January 21, 2026 – Capital Improvement Planning Committee – Video & Transcript
January 21, 2026 - Capital Improvement Planning Committee
in progress
the meeting may be recorded it's reported that we made a job open public on white hands as soon as possible after the meeting pursuant to chapter two of the acts of 2025 this meeting will be conducted in person or beyond mode of access importance from the law you may watch it participate remotely immediately on the website or in person in the slide or in person if there's any public comment comment to the agenda so 6 p.m this call order reviewed and good public announcements we do not have any announcements six and five public comment and the virtual response 6 10 limited review of articles submitted by the downtown meetings
6 30 review of fy 27 requests that were now recommended for inclusion 27 capital budget as well as fy 28 through fy 31 department lower class to determine whether to include in the fy 28 to fy 41 capital and including by the disorders 8 p.m discuss and vote amendments if any to get these reports the town manager 8.45 review and vote for improvements of july 14th 8.55 topics not reasonably anticipated by the chair for eight hours prior to post day penny and setting the times of our meetings and 9 p.m is adjourned do you have any members of the public
and i lied i do have an announcement um that is so that we didn't see i did get draft draft actually the actual report out uh yesterday so that was sent to the town clerk as well as the town manager and the finance director and also included anybody who's ex-officio otherwise members of people but department managers that uh given us information as well as chair of the findings committee the chair of the school committee and the arts lab work nice work i think um rad for being my my peer reviewer or my proofreader um and obviously brian for all the tables and inputs that he has provided throughout the process i would not have been able to to do this without that so thank you both and she needs to look at you know yeah so carol is saying she can't access the meeting from the calendar page and somebody
as far as you know is liz not able to attend tonight uh liz told us that yes that's what's going on okay all right so did get some feedback from the whole folks or just to me when we get to talking about future requests i'll do that um um some problems work reminding me that you know some top holder um sorry i said that last time again when we get to the the agenda item on future capital requests i did get emails that i had just reading out from tom holder and um commentary on projects so i just wanted to make sure we talk about them all right and then carol is joined carol you got in can you hear us yes thank you i don't think the link's working the one on the website's not working the one on the calendar page it sends it to the um agenda versus to the zoom page the first agenda item um i hope to get through the select board meeting materials um just to make sure there wasn't anything else but i do know from from carol um that the select board voted to submit um an article that they asked for our opinion on um whether or not it was capital so um talk about that one carol do you want to give sort of an overview of it sure um real quick in 2024 there was a budget task force which brian participated in and there was another one this year that both brian and i participated in and obviously we're looking at you know the budget's very tight and how do we find additional revenue sources and both committees recommended that we look for some new growth opportunities in town so we the passive option is we wait for a developer or we go and look at some town land so this was presented to the board in november and then we instructed the um town manager to have us let's look at some properties that might be available for for developing and unfortunately the town owns a lot of land but not necessarily too many large parcels so there is a parcel over on 25 holiday road that has on just under 14 acres so the select board discussed this this now we're probably end of december beginning of january discussing this the land does not belong to the select board so the options were go to town meeting and ask the school committee to transfer the land to the select board and then we could um you know do some due diligence or try to just do some due diligence and then when we went to town meeting if we thought we were going to proceed with development to um be able to say we're asking for the land transfer and this is the reason it's almost like a chicken and an egg situation where if you go to town meeting and ask for land they'll say what are you going to do but you've got to do some engineering and appraisals and perk the land in order to come up with um some potential uses so the select board has put in we've only voted to insert we haven't excuse me submitted uh initially that and we're looking for about 200 000 the number needs to be refined um and we're going to be doing what i said some engineering um possibly appraisal possible some perking to that with the intent of um to come back next year to town meeting if all pans out with the development plan so it would not be a capital build project in the future if um at the moment that's what our hope is um i did have a conversation with the town manager and the um finance director this morning because i said you know we really should have a funding source in place before we go um any further and it appears kelly you and i were right we are going to use the it's called was it receipt of real estate um sales um so that's in a nutshell real quick so i just forwarded in about what they have to do about before they do the article um my we don't have to decide this right tonight we've got some time to think about it um but i think my concern was it is over 20 000 right presumably a study of the use of the property has a useful life of more than five years however um in going through the capital policy it's not going to be used for a future capital project right it's a study to decide whether or not it's saleable right for what i i hesitated on whether the capital policies were meant to be exhaustive lists of what you know what constitutes a capital project or if it was meant to be a broad definition of what a capital project is and so i wanted to it's not my call right um wanted input from the committee on this and i see it's our new committee and the policies all the pieces of them may have been in existence in the past right they are in our platform already um wanted to to discuss it
so if i think carol start out by saying um focus at the moment is how do we generate new growth revenue for the town on the other hand if all the same work was being done under the purview of the school committee in advance of proposing a new school or if based on the work uh the determination was we want to use it for recreation all of which would be town capital assets i think in those scenarios probably is within the purview of this committee uh i don't know that the select board other than the genesis of this was how do we generate new growth that that they're necessarily able to limit what the ultimate use is so i kind of view it as unknown um if it's strictly going to be used for private development um although even there i could foresee a scenario where you do this work uh you get enough positive um back in the testing that you decide you want to rezone it so there's legal work and so you're you're sort of enhancing the ultimate value of a town capital asset i.e raw land land or could become developable land um so that under that scenario you could argue that it is within the purview of this committee if it's strictly you know perk it appraise it and maybe a preliminary feasibility study not real engineering work and then you're handing it off to a developer through an rfp process and they do all the permitting everything else now you've spent money on what is a private development and i think that last scenario my view probably wouldn't be something that you know would come especially in the purview of the capital plans the question is what is it at this stage um i guess yeah i agree if the ultimate goal and it sounds like the ultimate goal isn't necessarily known it but if the ultimate goal is that the land would be ultimately uh sold to a private developer for development and i tend to agree that i don't see that as a capital lesson and unless we had to do like remediation and do some other work to then hand it off maybe but in this case which we have had to do so if we and others you know use all your thoughts about right similar somewhat similar situation right where the town decided to sell it to the developer and in that process turned out where those asbestos on the property and you had to do project enough so it can turn that way i a good point brian right that at this stage you're not going to determine the outcome yet of how you're going to use it i think carol in my my personal opinion depends a little bit on what this what the project is excuse me one second kelly you're coming in so garbled i wonder if you need to move that little microphone to to the right of your there thank you so i'm sorry your personal opinion yeah my personal opinion is it does it might depend a little bit on what the content right or what the request is in this study right is the study very narrow to i want to you know figure out how much this land is worth so i can sell it or is the study tell me what this land can be used for right based on it's its current you know condition whatever i think it matters a little bit on intent in the study but i think it could be a capital project if that intent is broader than just tell me how you know tell me what i can sell it for right um so do you have a sense yet is it too early in a sense yet and what the yeah so that is the because this is one of these things that's just like i said popped up really around october november and then we started looking into it um so we haven't totally defined even what we think we're going to need for funds we're guesstimating 2000 it'll be it'll be refined as we go through the process here but i believe the consensus we've not taken a vote the consensus of the board is to develop new to have a new growth resource here new tax growth and the highest new tax growth option we all know would be development um i think though realistically if you've been in there and we this is out of my area so forgive me if we you know did some testing or perking or whatever and found out that wasn't and had to come back and say okay this is good for a field then i agree it becomes a capital project and it gets into the queue as a possibility for a field location for example um but i believe the intent is to increase our tax base that's that's our goal goal i think that i think if that's the intention it would seem that they'll be directing the appraiser to praise it the highest and best use they'll be suggesting to the firm doing the feasibility work for them um you know to look at housing options of various sorts uh they'll be perking it for for seeing what the maximum number of bedrooms uh are i think if that's the intention um maybe you say for now probably doesn't fall inside our definition but as the process evolves um and certainly when it gets to the end of the process as carol just said if based on their preliminary work they conclude that it can't be used for those other purposes or there's a groundswell and again this all presumes that the school committee uh is agreeable to give up control and custody of that parcel which they're in the middle of long-term planning for elementary schools and this site is one that they've held for potential elementary school um and i have no idea how feasible it is or isn't and so uh you know i guess i'm not troubled by saying for the moment it doesn't it doesn't kind of fall within our bailiwick but it could yeah i i i'm i agree let's move forward i'm comfortable at right now carol based on what you described it doesn't fall within the committee but if that remit for what that studies look like if we're coming down the pike towards town meeting and it turns into something broader than selling it right then i think that could change how how we feel about it and i don't know if there's a i still want to set precedent but there's suppose there's also a path where i don't see what it's strictly within our remit but you still want us to look at it to avoid right but anything any concerns being brought up that it wouldn't go through this process so