and you have it in the road map so if you just check that one yeah um i'll give you a comment on that because electric vehicles although compare if you look at the example that i put on the slide which we don't get to see in view but you have in your packet um if you look on the the ford you know uh fleet website and e-transit which is the electric alternative is starting at about ten thousand dollars less than the internal combustion engine alternative right now that doesn't include incentives which would lower that initial cost um sometimes when we're looking at electric versus ice the numbers are slightly different when it comes to maintenance over the long term electric vehicles are far less maintenance we don't have oil changes we don't have filters to fix we don't have parts for our motors because there isn't a motor right um that being said there are there are um infrastructure costs because we have the charging infrastructure that we maintain so the reason it says accordingly is more to just say while now we have the budgets that we have and the vehicles that we have in the future there's going to be a shift in prioritization of how we we're not going to be um investing as much in technicians vehicle technicians but we may be investing in tech vehicle technology right i understand that but i still would like it to just be consistent that you know where it doesn't imply that the select board has now made policy for the capital plan they're like on a comic scene right so and if you're willing to do that then i will ask for a motion to approve so are you willing to change that finance or yeah i just i want to make sure that i understand where those references are before i right i don't want to miss you do you want to see uh the final copy before it goes out or would you like to look at us we can authorize we could authorize bill in the motion so i'd like a motion to approve and bill can have a look-see i move that the board approve the zero emission vehicle first policy with modifications discussed today as originally appearing in our packet and that we authorize select board member bill whitney to finalize any such modifications um with miscarriage do further uh uh authorize the chair to sign a letter of support that's match that's number three one at a time okay don't don't bother doug he makes good notes do i have a second please yes thank you all right any further discussion and all those in favor say aye all right um could you please also make sure you get the road map to the capital planning improvement committee they will want that data i can guarantee you um okay so then their holiday season homework carol this will be doing for the next couple of weeks okay great so the next item is that we have been asked as a letter in here for me for the board to authorize me to sign a letter of support to accompany the application there's no draft letter um going to ask the board is okay with that someone else who else drafts it for me and i just sign on our behalf and if you're okay with that motion please remove is there any second okay is there any further discussion okay all those in favor say hi could someone draft that letter for me yes there's an example in the packet so okay i'm sorry not in your packet in the department of energy resources packet for us all right thank you very much thank you thank you so much sorry for our tardiness thank you guys all right bye um so now i think we need to go back um i see some of them so i must have to go back to the um liquor licenses right
yeah okay so let's go back to the two liquor licenses so now we're going to have um discussion
potential vote to approve the amended on-premises retail annual all alcoholic beverages license for urban whalen village llc dba terrain located at 297 and 311 boston post road in whalen massachusetts 01778 we are inviting attendance by heather kranz hello good evening jennifer guss and is lily bianchi bianchini i don't believe she is on but our premises manager sabrina is on she's just on the attendee list sabrina moore here as well yes she is on the attendee list yeah okay so did we pull her over sorry for our delay we're obviously running late tonight but if you bring uh
he's gonna she's not an attendee yeah she's right there that's you know more madame chair yes uh we do not need a hearing for this right no no this is a um i will let them explain this but there has been the submitted hello welcome thank you for joining us sorry for the delay um i believe what happened was we approved this license and then when this paperwork was submitted to the state to the abcc right they had some uh edits and now we have to endorse those is that correct would somebody like to um verify what i'm saying yes that is correct so back in july you approved the license for 297 boston post road and 311 post road when we went to the state they said because there are two separate properties we actually couldn't put both of them under one license and so since 311 boston post road which is the smaller building we never intended to sell alcohol or sell food at that property we are just going to shift the license so only 297 is now going to be licensed okay so well our job here is to uh we lost you for a second there we are thank you our job tonight is to discuss this change and vote to approve the amended on premises so i think this is a pretty quick item someone want to make a motion and then we can have discussion it's item number 11 11 please what is the appropriate motion um it's to vote to approve an amended on-premises retail alcohol beverage
is that the correct motion is that all you need though is we the board moves to approve the amended version of the on-premises retail annual all alcoholic beverages licensed for urban wayland village llc doing businesses terrain located at 297 and 311 boston post road and wayland to reflect only 297 right the post road accepted okay do i have a second second thank you so many for the discussion okay all those in favor say aye aye all right i think we're all set there thank you is there anything else thank you so much thank you thank you so much for your time yeah probably we're so when it's so late but thank you you're good we just appreciate it okay all right thank you all right thank you i'm going to go right to number 12 now which is we need to approve the renewal of the 2026 thank you second okay the further discussion all those in favor say aye okay i want to go back now to number eight which i meant to say i was just skipping over and mr fay nearly jumped out of his seat we thought i was skipping it all together heaven never do that man uh can somebody tell me what page this is on so on the packet um what i had put here was in conjunction with the edc coming in and we've talked about this passing and other more time sensitive things kept popping up so we move this out but well thank you page 34 but i it says discussion of select board objectives but it's actually just the second select board objective or the third one which talks about us participating um develop and implement measure of progress on the route 20 corridor that promotes economic development and employment growth including integration of review functions and participating in the joint task force and we touched on this for like two minutes the last meeting and i asked mr fay if he would be kind enough to give us a draft um charge which is on page 36 in the packet so i'm going to let him speak to that please sure so one of our goals as a board is to take a close look at route 20 between unitarian church and the sunbury river in order to enhance its attractiveness and commercial success so many of our area towns have developed task forces just like these to improve their commercial districts so this is nothing new and so this uh proposed charge reflects participation from from keyboards and committees to look at everything from planning engineering that kind of economic development real estate development uh portable housing architectural design potential zoning changes that would be recommended to basically improve that district the individuals the appointees could be members of the boards and committees or simply be individuals could be designated by those boards and committees that we saw tonight we have some extraordinarily talented people in this town who i think would be terrific members of this task force to make recommendations to both uh to our board to uh get the process started uh there's an argument to suggest that this really should be initiated by the planning board but i have seen year after year how how hard the planning board works and their plate is simply full all every year all the time and i do think we have a little bit more bandwidth to initiate this um this task force and um i welcome any thoughts and uh proposed changes the only question i had was it um mentioned that the appointees were going to be um there were going to be voting members and i just wasn't sure what they'd be voting on well any board or committee um in town some more than some more often than others have to vote on to example we want to recommend this we want to recommend this we'll take a vote so that's essentially it um the charge that is submitted relative to zoning um doesn't call on this task force to sponsor to when it's so even to draft zoning articles rather make recommendations zoning is typically a planning board task um although the select board can initiate um zoning articles that's that's that's what's meant by voting members yeah comments or questions as you know as liaison to uh the planning board did discuss the discussion board appointing such a committee and the alternative having the planning board appoint such committee they declined those suggestions in the nicest possible way
citing the fact that they are presently working on route 20 zoning as well that being said i agree with mr fey that we have uh some terrifically talented and experienced people in town and in town and personally not sure that we would need a consultant rather withdrawing the expertise of those folks and specifically um the charge uh i had a question about uh this group advising on the selection of a curb cutting sidewalk engineer seems to me that's pretty straightforward civil engineering stuff and uh you know the location of the curb cuts is obviously important not sure that mr feya needs picking a civil engineer yes yes sir yeah so um thank you for doing this and i want to say this i tried to do it now and i tried documents for the board particularly where the public looks at our packets if we could write draft on things and you know i think the last couple times i did something at the bottom i put cm in the date so we knew i was the authoress or something um because i did get a lot of calls that's why i used that's why i used with proposed okay thank you i see that right um so i was hoping that um this couple things i was hoping that this charge could more follow like the extended charges we just put on the other advisory committees there's a lot of here where they're going to be reaching out to the town manager and i think we'd rather have them come back you know through us trying not to add to the town manager and the assistant tom and she's shaking her hand yes workflow that kind of stuff so i was hoping maybe we could give this another you know pass through and make it more consistent with the others and um i'm sorry just make that one so i can make a note make that point again can we more consistent with that extended expanded charge we had where you know they have to come back through the board for um approval to reach out to you know consultants and