i'm on the fence i think as it stands right now doesn't feel like it necessarily fits under our review but if that were to change it might be too i think um when i wrote to kelly i think you realized i was kind of on the fence too it's the first year of the committee and we have been the sponsors of creating the committee and we certainly did want to be the poster child for the first ones that uh said oh geez oh after we got to town meeting so i thought it was prudent uh to come forth and say this is what's happened we actually as i described didn't even have this on our thoughts or we hadn't even had a conversation about this until mid november by then of course we're past time to submit capital so um i did want to speak to you i can what i can do is um as we go through the process just sort of keep sending you some updates you know if we do now until meeting if you read i'm sure brian has already read them if you read the articles that were submitted you'll see the little background information i wrote about 150 words there basically said that the intent here is to see if we can find a source proactively find new growth to help the tax base so and we do we have reached out just have started reaching out and speaking with the school uh department and the school committee you know about the land certainly we're not going to go to town meeting without having had those conversations a little more formalized than they have been um i think if it's as you described carol and kelly has summarized um it might be useful and it may have to appear in the finance committee's write-up so you would have to whoever's the stock board liaison in the article might need to work with them might be worth putting in a sentence or two like you know just saying uh this this request was discussed with the capital improvement planning committee and for the for now based on the intent it was determined that it was it wasn't within their purview or something to to you know proactively answer the question um yeah i i i'm gonna refrain from doing any sort of vote tonight i what i'd rather do is as we get a little closer and it develops right and we have a little more information we we take a vote um just in case it changes in a way that um makes it okay i will keep you informed the best i can you do know all our article write-ups and you remember this all both of you have to be done by mid-march so um we will be starting our discussions of this probably this article in the february 2nd or february 9th um to start yeah yeah yeah you might you might consider carol i don't think it applies to respect to the appraisal because where the schools to proceed or want to proceed or at least investigate proceeding with a new elementary school there it's quite possible they're going to need some sort of preliminary feasibility engineering so when you talk to them you might see are there any things that they think on a preliminary basis they would need themselves were they to decide not to give up control that if you're going to be doing this work anyway it's cheaper to do it all together
i'm sorry but i really think that we are going to get um like i said have more formal uh conversation with the school committee before we go to town meeting i just can't foresee myself if i won't i'm not the liaison on the article but i just cannot foresee the select board then um presenting this to town meeting without having had serious dialogue and conversations with the school committee you know about potential use you know and does it make sense for it to be evaluated for potential new growth or do we need it for school buildings i mean we really but the idea is we're going to try and make a decision here well but the answer is you may not know until you do the investigation well that's true and they may not know until you do the investigation if the investigation says you really can't feasibly put a school building here that clears the way for them to feel comfortable giving up control if it comes back and says you could and you're still looking at the new growth option you've now used the money to get to a decision point and that then that's a decision do you then are you able to come back at some future town meeting looking to transfer control um so i just don't know if they'll you know you'll have the conversation i'm not sure they're going to necessarily have all the information they need to make a definitive decision before you go to town meeting and giving up control i can't speak for them it's it's a platform yeah yeah yeah if they're a hard no then yeah
you know essentially just close it up by saying essential the select board is doing the due diligence that we think needs to be done thank you um okay i'm going to say before i'm going to probably say for a little bit of a little meaning but i'm going to hop in if i may and say i read the report it's fabulous thank you you're welcome we still have work to do but uh as i said in my email i just wanted to delay getting up 27 or due to us so okay um i did not have a chance to look maybe carol i still have you here i could not look at the rest of the articles and have a chance to before tonight brian if you did yeah other than i don't know if there are any petitioner articles i haven't seen anything yet but i don't think any of the other articles um you know the only ones we thought might have the possibility were in the cpa articles and i i don't see anything that's changed there so so then it's just it's just me to answer that question yes please okay hi oh sorry i forgot to introduce myself in the beginning sorry carol martin on lake road remember the select board okay um there are seven petitioner articles one of them has to do with an asset management plan of our capital i think in there i think the request is for um the select board to either review it or something but i don't think it has it's not a capital project um and then there are two that i don't know what they are um and then there are four pertaining to the sherman bridge the bridge on sherman bridge road about regulating i had the couple of had to do with traffic one with the design that may in fact um be something that do you want to look at brian um i believe those articles were being certified and they may have been finalized today and once they are they'll come out to the select board okay yeah because on sherman bridge up to this point you know when i get them how's that yeah up to this point we've been told by tom holder that he's not anticipating needing any additional pound capital for that project so if the petitioner's article is asking for you know additional bells and whistles that will require capital that probably falls within our purview but having said that i would also uh and i brought this issue up while i was still on the fincom um um to the extent it's a petitioner article i'm not sure this committee can block anything going to town meetings during the working group petitioner article falls outside i mean obviously knowing awareness of it is important but we can't write a petitioner's article is a petitioner's article they're allowed to to bring it before the town so awareness good but i don't there's no we can't mandate that it has to go through this process and i believe it's the first yes i'm just going to throw a couple thoughts out that just went through my mind is it is petitioner's article they are entitled and by right by law code to be included in the warrant and heard a town meeting however i would get a ruling from our opinion from someone because our code now says uh capital projects don't get approved to tell meaning unless they've gone by the committee yeah essentially why i'm here because i'm making sure we're not violating the rule yeah i was going to comment on that carol so when when the um the bylaw language came forward i raised this issue and sought advice to town council through the town manager and the best i could get uh was a verbal representation by i think the town manager that he had gotten that input something that effect and i memorialized that advice or input in the minutes for the meeting at which i asked that question for fear that we would get down the road and there'd be no legislative history i was trying to get the language changed yeah in the in the bylaw so that this wouldn't be an issue and the best i could do is get what i call legislative history um and so i'll dig that out just for benefit of this group as to what was in the minutes of that meeting uh now whether in the future someone wants to say well i'm sorry that's not what the bylaw says um that that that becomes a different issue yeah i don't i guess my opinion is i don't think it's it would be harmful for the committee to look at petitioner's requests and have comment on them i just the we put in in the bylaw that everything has to go through right if it doesn't go through our process it can't be included in the town managers recommendation but the petitioner's article would be outside could be outside of that anyway well with town council what i was trying to get town council a pint on for us was that it would be repugnant as they say the state law because there is a state statute as to petitioners articles going directly before town meeting they don't need to get you know voted into the warrant by the select board for example so uh anyway i'll circulate the minutes from that fincom meeting so everybody has it i would not expect us to uh feel obliged to have to opine but i agree kelly that uh it's helpful for us to know what's going on and particularly because it may ultimately affect what tom holder thinks the dpw needs to do um you know for example if it was directing tom the dpw to do something specific and then tom holder come came back and said i've got to revise um you know our capital request for from zero to something if that's coming internally that may be a different story um the other thing it's it's not you know money but i would be interested in whatever this other article is once they're available about an asset management plan for town capital assets is that what it is carol yes but i'm i'm i mumbled and bumbled before because i'm not a hundred percent certain exactly so i'll wait till i get it if you don't if you don't get in a couple days brian um let me know and i'll get to it yeah also they'll get posted on yeah but yeah so it'd be interested whoever's petitioned that what what their particular uh interest is and um i would like to think if it is town-wide capital assets that they would come forward and share with us kind of what their thoughts are what they're looking for and then my last thought is which we didn't think of kelly when we were on this committee is that um is there i know your advisory to the town manager but is there a situation where the capital improvement and planning committee uh planning and improvement sorry committee wants to all pine on uh on our a capital um item that goes before town that hasn't gone through the process do we do it through the finance committee comments do we do it through the do we have to make a yeah okay so maybe we have to do it through the if you have
over the years on the finance committee right there used to be everybody and their brother put a vote in in in the finance committee um write-ups and that got limited down to only the finance committee and the bodies that right actually had control over whatever the particular article was so i don't think we want to add cipc to like a whole separate process i think we can consider if you know i wanted to add right a paragraph or a sentence or two on cipc's position position on a particular article i think that would be okay but i don't want to create a whole separate no i like that but i'm thinking there might be somewhere you want to reach out to the finance committee and say here's our position on this article talk to the liaison you know we're learning as we go here about how we're going to do this so yeah and at the moment we're we're talking about about possibly two articles the first one we talked about which um we said depends right probably not initially and the other one is the petitioner article which we don't think i mean we might have an opinion on it but it's not that relevant yeah um i agree with kelly and i think our report should i you know had we had any of these available prior to issuing a report which we typically won't to extend our report has to be done by october 15th um uh but i suppose that's not to say that on some agenda prior to town meeting this committee might you know want to look at article i mean it has to there might have to be right i know the bylaws says october 15th but given the way capital goes and the way budget creation goes the likelihood that we could issue something on october 15th and never have to issue an addendum before town meeting it's like no no right because stuff's going to come up and the bylaw says other than emergencies i don't want to get into a debate about what's an emergency i think there's going to have to be a process to just we're going to have to amend right take another we get something hot by the 15th but we're going to have to amend for new information prior to town meeting i just don't see a way to do it otherwise makes sense okay um so i'm we can revisit i'll put it on the other one once we have all the articles i'll send them to you guys if there's these petitioner just so that we have full view and to the extent anything changes carol you'll let us know on the on the holiday road one um i do before as we're getting into future projects uh fy28 through fy31 i wanted to bring two things to your attention after i sent out the report i got two emails um one from michael feta he said his only concern is the public safety hvac which we had not included in the 2027 plan um we pushed it
that's medium number two wasn't it yes it was um he said that that is on its uh one compressor out of four um i'll be utilizing some age dollars to purchase the equipment so we'll be ready for install the requested 27 dollars would be used to complete the work um including some controls and updating the vavs um i'm happy to discuss so that changes a little bit i mean so i would say if we're going through the 20 to 31 projects i think we might have to revisit if there's something i can swap out and my other question we did put it as our like hey if there's anything else available this would be a good candidate for their surplus capital right dollars to to cover that i mean why don't you talk about tom holder's email and then we talk about process because it seemed to me unless we draw the line uh you know ultimately the town manager has to create a budget and so i think i'm not saying we amend necessarily so i would say as we're going through prioritizing the rest of it it's good to have that in mind well it sounds like that one might pop immediately to right top of the heat but it sounds like he's saying you can't wait till fiscal 28 yeah and so that to me sounds like town manager you need to figure out how to squeeze that one into the fiscal 27 budget and if you need to knock something out or find the resources yeah right um uh and then the other one is it is it worth asking him relative to the school hvac which is 500 somehow thousand that we had as medium number one yeah um ask him of those two which is is is the public safety building more urgent i'm gonna i didn't ask him i'm gonna assume it is because that's what he okay we he calls out he's calling them out right um okay and then um holder we learned that the construction costs for the dudley road water main replacement has increased to 1.17 million rather than the 1 million currently requested he sent me an estimate we're requesting funds for the base bid only asking that we increase we add that to the capital budget and i think similar to what you just said these are things that i this one in particular because it's a change in estimate we're not going to we can't go back and redo the capital plan for every change in estimate i don't envision that as being part of the bylaw requirement that we've seen the project right isn't like well did you see it in that exact dollar that it's going to end up at that's got to be a town manager um right okay i got a tweak especially when we've already submitted yeah right yeah so yeah i mean if we're in the process and probably we'd update it but once it's submitted yeah because everything's going to be up or down that becomes a different issue yeah and these are just two examples of what traditionally has happened at the fincom level where how many days has this been four for now less than 24 hours right so that was which is a little troubling i mean i don't know when tom holder got the s-man but but we've been we've been sending the uh minutes and the spreadsheets to our ex-officio members and uh and and to his credit mike fea has responded a couple times to me along the way saying so far i think i'm fine but obviously there's so much detail and um maybe he just realized that that so the the report is from tate and howard and it stated yesterday that's that's on tom holder's piece yeah yeah yeah yeah and then on mike fea's pieces that he may have just dismissed it in terms of how we were categorizing it in massive detail so but uh yeah it's it's a little frustrating uh you know with all the disclosure to people that you you still find yourself in a this and this is very late i mean normally the capital budget from the town manager has been delivered to the fincom probably late december uh so i'm sure that's right and then continue to change up until and through right through town meeting so it's not as if when it got delivered to to fincom it was ever so usually it was emergency type things but the question is do you feel a need from a process standpoint to have the committee review comment on either or both of these emails um um right i i would like to come comment back right that we appreciate the additional information at this stage right it's up to the town manager we've reviewed both projects it's up to the town manager to make adjustments um and you know make your case with him accordingly right but i don't i don't think that we have to do anything else yeah i just want to actually keep giving us the information because obviously we'll you know i don't want them to call let's go to him stand and not tell us so yeah so i can i if you're okay i will i'll communicate that like we want to keep we want to keep sharing the information with us right because we want to stay and continuous like knowing what's going on but at this stage it's up to the town manager to to make adjustments for for things like this yeah and i'm not i don't know if you want to even say it but if we were having this conversation two weeks ago i i in light of those two requests i'd probably figure out how to make room in what we did for those two items with that that additional request uh so i don't want them to feel like we're unsympathetic to oh no i'll i'll be nice about it like it's not it's nothing against it's really just the process we have to draw the line with the submission of being there it's that moves to execute yeah well to your point isn't isn't there's gonna be a lot more of those next year assuming we submit a report on october the 15th there's gonna be a lot more post report yeah i think i divide them into two categories though right so in both of these cases the projects were submitted to us we did review them we made a decision based on what was reviewed in the case of the hvac we decided not to include it but we did put it like hey it's next in line it might uh sorry michael mccall is how manager has complete ability because we reviewed it it's considered in the plan to pull it in on dudley road bar name replacement we reviewed the project that the estimate changed that's going to happen all over the place unless i i would say unless the estimate was a million became two right something where it substantially changed the nature of the project i don't think that's any different than the ones we didn't include like it's still up to michael mccall to say okay we're going to keep these amounts right as we get closer if new projects come up or right completely new that weren't considered i think that's a different story that it gets into is an emergency because unless it's like you know back during covid years right when this happened you didn't have this committee but there was considered right ventilation needs at schools were an emergency it had to go in right and that got handled kind of the tail end of the process i think even after it's been found um so that's fine but if it's just like oh well you know priority changed i want to i want to do this project that wasn't on the list then i think it has to come back here otherwise here i mean other other than that the only other way to another way to deal with it which would be unfortunate would be if we're dealing with this for an october 15th report and taking position would be to have to carve out a contingency uh if we're looking at resource resources available saying we're going to have to stick you know a half a million dollars and not allocate any project to it knowing that inevitably there'll be things that pop up which is a another way to do it that way you could also do like opposite of what we did where we said hey if there's any more money there's these two projects you could do the opposite and say if something else comes up the first ones to go these are the first ones to go but i still think by the bylaw we have to review the actual request right so i just there's we're gonna end up needing to do addendums i just these right as of right now these aren't things that i think qualify for that um so i'll respond accordingly we appreciate the additional information we want you to keep sharing that information based on the bylaw and where we are in the process this is this is the time and the fact these were included right in what we consider the town manager has the wherewithal to add them yeah projects are approved they're just they were considered they've met the requirement they were considered by crpc town manager has the wherewithal to adjust um or adjust amounts or adjust projects as he sees fit that was good okay so next up is to start the process of talking about
i felt so accomplished yesterday guys um um that's exactly yeah and you open my revised spreadsheet and said yeah
which uh looking at number nine i think we're on well they have version nine they have version nine i don't i don't think i sent you guys version 10 yes that was a special one for kelly is that because there was something else well i put that extra tab on it so i'll just do nine so it's the same that's the new tab that i added with just fiscal 28 for now figuring it's going to take us a little bit of time to get through that one yeah till we get into a kind of a global concerns and given the amount of money that's involved but i will send out a actually a version 11 because there as we get these kind of emails i'm going back into that spreadsheet i'm just highlighting the uh you know the changes that are being requested and obviously based on our conversation tonight to accept we start ranking some of these things or recommending some of these things i'll put that in and circulate it it's the very first tab yeah so all i did was i i used the same template that we used for fiscal 27 which came out of brian keveney's capital budget spreadsheets um i figured we'd hopefully presumably start with all the highest ranked priorities um including the adjustment we made to road improvements and then just for purpose of discussion immediately following the high we'll come back to all these but feeling following the high ones i i slotted in all of the fiscal 27 medium requests including the medium number one and two that we were just talking about uh on the potential theory that those might be considered by some members to have a higher priority than the mediums that are being requested in fiscal 28 but we have to discuss that right um and then the same thing for the low priorities i just slotted in the low carryovers first and then the fiscal 28 lows and um and then the objective tonight is say okay when you add all those up if they were all included very bottom you'll see just big picture that's 19.8 million dollars of capital requests and in the five-year capital plan last year for fiscal 28 it had 8 million 272 so we're 11.5 million dollars over what at least was in last year's plan and um and then so one we have to just deal with sort of order of magnitude how do we get that down to a manageable figure and then second step is um spreading that which i didn't do myself spread it across the page uh to a funding source uh but i figured it would be best to have us go back through uh and uh see if you know people how people feel particularly about those carryover items anyway so that's what this tab is and i i don't know we'll get a path through this hopefully get through this one tonight i i'm happy to do a similar thing for 29 30 and 31 um and you know they might get a little bit easier because there's fewer requests as we get out