what have you and reach come through the the board versus the town manager first because michael only gets 100 emails a day doesn't need another 120. so i'm just i was just hoping we could be more consistent with what we're doing and that kind of stuff um and i'm a little bit concerned about this board doing zoning because i'm a big proponent and only one cook in the kitchen right because i noticed what we happened a few years ago someone a group just generously created zoning but then rather than looking at the picture what we want for zoning we ended up having to edit from that i think it took us longer to get where we were going so in the end i think maybe they could make zoning recommendations or something like that that would just be that's what and that's what this says basically but it says zoning if necessary and all uh whatever i just would like not to have those things and i think i think you know the idea is for example let's say there was an idea from mixed development on u20 where you'd have retail on the first floor and housing above it um that would be a uh something that need be done through zoning so that recommendation might be in their report yeah make a recommendation versus drafting it i think i saw some place in the right they might draft it and then i want to say something that's you're definitely going to jump out of the seat now get ready i would like to only because we are both equally elected boards i would like to reach out one final time because it's been about six months to the chair of the planning board to let her know that we're looking at this and that our our objective says we're going to we want to participate in a joint task force so see if they want to do a joint task force with us how they would envision it and then i expect to be able to report back on that at the next meeting i believe that the liaison just told us that he did that and they said they weren't interested that was about six months ago so i don't know bill do you think it's worth reaching out again sorry to put you on the spot you're much more persuasive is there going to be a liaison to this task force um yeah create one it's to me it's it's the most um i mean they're giving us a significant amount of power considered compared to other committees it says facilitate public tools as appropriate for public input and all of these are included but are not even limited in the scope that they're allowed so if you think about back to the edc when they just wanted to put out that one little questionnaire there was 12 questions not it wasn't even anything very serious like it requires like eight iterations and two board approvals trust me when i say i want to cut through all that red tape and i would i would have just let them do it i'm just pointing out the fact that this task force has more power than anything power is one word but how about ability to get things done right and learn what learn what residents really want when the library planning committee was organized you know they did i mean at least two surveys to to learn what people wanted so they could come up with a product that that did pass by maturity didn't get two-thirds but i think the task force most task forces there um the way they come up with recommendations is to learn what people want and what works you know in part and as well as what can work based on engineering and other other facts i'm just pointing out that this is so that was i'm okay with this almost across the board personally but i'm just saying that this is a precedent right yeah and that's why i said i think it should be more consistent with what we've done with good investments i'm sure tom will direct redrafted for us and so listen i'm going to volunteer since you all didn't agree to it now i'm going to volunteer i just feel i like to be respectful of other boards i think we've conducted ourselves very respectfully amongst ourselves and i think we do we've done a nice job with other boards let me just reach out one more time and the answer by next week just say this that many municipalities don't have a planning board do this by themselves and the reason is because they don't have the bandwidth right oh that's why we would have a joint group joint task force most of these task forces are created by select boards so this is not unique it's not rare and uh if the board doesn't like it that doesn't mean that this board shouldn't proceed with uh with it if if it's associated i've said last but again please one board doesn't like the idea it doesn't mean this board shouldn't pursue it if this is i didn't say we weren't going to pursue it i said i would like to just be nice i would really like to see uh select board liaison with us yeah so i think we have a little more work to do do you want me to help you with that yeah what i'll do is i'll i'll modify it based on your comment and i'll i'll pass it to you okay and you can um and i'll do my persuasive thing you didn't know what online is it is one of our objectives we do want to have some action on this we have agreed it's about a three to five year process is that what you said when we did these you have a couple years to get this done oh who knows all right um mr mccall um a couple things the assistant town manager and i'm wondering who you had in mind for a staff member staff liaison um you haven't got that far yet well just throwing it out there and then also with regard to selection responsibilities i would just throw in the caveat to the extent they aren't in conflict with procurement uh laws or any of my duties or obligations as the chief procurement officer because there are rules about delegating certain authorities and things yeah good point yeah yeah so many return we're running by calcia two yeah good good sound good you'll see okay with that yeah i mean they they can