yeah i think the other thing i need to do chance to do that now that first focus on is running out with production because i think there's a fair amount of hinges off of off of that um really for your capacity wise and strength wise um so i can work on that before as well because i think it's going to be critical and i did get the debt schedule from brian company and it has the existing debt and then it has proposed debt which was based on the prior capital plan um but what it doesn't have in the proposed debt is the mwra which i mean we've talked about it with tom holder is the only reason it matters in in projecting kind of that probably is we have a debt policy a policy not to have more than 10 percent of total operating budget um as debt service and that includes everything not just at least the way i would hit it so i think it says not more than a 10 target 68 percent with the mwra i don't know how you're gonna how you can meet the target at the mwra so i think you have to be mindful of those sorts of you know the policy limits on some of the stuff um which i'm not totally sure the prior plan well it didn't because because because the mwra wasn't in there so right and there were no number of other you know the high school little subject wasn't in there and or wastewater wasn't in there so it didn't fully incorporate that stuff in so i think there's going to be some capacities capacity constraints if we're all in policy but carol carol are you still on i think so drop off yeah my audio wasn't working to me yeah i just had a question uh so thus far and i'm hopeful going forward this committee is attempting to complete its work within the parameters of the capital and debt policy you know various thresholds percentage thresholds um kelly was just talking about you know the the size of the mwra debt that million eighty year or so that service over 20 years uh could along with other existing and projected debt cause us to go over the 10 percent of total operating still over 10 if we're but target of six to eight but the eighth is pretty hard to to be uh but i guess my question is uh policy is policy is policy but at some point in time there will inevitably be a project or two that can't get done unless policy is waived who who do you foresee going forward this is just a general question who do you foresee being the the waiver of a policy uh debt or capital policy of a parameter um does that require the select boards approval you think i think well like you said it's a policy versus code i think this is a brian question um i'm going to throw it back to you now brian is debt exempt debt excluded debt is included in the metric correct calculation now also the um i did see in your report by the way the question of whether the mwi it's actually called long-term water supply um is going to be funded through water rates 100 that's what's being presented to town meeting control that and the deal right to be definitive and i had i had explained to them uh the members at the last meeting i think that uh at least your board and brian kevin had had a discussion where brian explained the possible other approach which was issuing exempt debt uh you know have the general fund issue the exempt debt and then have the water fund reimburse the general fund for the debt service and i don't know that you ever definitively took a position uh on that i know bill whitney asked about whether you had um either way the water fund ends up paying for the debt service but i got the sense that brian was expressing a little bit of angst that if water rates in some year were not sufficient to pay water bonds um that the town would have to pay through a subsidy and if it was a subsidy from the general fund it would uh be within the levy and that's why he was suggesting you think about you know putting on the ballot exempt debt but having it be 100 reimbursed is that still a still an alternative which in part is why kelly i thought partly is why you worded the way you worded it um yeah it's partly but it's also because it's not our hurry and i'm not until those decisions are final final i'll feel comfortable um i believe the board has taken position on all of those items brian we did review the alternative suggestion that mr keveney brought forth the biggest concern for that wasn't necessarily that the water rate the water revenue didn't did was not adequate to fund the debt service because apparently the dor when you do the tax recap will tap retained earnings before it comes back looking to the general fund so if the water fund has like a million dollars of retained earnings and they had a 400 000 deficit their retained earnings would be um reduced by that deficit the real issue was that the the note if you will the debt excluded note stays open because it just it's it it's there so the balance could be spent this was brian's biggest concern with this suggestion after he made it he came back and said uh you know there's always a possibility that another another select board or another you know finance team would say oh let's spend the balance of this debt exclusion on this debt exclusion note that's been authorized because it's open it's just open so with that the select board said no we didn't care for that and we voted for just water rates to be funded the the construction cost to be funded 100 through water rates okay well i i misspoke and i didn't i didn't get this because bill whitney seemed to be questioning whether the board had actually definitively ruled out that other option but uh obviously you're you're the chair of the board so uh anyway back to kelly's point then we we have no purview over that decision anyway right but it's what is that it is what's currently on the table as is what is going to be presented in the article and in town meeting they select what is concerned of course that should to your final other point should the deficit one year exceed the retained earnings the general fund will be on the hook and there will be no conversation and no vote at town meeting but that would be a really huge swing so okay so back to my question then if and you you suggested you know the answer to the question i posed about weaving a policy you say starts with a discussion with brian keveney i believe so i think he was he he's a much better source on that in terms of how we would go about it i do believe that very long ago when i first started finance committee when we set the metrics we said generally you know ten percent because you have to like to your point we understand that if you have a large project you will exceed your debt metric so i'll read it to you because it is yeah so brian when i think would be a better uh source for that question myself debt service targets full debt service ideally no more than 10 percent of the total operating budget with a target of 68 percent so i would read that as because the word ideally isn't there okay we're trying to keep it under 10 but it recognizes the fact that it might be over i think if you're over you got to explain it right to to the residents that you're going to be over uh and it does specify so that's a total debt service total operating budget and then it has a sub bullet within levy a goal of three to five percent of the general fund budget so that is the other reason implies to me that that's total with excluded and self-supported um because otherwise why are you doing it three to five percent of what general three to five percent of the general levy debt is a goal of three to five percent of the general fund budget okay so that that one wouldn't apply to water that service but then over 10 percent debt service ideally no more than 10 percent of the total operating budget okay with a target of six to eight percent so because it says total debt service and it says total operating budget that to me is all is general fund plus enterprise funds so then the question for us as we start to proceed through this would be and we don't know what those numbers are at the moment but if the mwa happy hollow project debt service were to and and i hear you saying you don't think it does but if it were to push us beyond 10 percent um or a new school building were to push us beyond the water by itself is not going to do it it's going to depend on how much other borrowing we set so so my question is um and maybe we need to go through this first but if we felt we were going to if we were trying to keep it within that limit but we were bumping up against the limit because of a very large project from our perspective do we set aside that large project and say as long as we can meet those criteria except for that project or we're going to go over a little bit but it's because we have this large project that's skewing the result i think we have to make the decision based on right all the other criteria laid out and then if we go over i think we have to disclose that right it's going over because of okay so we'll try to stay within the limits as we go through this but if we find we can't get some critical things in there then we make the case here's why we're recommending you okay but until we see the numbers kind of that debt service we don't know whether we're going to bump up against it exactly and so what i did for purposes of the report for apple 27 was i looked at the existing debt and then i was able to do a good enough swag right to know that what we were adding wasn't going to tip it um but it does beyond one year i can't do that on the back of an envelope so yeah and well it's hard because you have the high school it's still amortizing which is a pretty big number but that goes off yeah not too distant future and then you got this big water number coming on and then you probably have another big school debt service coming on somewhere down the pike um those are really and those are really the biggest projects unless there's something you know like new town building or something but why we have carol do you want to drive home that point even though it was bolded in your memo before we find epistle 28 just since we're about to talk about the rest of the capital i do think it's uh in scope i think we're going to talk about f528 or f531 the the future of the town building is absolutely critical to this town to this planning there is as i noted we noted in the report there's significant all of our terror right to the town building that is in the capital plan that is currently slotted fy28 and now there's a little bit this year two million this year and call it five million in the other years why our understanding from talking to um facilities is that is like scratching the surface that just you know and making the building that is not a rehab right that's not doing all the things that need to be done and so it's really important that that the select board or whoever needs to thinks about how this is going to work because otherwise we're going to be throwing millions of dollars into this place uh just to get keep basic functions going and i don't want you know a situation where that's done and then i think the select board has last year started to express some interest in having this discussions and so with the change in the i hope it was my turn sorry all of a sudden wait a minute um with the change in the leadership and facilities um i think we can put this back on a future agenda most likely we'll have a conversation like after we put the warrant to bed but i'll put it on the draft agenda list how's that sound yeah i would appreciate it yep done i mean it'll be like april may june but done yeah that's fine the concern is just this as you know and brian knows from beyond that you know a five million ish number for town building has been kicked getting kicked out in the plan every year for the last five years that's on top of several million dollars that was was already for work here if you really sit down and this is what we asked the the facilities director to do when he's working on sit down and figure out what this building is going to cost that in our opinion the town needs to know that before they vote on any more right temperatures related to this building that they need to know what the cost i think the select board is an agreement i think this just has not um moved up in the onto the um what i call the draft agenda list so i'll get it on the list and then like i said once we get through the warrant we'll get back to some of these other topics but to your point you start your work in october or maybe start putting your projects your plan together in october so i think this probably should be we're continuing tonight carol we have i know but
your plan you're putting your plan together so right right the plan has to be done october 15th so all right well we'll see what we can get it done in this you know sometime in the summer how's that thank you all right so anything we do given that we have a large carryover amount for town building improvements that like they have pushed off which i think i mentioned at the last meeting and you can see in this tab he didn't he didn't i don't think he necessarily concluded all these are the right dollars and they all are going to be spent and he wants to request them all fiscal 28 i just put them there as a placeholder but it's a big number and so it crowds out if we leave it there it crowds out potentially other important projects and so again so let's talk about that let's get to that one and say what do we want to do with it my position is that the only town building stuff that stays in is the group work that he faced across the years and the rest of it has to wait until there's a decision on the future of the building unless my unless michael said it's like hey it's like the elevator so there's one other thing that has to get done i'm not putting that my opinion you don't put the whole nut in fly 28 not far enough along in understanding the costs to do that so those are the five items starting with the million eighty five thousand down to the two hundred thousand but we also have the painting town building exterior painting for 125 000 so that's five thirty thirty six six items yeah town building enforcement tiles or is that moving down to the line what was that line 33 33 oh it's up on the medium yeah that one definitely you have eight items yeah that's seven where's the eighth one i see 44 45 40 oh wait 46 is a repeat 46 a repeat of 33 oh no 46 is the actual project so 33 is the engineering yeah and that's because we pushed out yeah but to that point if you if the engineering is in 28 the project wouldn't be in 28 and when you want to think so well that's because we yeah we push the 75 and i guess that's my point it would be included even engineering wouldn't include the project yeah i mean i if we spent anything i'd be inclined yeah the engineering 75 000 it's like it'd be better to find out what's involved if he's ready to do it yeah that's kind of yeah but then so yeah so the 75 the million 85 the 700 to 500 250 the 200 the 150 the 125. well the 150 is public safety building yeah oh i'm sorry so the one yeah i separated them so so so those are all all those last ones other than the 75 are in the medium category anyway but we're saying within the medium category no one feels like i don't want to speak for everybody here but there's a general sentiment that we don't want to deal with those in fiscal 28 yeah i think if we're starting at your so starting at your mediums from the things that didn't make the cut enough like 27 right because everything's helpful i think those still don't make the cut until we have a better agreed a better plan yeah i agree so just so i understand so we don't we say they don't make the cut does that mean they automatically get put into 29 for for right now for what we're doing i think we want to work in a consecutive fashion so i would say for those you're pushing to f by 29 same exercise we're doing here right those pop on for 29 um and we evaluate again there yeah yeah agreed
am i correct in assuming all of the high priority items would be um or we'd be recommending to include in fiscal 28 yeah yeah we talked about the town building and realizing that at the moment we have a target of 8.2 million dollars 8.3 million dollars if if we're using last year's capital plan as a target yeah i mean i don't know if i'm using last year's capital yeah so we do all the highs yeah again there's nothing in that we we kind of went through these not in great deal until the last meeting but there's nothing in that list of eyes anybody's got any concern about they're all again life safety yeah i mean there may be it's just the right amount to be split but yeah i think the right projects i mean the only one that i even i wonder about this will need the interesting input of you know we put the care the number one we did the elementary hvac and then 28 is the middle school and i think the order of which is deemed failure and that could be switched i don't have you know whether or not one is high versus medium like you know i mean yeah yeah yeah i think they're both going to end up in the plan anyway so but he may say no i really want to do some of the units i think we might want to put on that one just to see if you would still want to do both next year assuming the money doesn't get freed up this year or for 27. everybody knows that's about some kind of yeah yeah the other the one that was medium or 21 versus 25 yeah 21 25 and 26. yeah for the road improvements what we had done for 27 was we had cut that in half right and then and it yeah so i would say that one row 27 is uh that's just gone yeah that's not happening yeah so we already have been 28 9 15 in the high so we started to reset the plan right yeah i would agree
so for the moment do we want to assume that the public safety building hvac will find its way into the town manager's budget um no i think we right now assume it's based on what we learned it's a high priority do we want to bump that 28 and he pulls it in right that just comes out and yeah i agree
our recommendation has to align with what our recommendation is okay so we want that to be a no longer a medium or a medium high but move that up to high yeah it's because that's the same thing for the elementary i would yeah yeah so i'll move up i know what's going to happen they have over but they can't all go the same year most likely well maybe it's just yeah it's because they do them at some time and they've got to have buildings for different programming so it's hard to do them all at once right i'm looking for you know medium highs as well there may not be other items we're going to move into the high category but if they are medium high they're they're going to fall above obviously the rest of the medium so we keep moving down our list here so to the 400 000 for the roads we're not carrying that over correct correct i'll delete that from the list or
the swap loader um again that's a truck that tom holder made it you know a good strong case for but we ended up approving two of the three for fiscal 27 um yeah we've got i mean we've really got four dpw projects here in this section we've got the water system radio system upgrades um and the dpw facilities rehab and upgrades yeah i think the first three i'm i'm fine putting them at medium high or even high i suppose yeah i like the medium high kind of keeps it i mean it doesn't make sense but you definitely get them out out of the middle medium yeah so yeah i mean if we're gonna if every year they need one or two critical vehicles that's one of them with stormwater we pushed the radio that ties it on the rest of the system so i think it makes sense it joins everybody else i just don't know on the facility rehab and upgrades exactly what's involved there so yeah and i feel like i've seen this before broken into pieces this year or two about this there was a i think it got combined on the project but i probably want to move it i want a little more information but do you think there's a general philosophy we have to be thinking about what our philosophy is on maintenance type upgrades of newer buildings right is there like do you do you start if you've got to make a priority decision do you start the buildings that are in the worst condition that you can't recover from but make sure you're on top of the maintenance uh rehab needs of the newer buildings so that they don't end up in that position it's a first in first out kind of versus last i just don't i don't know the right answer is i just i cringe at letting assets that we've spent significant money on deteriorate okay well that one though i agree with you i'm not i don't maybe i just don't recall exactly what's entailed in that uh yeah so much to get more information yeah uh we skipped the website we're talking about tbw but um i can't i was a betting person that'll be in the fiscal 27th yeah i can't put it in until the it balance gets those it projects get done all right so just so i'm keeping track of so the the three dpws i'm going to label medium high
the website i'm going to leave is medium carry forward 20 27 dpw facility same thing leave it as medium carry forward um and uh what do we decide i'm in town building force may tie in or push that with the rest of them and just leave it in a medium but we're going to push it to 29 or push it a year anyway well we will when we're out of them yeah right when we run out of money okay so should the rest of you three feel that is similar to the other town building okay uh then the biggest number on the page um so i can't put that in order until somebody answers my question on send a reminder because it's maybe they just got lost whenever using box yeah i don't think anything has changed and that's not understandable so it's not even to the point we can decide i mean the question's been raised many times yeah and i don't understand there's a plan like there was a plan but what was included in that you're supposed to be a committee it's supposed to be so i'll ask again but i can't move that on until i'll get my answer so in terms of how people are looking at that at the moment i'm showing it as medium carry forward from fiscal 27 but it previously had been in fiscal 29 in the prior year five-year plan um we want to just label that a medium and lump it in with all the rest of the mediums until we get more medium because i the way we're going to run out of money yeah and then these mediums are going to get you're going to roll them over right and i'm going to keep doing that for as long until somebody tells me what's in that request probably prevents i mean it's kind of generic but i need to use that major hard part or something yeah the next the next three i just need to know what they are like so i know the dw flooring when we talked about this is the one where he says essentially he picks so many square feet of flooring to upgrade everywhere every year that was yeah but he took some we had more years in and he took some out he did take some out so i think they've gotten further with because they they've already had a bunch of update on this they've gotten further with it than they originally anticipated so do we ask on these at least on these three just for an update of based on on 27 and where they'd rank these is that let me ask this question do you other than getting more information do you maybe just got to get through the next list of mediums but we can also take some of these mediums and do what we did with the two that are sitting up there as medium one and two and kind of pick and choose a handful to put toward the top of the list in the event there's more money to be spent and maybe we just don't have enough information on these three um to do that yeah yeah my my kind of stance is if they were they were on the FY27 take them out i want to deal with that before i deal with fiscal 28 mediums okay because they were already pushed from a year uh like the medium so why would i why would i do that FY28 so this is purely so we can keep track of this stuff would you therefore prefer that i keep this label medium carry forward fiscal 27 and just keep showing it above the rest of the mediums yeah okay unless we consciously we haven't do you feel that same way on the high school baseball field as opposed to dropping that down into the mediums of all the other mediums i would say the only two i see dropping down are the 10 building force each each side five because right i don't because we don't know we got rid of the road carryover right yep the website because i don't know i think it's going to get put in this year i don't put it in my priority with the other stuff okay um and then the high school fields i would agree everybody agree the high schools will just become regular medium it's a couple questions about and i think leaving a medium is final the ceiling and wall repairs for 250 000 that's a lot of money and i'm not sure what that's or especially the high school it's not that since 2012 i'm not quite sure what the yeah i agree with what you said john i think that there's a number of michael's requests that um weren't necessarily specific projects yet but just based on experience that is inevitably going to be some work somewhere and it has to get done in the summer and he needs to have the money to be able to move quickly and identify what it is and do it so you know we can try to get at least that much confirmation from him i got the impression the middle school is tied more to windows and h because as they rip the hx remember they're going to go from the ones that have like piping below the ceiling that's the rooftops or something it was something the high school i don't know but the middle school he definitely had it all the time yeah that's an old building there's there's i guess it's more middle school but um practice that they started using in a murder throws to combine if they rather than have a project for fifty thousand for the high school and a two hundred thousand dollar project for the middle school and you do 250 so that you can contract you know one contractor same contractor and get the and your prices yeah right yeah yeah so that's my guess i mean if you walk through the high school compared to middle school one of them is right in marketing better yeah yeah so i guess where that moves me is that the three the ones it's the three school projects the high school building improvements the ceiling of all repairs in the district white flooring i would say are mediums that rank higher than because they're carry over than the mediums okay i agree i mean it seemed like he had plans so it wasn't like i don't really know exactly what i knew him like he just doesn't know what what room but yeah yeah i would agree i'm good with that which one expensive let's i'm gonna call up ballpark six six points or 5.3 million between the 3.7 million high that's there now then picking up the first two medium high number one and two and then the three you're 5.4 million if you get down where radio system operates because you only left out is so important movement 5.4 or 8.2