participate in processes but wherever it says you know been selected in that information that's typically good yeah good point not that i have to prove myself but i want you to see right there route 20 task force for one five i already knew it was probably gonna not too much all right so we've made some progress on that we're good um i think we can move on to i don't know what page you're on here i'm going to need help in the animal town meeting now what i wonder what we've done here is in the packet i think they're way down um look for kelsey and i've worked with galen and you know we're trying to get the town meeting thing articles in and the first group let me back up this up so we have about 25 i think we're going to have about 25 articles that we are going to submit to the warrant some of them are skipped articles and we not only submit them but consideration we know we're going to insert them so that is the first group this a and it's our article a through p these are all articles that we put in we're going we know we're going to put into the town warrant and they are standard articles the write-ups are in the packet if you've read them there were a couple um typos or wrong and i already spoke to um with jaylen earlier today and she's going to make those edits on those so if you saw anything in there that needed to be edited that will be done before they get submitted okay so what i'm looking for here is this is just an a motion to vote to submit and insert those articles a through p remove okay any further discussion okay all those in favor all right uh great that passes the second group we pull them out is these are articles that we might need they're standard articles but we don't know for sure yet because we need the information from someone usually it's the finance director so my suggestion is that we just vote to submit these so that's articles c h l m and n so moved thank you all those in favor all right thank you okay while we're on this on friday we will be having a meeting we're going to be talking about a couple items that will be new articles that we need to discuss and uh tom has a couple yeah i'll be brief um there's a need uh for the town to acquire a permanent easement from the new town room the new owner of the town center the section of boston post road and andrew avenue so that will be uh presented within the packet for our meeting on friday right and likely the second article that's related so it's it's uh less than 4 000 square feet and then the other one there's a construction easement that the town will have to give for the uh construction rail trail between sudbury and the whale mark and the other one that we're going to be discussing on friday is the pension obligation bond um i have brian kevin explain that to us it was on our packet a few weeks ago we didn't discuss it needs explaining so we're going to do that on friday morning as well what time is it set immediately starts at 10 10 30 isn't it 10 10 30. it's not 10 so i told tom it's 10 30 30. and i already told mr clinton she's 10 40.
it's all remote okay are you going to go 10 30. 90 minutes i think 90 minutes 90 minutes it's a data max 19 18. all right tell me energy report is next thank you oh great
just a couple items and i'll be brief um as many of you know we had a special election last week and the voters approved by 31 votes the question to convert the levy debt for the dpw facility into excluded debt i'm very thankful for everybody who came out and voted and for all those who supported um this suggestion that originally came from the budget working group um as you all know this provides us some additional cushion capacity in the event that the numbers don't break our way in terms of state aid or our health care numbers so we're we're hopeful at this point that we don't have to rely on this but time will tell there's a winter lights contest being sponsored by the recreation department people were allowed to make submissions uh through the rec department up until last week and as of today they should be posting out uh some of the locations to go check out home lighting displays and then you can vote on them through the rec department's webpage we will be having tom manager office hours i believe we decided on the 25th yeah i totally spaced it i i believe it has to be the 29th because um the last day of hanukkah is on the 22nd is that correct sounds right yeah so we moved it we moved it to the 20 we moved it to the 29th i want to stay yeah happy
for december holiday hours and new year's just a reminder that the town offices will be closed on thursday december 25th and january 1st uh 2026 which is a thursday as well a couple of items that just happened in the last week the several of us appeared at the weyland human rights day which was celebrated last week at coa jameel adams was the speaker um everybody uh recited the lines out of the u.n human rights declaration in various languages from the various residents in weyland who have cultural and ethnic backgrounds they read their lines out and it's a great presentation and i also want to mention the dpw has posted its snow and ice policy you can find it up on their webpage if you go to the dpw webpage on the town of weyland it's listed uh underneath their policies and speaking of the website we are still working towards um migration in a new platform to be released later this month for everybody and that's what i have madam chair thank you very much um remove the consent calendar i just want to go ahead second somebody so you do know that there is a supplemental packet and in the supplemental packet there is a revised consent calendar so the original agenda had um four items and they revised as six so just to make sure everybody knows what they're voting on i would ask that we pull out the the items that were added