yeah 6.2 maybe about 2 million to go
the salt shed would grab a million of that and again it wasn't entirely clear when tom met with us again we spent most of our most of the department had to spend most of our time talking about fiscal 27 items um so it may be we need to you know reach out and get a bit more detail
you know you wouldn't want salt shed to be you know leaking on top of the material
i mean those for those for me the first three of us are a bunch of questions right salt shed you know why why are we doing it how to when we need we i don't know how the landfill ties in with the transfer station if it's just part of the future use conversation and also i think that's a and also whether or not there's any state in the ending there you know yeah so there is there's issues so the landfill the landfill is across the one that they're talking about there unless i'm wrong it's across the street from all the oxbow it's not it's not it's not the landfill the old landfill and my understanding is there were some
issues that needed to be resolved yeah i mean there's a committee that's been overseeing what quite that land to be used for and they're looking at all sorts of different options but i think to be able to fully utilize it for any of those options they have to finish doing whatever they have to do to the old landfill i'm not sure that i've ever i've heard recently that the state is after the town to necessarily have to do something yesterday i think this is more part of you know the forward-looking reuse of that but if they're going to reuse it wouldn't that be part of the cost of the the future development of it i mean it depending on and they again they they have all sorts of different options but as kelly said on the uh oxbow apartments if if they chose housing
it may be that the town's got to get the site at least to a point where it could be built on right right right um but you know that to me using that particular parcel is a nice to have but not a you know we absolutely need it i don't know there's a lot of good people focused on you know trying to find out you know come up with creative uses for it um not many of which are going to add new growth to the town so i i don't personally um put that one you know higher than any of these other mediums the salt should rehabilitation i really agree we need to know what's the scope and what's the downside if that got pushed and could some smaller amount of work be done to buy another two or three years um same on the route 20 rehabilitation design this item a total of i'm going to say seven hundred thousand dollars originally appeared in fiscal 29 uh the town manager's five-year capital plan last year and the economic development committee who's again with the planning board focused on uh creating more development opportunities up and down route 20 uh hopefully to generate more tax revenue um in order to access state money to do the bulk of the work on route 20 sidewalks curbing um there needed to be a certain amount of preliminary work done so they were successful in getting the finance committee the getting the select board town manager and the finance committee to move i think it was 250 000 of that up into fiscal 26 capital budget and the balance of it uh remained in fiscal 28 um but i'm not sure how much if any of that 250 has actually been spent so far and the uh the reality is that you know you hurry up and then you wait four or five six years to get on the state's highway improvement list so again um work on that quarter on route 20 which i place at a higher priority than using the old landfill on route 20 but it all would be improving that quarter right i personally would replace this one higher than the landfill cap but again you know i'm just not sure how much additional new growth we're going to get out of an improved route 20 corridor might look nicer and it's kind of like years ago there was a proposal to bury the utility wires in town center in the historic district at a cost of millions of dollars which would be paid for by the ratepayers through a surcharge and you say well it'd be nice to have but yeah you really want to do it so yeah listen i think we can we can ask i can reach out to tom with our information the salt shed we have um as far as you can ask for the 250 any of the 250 has been spent yeah i can ask if the rehab the 20 rehab has been spent at all in care if they think that they're going to be ready to move over time reasonably yeah i'm having a hard time with with that and the restoration without a specific like something really pushing the need for that putting that ahead of some type of stuff that we have out here yeah we had a non-compliance that we had to deal with or hey we do this and then like we're losing our place it's a different conversation right yeah if there's if there's money from the state for route 20 rehab i want to take advantage of that because it doesn't come up that often right that you can actually get a hold of that and i it also depends on as some of these new businesses open on 20 right how does that change yeah things as well yeah i mean of these three i would probably say 41 is the most i mean whether not it has short-term value definitely has value that i'd see that we probably could use but not milling to your point you know the matching funds i mean we have to repave the road like other stuff will have to happen there anyway there's so much happening so it could help us avoiding the cost down the line but yeah the road actually was just repaved um finally but um you know one of the things we did approve i think the other that's in here uh to go all the way down to the wastewater low pressure sewer replacement construction two million so in fiscal 27 we approved the design money but you know the useful life of the piping to bring all the septuages of the town wastewater facility according to tom holder is getting near the end of its useful life and he knows at some point the towns pushing to get this route 24 sort of upgraded with granite curving and sidewalks and etc again that's really and then when you do that it might have to be repaid yet again so knowing that he wants to get the low pressure sewer line sort of replaced because you get a trench all the way down through 20 again um yeah yeah so there's there's a number of these projects that are lined up in front of when we're ever going to be able to get on the so-called tip list state list and um but but it's also true that if you haven't done your preliminary work um there's really no chance of being considered to get on the state list so it's a chicken and the egg so let me tell him give us just again this seems like there's a lot of pieces that all tie into climbing dependencies like maybe he can come and say hey this is what i'm thinking i'd like to see this these two can happen in parallel this happens later i mean i don't i mean it sounds interesting i really yeah i need a little bit more detail yeah to his list yeah i just i think i just need to have him tell me about this maybe we just haven't come in yeah because he's got there's a lot of there's a lot of w between what we've moved there's uncomfortable moving and getting in there but that's a lot more right i'm also fearful here to go into it there's nine things in the back of his head that he's going to be prioritized he just hasn't put up the paper yet i'd rather have the conversation now before we actively debate debate these too far for 28. i'm sorry the uh yeah the you know the low pressure system of two million is in that it's in that 8.2 million dollar capital plan number i believe that just that that one project by itself will which we had as a medium you know again i think the question for him is are you looking to get this done now because you're anticipating it's going to take you know another you know until fiscal 28 to be able to do it because you're anticipating this other route 20 activity or are you saying it needs to be done in fiscal 28 because it's going to fail but if if it's going to fail then that to me that medium probably be for me anyway becomes more of a high or medium high priority and they can repair breaks but and i'm not sure it's low pressure i'm not i'm not not sure they're really going to have a break um but it i take it from what i've heard him say it does wear out over time but anyway that two million right if we have roughly six million in the high category uh in this three to six items in the medium carry forward column uh that kind of gets us up to the eight million already just for clarification going back to the ceiling and wall repairs you know that line 36 but is that is that line 56 is that the same because he had it he had it seized over several years and we pushed 27 we didn't sign the 27 so now there's there's double um pushing 56 probably did the next year just push so the next tab you see on here there's going to be a block of these that right populate in and and you know so the only good news is you get into fiscal 29 31. i think the bottom line numbers that are in here at the moment uh are a little closer don't have quite as many of these big things to worry about do you count uh just out of curiosity the uh the local playground cpa funded 400 000 i mean that's in here because it shows up as an article yeah i think brian like i would have to admit in the name i want in the neighborhood of eight but then when we go through and put the eight million how we go through and put funding sources right to the extent i've got there's a shelf things that have funds yeah right i feel a little differently about them kind of i think that's kind of that's borrowing or free cash right so would you view would you view that one as a medium high just to yeah i would view that as a medium high and i would view i would view the field maintenance uh we made medium high and i knew the field maintenance was medium because we're not something we're not funding any fields we're gonna put some some maintenance into it i don't know how we can yeah it's a trade we're not spending two yeah yeah um and then the shift officer command vehicle you pushed out a year already wouldn't you know oh no oh no that's the one i had that description error but that one is probably in the last month so that could be a mri on that one yeah people feel okay with that one yeah yeah it's again life safety i want to do the i.t project data center infrastructure i think we funded the things that work in cyber security this year i can't see funding anything else on i.t until we see balance coming down and it can be planned from the i.t director right because he didn't really give us anything beyond yeah i think he was still getting himself acclimated in the in the position yeah i agree and there's there's over a million dollars there that has to get spent so yeah i mean just 54 high school building improvements i mean i read that as improvements not fixing broken systems so being fine to me it's going to be a little bit yeah well it's he has it right it's it's circulation the they've got reviewed for him um fitness room and then he's got the hvacs and i'm having a hard time and this goes to like the whole assessments and i feel like i need a spreadsheet of all the hvacs of all the links and like what year they're from right it's a little bit of risk factor that's bad okay it just feels like there's like never any hvacs um which probably is but i think part of the issue too is there's you know like you said public safety building there's four of them on there only one's working so that means you got if we replace one we still got two more to go somewhere right how old's that building oh let's say 50. uh 20 25 years yeah it's already going back here i stopped dragging on the poor sluggers for 2000 2001. yes so any any other items in this medium category uh for the town and school projects that people and when we say medium high just again when i redo this we circulate it um again prioritize the medium carry forward from 27 above the medium highs the request in fiscal 28 which will then be above the mediums that were requested in fiscal 28 and then the lows follow just this this may sound weird but i'm actually curious for the custodial equipment this goes back to maintaining what we have like the fact that someone didn't ask it where it tells you that like are they not keeping things clean right yeah i mean this is probably like hey the floor buffer doesn't work anymore right or it's you know works sporadically right i i have a hard time so not not something something like that seems silly to me because that's what i'm thinking right yeah i mean the other yeah i mean the other thing uh well although i think michael did go back so i'll strike that i think michael did go back and relook at because the schools originally came in with it basically numbers that tied to their capital plan five-year capital plan from last year plus those extra two requests from kirsten um but i think michael then went back after we posed questions brought up firearms brought up some other things then he looked through all those prior plan requests and he moved some of those out so i think he's you know he's begun to look a little closer at these out years he just probably hasn't had that much time so i think i think well there's there's pressure on us to get this done right the five-year our five-year recommended plan um it almost seems to me that we're probably going to need to have michael back in as well at some point um just to make sure that we don't inadvertently not you know we put something somewhere and otherwise we risk he's just going to have to come back to us right yeah so why don't i ask michael and tom to come back i think they have the bulk of the dollars because so many of the dollars that's little dollars are michael's right he's the most knowledgeable on them um on where their facilities i think we have them come back and help us rejigger what's high at least understand what's highest priority so they'll be on the list for the updated version of this that shows what we're talking about tonight you can tell them please review that updated one yeah and then you think we got it in the wrong order let us know yeah well we still probably want them in because there we may still need to read yeah yeah absolutely yeah the rest of this isn't really clear i mean so desperate to get the cib one well i also think there's you know there's certain items here that they just know like the roads they know they're going to have every year so those are pretty good numbers um but the other things are kind of once you get past the current year that they know they really have to push for i feel some of the other things are more i got to get some numbers in there some placeholders and so part of the process is going to be a more detailed cip form getting them to realize that unfortunately they're going to have to real time put a bit more work on the out years because once we get past five-year plan now we got to push it out you know another five years and obviously those numbers become even squishier but but um and some of it is just round numbers and rough years knowing that there's going to be a lot of things that change
on the second page how do people feel about the transfer station garage which we had a convenient uh way to punt it because they're they're i don't know if they've started their study yet
so is that one that you feel like we just i don't understand uh 450 and then there was one point eight that was out further and i don't understand typically when we have two stage on the product on the project it's major design and you have construction those are here to be completely different yeah that'd be a good question for michael and tom at the same place at the same time because tom told us all he needs is a 450 000 prefab replacement michael said i need 450 to fix up what's there and then buy me two or three years and i i'm going to build a 1.8 million dollar new building which yeah yeah i can't even build not going to happen that's what he said i know and so you know we need to ask him where did you get your concept but on the other hand i can't conceive a scenario that we'd spend 1.8 million dollars building a building at the transfer station the transfer station can't like this goes back to the study it it can't pay its bills as it is it can't pay for these buildings to do them the general fund is going to have to pay for them i get really stuck right on that because i know what i pay to have my coverage picked up and so i'm like for what we're talking about in building costs i'm just kind of these garbage picked up right and i know not everybody agrees with me but it's it's hard for me to yeah so we leave that one as um as it is at the moment low carry forward yeah i think that's low until technology that it didn't didn't get done in fiscal 2017 which they agreed with um on the enterprise funds right excluding the transportation in this discussion
but on the water and wastewater right this is where funding source matters right the wastewater should be covered by the wastewater i just don't know what kind of financial shape yeah that's they're in good they're in fine shapes that'll be waste wastewater borrowing yeah you could you would do that project and this might be where like you end up over a meeting but you're doing that on the wastewater and you know i can't see same thing on the waterfront vehicle like i can't like see restraining there either because they need vehicles to run the operation and that's what their water rates were you know ignoring the fact that where it's been 36 million dollars um placing furniture at the jcc also you want to um you think without actually putting them into the new order do you think we want to just at least quickly rattle through funding sort initial funding sources and that way i can slot those into what i recirculate yeah let's go right down the list so first is there there's nothing on here that strikes you as uh being of uh high enough to warrant excluded debt is that reasonable the only thing that would be excluded nothing that we talked about putting in this year the only thing i think would need to be a discussion is if that field kind of move forward move forward but i don't like how they reference about five million dollars for excluded debt yeah you know like you talked about this before right it's hard for me to say you got to get five million after you just re-characterized so that's the only one i see that we don't have that we're not putting that in the initial plan anyway well we we still fill out yeah i still will fill out a sourcing so i'd be inclined to put it in the excluded column for now understanding that it's below the five million yeah yeah just yeah because we didn't fill it out before yeah because there's a place holder the only yeah if they pull it in to put it with the septic then it will be close to five million so yeah yeah they can't combine those that'd be hard to do you can buy things that are that are similar to each other but are better like you can make a notification for the septic and the fields because it's yeah i think they they could do a debt exclusion question if they wanted to they could do a debt exclusion question that yeah you know we're both those projects together well they could i just think the policy oh for the policy purpose yeah it's being by itself yeah right by itself yeah um it's why the town building project right which was in fy27's plan last year for fy27 you put them all together it was five you know over five million dollars it was supposed to be an excluded debt an article project potentially excluded debt but you start breaking it up into pieces you're not going to do excluded debt you're probably not going to do an article if you're doing it in pieces um all right so so that's so i'll do that one as excluded borrowing why don't we go quickly through the list looking for levy debt and then we'll come back so let me get uh yeah we did uh borrowing let me get so we have the animals we have that we have the roof of levy we had ac's we had fire alarm about water's levy yeah so going on the list i would say the roof is looming it kind of saved the elevator upgrades levy it's kind of all time building stuff together extra patient equipment's emails fund to testing machine telly that's going to burst free cash what we did before right yeah the radios are all free craft cash yeah radio a fire alarm did you say i'm going to go
for the schools but it's there yeah they're kind of these are kind of the gcc one one 200 so i would say free cash for though yeah just i'll put these in for now and then yeah i'll have a clean version to look at radios free cash yeah in car computer replacements free cash yeah epic signals we had free cash before hvac levy hvac with the fire alarm we did boilers we have this levy is lost i mean granted the school projects i can't help you guys all together yeah another hvac levy debt
up loader we did as free last time right the vehicles i think we typically try to do three cash unless it's higher than 400 500. stormwater system or that's infrastructure improvements i would be inclined to that is levy debt radio system upgrades free cash website zero no um free cash yeah facility rehab levy debt levy debt building forced main tie-in engineer either way free cash for now
uh 87 000 building improvements actually i'm looking now that these are carriers so we had freak yeah we have free cash for that one free cash for the 87 just read flooring we had borrowing
ceiling we had borrowing i'll just make sure all those match up with our fiscal 27 report okay i'll double check them okay so now the new ones the salt shed would be levy debt
that's levy debt so it's uh you just see how they funded uh 250 um they did the 250 out of uh real estate uh seats reserved for real estate just because it was a last minute request yeah i don't think that's necessarily precedent so you view that as a levy debt yeah we still free cash vehicle free cash skipping all the buildings pmbs psp what is the psp bms that'll be a management system
that electronic building management control system to do h like integrated hvec and heat and boilers or alarms so people have a view on that one free cash yeah that's an it vehicle free cash or no ambulance that's fire yeah that's emails data center infrastructure free cash take around a cpa
h-pack levy debt yeah roadways levy debt yes ceilings levy debt still the appointment yeah free cash cash they deal the capital of state sidewalks we did uh free cash free cash on the next two
library grounds start there vehicle that's water borrowing wastewater borrowing transfer station we did transfer station borrowing and both of those okay i'll slot all that stuff in yes and then i'll set up um fiscal 29 tab and prepare it for the carryover of a big slug with me instead okay yeah yeah i'm wondering if as we get out further though if we
didn't get to that with medium right it's just an automatic way
because we're going to have to go through anyway because it doesn't make a difference you just project you're done that they don't they don't just automatically slide so it's eight o'clock
they could get through a lot but i think the need is good progress
so brian you'll free circulate that number 10
it's going to be number 11. you didn't see number 10.