today okay so could you adjust your motion please as uh i'll withdraw the motion and move that we this board approve the consent calendar for the summer 15 2025 consent calendar being the amended consent calendar found in our supplemental packet items one two three and four only exactly okay any further discussion otherwise it's going to be all those in favor aye aye thank you motion passes five zero okay items number five uh five please my question pertains to each of those items uh we received an email 320 today with a 73 page supplemental packet i personally did not have an opportunity to review them i'm not comfortable voting on them unless there is an immediacy to um would you like to address that mr mcone i'm getting careful i don't know that it's a 73 page i think the first 43 was the original consent but the additional was about the um um what's that initial this sow something what do you do with fiber optic fiber optics and then number six is a gift that the talentless uh recreation has received because it's just the very last minute nature of the thing uh you know we all try to be diligent review our material it's just uh difficult to be responsible there's a little opportunity to respond and i may have told the fib here there are three items added so let's can we start with number seven would you mind if we started with number seven that that came in and it's a request from the planning board and i'm gonna have to have michael help me with this this actually is a good thing ordinarily what happens the articles come in and then once the board uh gets all the articles are packet of all the articles we look and see there are some zonings we send them back to the planning board and ask for a report the planning board is trying to do and then what happens is by the time they they post their hearing they hold the hearing and they should report opt-in it's either just before we're closing the warrant after the warrants closed or they don't make it at all so this year to be in a timely manner or more timely like they're asking for us to authorize michael as the signatory for except uh excuse me where was these things uh can we to refer the zoning articles on number five for the zoning articles for them for review you know so we would authorize him to do it all we do is receive them and review them but i would like michael to speak to this was a bit of going back and forth on this today so but i do agree with you bill i don't like late packets our state statute the select board has to refer zoning articles to the planning board so that they can conduct a public hearing and make a recommendation back we did this last year and unfortunately well i won't say unfortunately most of those were by petitioning came in late and forced the planning board to scramble to fit in the public hearings um in a timely manner so as to get reports back to the board so i think what you have here is any board is trying to be proactive and ask that this review process and the referral happen earlier but does not have come friday instead of on monday okay and is that the words which these three items to consent on friday then you're going to be there 93 minutes why don't we do that
no problem i don't i don't have a substantive issue i suspect with the material since i have i haven't read it but it's just i have i have to tell you that this year i have had in general tried to get supplemental packet time in advance this one just bounced so i do apologize because i do have control but i think if there's if we create the expectation right it's is it then uh oh you just want me right you'll be there start reading it now okay let's go to the minutes please we have the minutes from november 17 and december 1st you want to do remember 17 does anyone have any well do we have a motion number one move approval of the minutes from november 17 25. okay great does anybody have any edits is that amended that motion it is and did somebody second it second thank you now let's have discussion with the edits and the edits okay i guess there aren't any then so what about the minutes did the motion include both sets did not okay so let's take a vote on these please all those in favor of the minutes on the 17th say aye aye thank you okay i didn't intend would you want to abstain okay move approval of the second i have to finish this so five zero one go ahead your court package i'm sorry you've just packed the court you added to select
what is he saying three lawyers in the room and look what i'm doing here with approval of the minutes of december 1st 25 has amended okay any edits i think i had some in another packet but i wasn't nice okay
anybody have any edits on this one
under the discussion of the water resource thing done very bad last sentence it says it was the sense of the board to continue to consider the hybrid funding approach is that what we were doing i thought we were considering the all water rate we considered all options consider all options okay great um anybody else have anything right most in favor say aye okay correspondence yes um michael i'm going to ask you to speak on this one correspondence anybody have any comments so um we have received okay first of all i want to mention in my exciting life now i've had my town emails months and i sent out an email to 435 my nearest india was correspondence which has created a number of problems including they not only did that but somehow i seem to be missing some emails oh but so i don't know if i've responded to everybody who has written us but if i've missed one let me know because i'm a couple popped up today from last week i don't know what's going on here nonetheless um we are getting a lot of correspondence about the sherman bridge brood uh bridge repair project it's not a renovation project is that i didn't sorry nothing he hasn't heard about shannon oh you haven't heard about that i'll call you tomorrow put me on the camera for about 40 minutes um and one of the things that's coming up now that concerned me and i asked michael if he would address and i had my um um holder wrote me a little uh spiel today too is this reference to this 1971 agreement and so i'd like michael to speak to it you know on the tape and then i will be addressing for the ones with this spiel so if you don't mind michael tom holder responded to it as well today yes it really would uh uh plan is here to try and explain it on camera for those who weren't party to the the question we've received several pieces of correspondence the board and my office relative to um a letter that came out in 1991 about sherman's bridge making reference to a meeting and an agreement with residents um and the agreement being between the then select board or board of selectmen and the residents um and supposedly agreeing to a bullet list of items and so it's been raised a couple times i i believe it may have appeared at one point mr stott's fact book um and several people have shared slides uh in their correspondence to us saying we need to adhere to that and so my office uh um working with the clerks went through the archives and we went through the meeting minutes for the border selectmen and we look for anything from the road commissioners back in 1971 and 72 we found minutes that talked about the residents coming in there's a list of residents that came in and spoke and that they said that they would talk about um this and there was a question about the takings and that uh the select board said they would work to change the layout of the takings but there is no agreement memorialized anywhere in any of those minutes or in any other document nor in the taking documents themselves are there any references to these list of conditions that mr stouffer alluded to in this 1991 letter we actually located where he was living mr holder did have a conversation with him at one point and he said you won't find it because it was a a verbal agreement between the residents and the select board that they would try and adhere to this uh further we did speak with town council that said you know absent any writing in a 51 year old verbal agreement does not really bear any weight at this point in time so i had given all the meeting minutes that we found from that era that mentioned sherman's bridge i've scanned them i provided the town clerk because we did receive a public records request so they will be sent to the you know some of the people that are concerned um in that neighborhood but there is no agreement that we were able to find no actual written agreement binding agreement so i'll forget any more of those i'm going to respond accordingly to that but any anyone else have any comments of anything from the correspondence just that we uh heard from gene millburn today about exploring the idea of an updated master plan since the last one was done over 20 years ago um i'm just wondering if at some point we should have a discussion about the pros and cons of the concept i think it's on my list too it's kind of in so doug has segued into select board reports and concerns does anyone you are you having any others i know it's okay um two items i noticed in the vacancies tom board the committee said i think there are four vacancies for the human rights diversity equity and inclusion committee and i'm wondering whether that committee might want to entertain reducing the numbers of that committee i think the idea should come from them not from us but uh maybe something they want they may want to consider um number two richard turner made a comment um many many meetings ago about a flagpole at the cocc i didn't know whether where that stood probably not a good time of year now to deal with a flagpole at the cocc but that's yeah we know what's been ordered and it's just as soon as we get it there i believe mr fey has plans to get it right up because mr turner uh he makes it well known that he would like us to expedite this in a good way in a good way we like richard i do not have no okay um i have a couple here um i booked the schedule for through january it was in the packet and it's also on the web page i am working on the february schedule i'm trying to coordinate with the the chair of the finance committee because there's some things we have to do together and i don't want to book us and then end up with extra meetings and so as soon as i get that we'll give it to you um i also went to the united nations um program the the hrd i put up and which is lovely february inspiring um evening and of course there was michael reading his little thing last year he did it in german this year he did it in celtic irish i can hardly wait to see what it comes up with next year i'm doing mine in english i mean i could be spanish but like 10 other people are doing spanish so i mean this is so just want to let you know just to throw me up all the time um i did represent us last week uh saturday at the holiday stroll as well we the select board have been invited um to the america's 250 and february and i'm supposed to ask i think i thought you're going to get an invite but it's february 8th on 2026 at the village green in preemingham there's going to be a presentation um regarding the knox trail and we're going to be commemorating the 250 anniversary henry knox and his noble train of artillery so we have been asked to speak so i myself and michael will give it something to say but i'm supposed to tell you please put it on your calendars i think we're getting a plaque okay um and i think um at the moment that's more than enough so happy to move to adjourn this week at 1004 1004 thank you sorry about that all those in favor hi thank you see some of you recording stopped