all right at this point i think uh item eight is if there was any addendums to the court that was you know in turn but i would skip my agenda so i'm sure for roll forward um and just in case you guys came in and said like kelly what did you do that's it's totally wrong um we talked about a few things that we've said we're not gonna we're not gonna amend right or report for yet so it's really just waiting until they actively working the rest of this so we get the rest of the five-year plan here so i don't think there's anything else to talk about unless you guys did another video and said there's something else we need to change did you get any other feedback that's a lot of work it did a lot of work it's great it's the hard part about it it's like it's good it's good stuff right i mean but there's so much more as you're writing and it's like ah i really want to talk about it and like don't have time um so i think one thing i would ask the committee to do though is to step away from it you know for a couple days and then re-read it and make your list of what do you think we are the things outside of the five-year five-year plan that we haven't addressed that we should address going forward um and i think it's going back to the list that we originally created right using ai because of like what goes in a capital report right what is it what's on that list that we didn't get in here that we want to have in the future and i know we're not going to tackle it right now for this year but i do want to have it sort of fresh involved fresh in our minds what those things are that we want to tackle for improvements in my ideal world we would be already once we're done getting this this five-year plan done um we're already going to like start the like okay what are the modifications like the template that we want to have because what i'd like to do is have a revised template right going into our planning for the next year already like here here is what we want to know so that we have a clear vision of what we need to find out right in our talking to the departments over the course of the year i think it will work that we didn't have the opportunity to share because of where we were starting but i think we we have that vision then we'll be able to ask the right questions i have one for you the long-term planning section
and i had a question would you envision the extent you
it could be your view right now just because you worked on it but um would you anticipate encourage future members of this committee to you know sort of just try to replicate a similar template as you call it of a report um and if so would you envision a number of the appendix that you have the bylaw the you know the current years capital request um would you envision those as be included each year in some of the sections in terms of membership and being kind of standard inclusion yeah certainly that's the template i think so that's the template because i i would hate having just done this i would hate for future members of the committee to have to start contract over here and that would be difficult so one of the things i need to do right between your exhibits and my exhibits is cleaning getting a nice clean like here's the the spreadsheet right the template right that easily produces that those exhibits but i would hope so that yeah something similar future committees may decide no we don't need the section right or we can modify you know maybe the open capital project section it's all caught up right it's all it's it's it's not all cut up there's always going to be some but it's not necessary to have a 10-year history right there anymore so something like that it becomes out of the system automatically yeah it may be automatically uh i also think to the extent we can get to a better cip right there might be a better format of information we want to provide right we get to it again kelly's perfect world in prep the cip comes in filled out and similar what i used to do on fincom where i i had modified but you could feed the exhibits that then were created for the warrant something like that where it's like no we're not doing this like take it and then put it in another spreadsheet we're we're feeding in the exhibits and it's spitting out right the consolidated um starting point so those are things that it doesn't answer your question brian but like those are the things that like maybe it will be easier because we we build out a better process but yeah like i would think you'd start with what we have and and work from there and it can it can be it's great like yeah long-term planning needs to go in there but it could also be like hey telly i know you added this but i don't really think it adds a lot of value right do we do we need a section or we need this exhibit this particular table as far as the appendices um my view is those first appendices that are all background should always be a part of it because i as a resident find it very hard to be like fine thanks yeah how do i and that way it's like no and for me even for me as a committee member i'm printing out this and i have it's my it's like the bible right i have all my pieces i don't have to go hunt down current pieces to double check right what the what the debt policy is so that's all i agree and hopefully those other pieces don't change very often right like the the policies i repeat but yeah so maybe i mean maybe as we build up the template maybe there's a sources like hey this policy came from yeah where did i come from i mean it's fluid to both of you but the rest of us becomes a scavenger hunt yeah not as fluid as you might think um another just um you might stop sharing just so i can see carol oh yeah or yeah i can't tell if she's waving at me here yeah i guess before i make my comment i want to make sure that um i don't want to i don't want us to stray too far off the posted agenda on some of these things so i'll reserve what i was going to have a couple other ideas for future reports but since that's not really a specific topic on our agenda um i would uh say that um it's more of an administrative comment um um i was a bit disappointed that we ended up with basically zero staff support and um i had envisioned when i came on this committee uh a lot of the work that historically had gotten done by the finance director and accumulating information put in his spreadsheet templates uh would all be done and we would be able to just pull from that and um for the rest of you i don't wish upon you um well we dealt with writing reporter i wouldn't want to wish upon any of you the need to sort of do the kind of things i was doing just because it is time consuming and you may not have the time to do it or the inclination um so this is more a discussion point going forward with the town manager as to what is his expectation of staff support for uh this committee and this is not a unique question for this committee lots of committees um don't have a designated you know planning board has a town planner but there's a bunch of committees that don't have a designated uh staff person to assist um so i think that's going to be an important question to get answered um but i'll reserve the rest of my i had a couple other points to make on on the report going forward to you put that on the agenda as a topic yeah i put it on it's yeah i didn't mean for us to start talking about it it's more of like give it a read and then yeah break those things down so that we while we're fresh in our mind we can make that you know the wish list which is tangentially related to the topic about the report and addendums it is future future addendums future addendums can i ask uh maybe the town process question i don't want to that's i forgot to say i had expected more of uh we present the report and i would have i mean i also would have thought we would have met certain numbers at least the select board you know to say like here's what you have why you made those choices versus this kind of one directional feed like we're sending a report and we i assume we'll get feedback but it doesn't seem like we're getting a lot of like conversation i mean maybe this is just how the committees work i don't know yeah just to me it's it's new so i'm asking we do have so a couple things we didn't care here as our back and forth that's already as i'm with the select board i am going to their meeting to present the report and we've talked about john will you hear we'll talk about you guys that's true so i i think i would say that setup is pretty typical of how the committees work together and we could have a joint meeting carol offer that we can have a joint meeting with the select board um to present it but i don't i didn't this this was consistent with my expectations at least of how this is yeah and i just didn't know what to expect so it's more about yeah i mean that the bylaw our marching orders in the bylaw to present a report to the town manager because ultimately the town manager is going to take that hopefully into consideration in developing his proposed town budget that he capital budget so i'm not opposed to some sort of you know more joint meeting at least in the initial year here just so the select board can get a sense of whether everything seems to be going according to how they thought it might go when they pushed for the bylaw but it would seem to me that would be better having that after we see what the town manager comes out with because you know i don't know it may be totally consistent it may be way over here i don't think it should be way over here but it may be more important in the five to ten years because that's more strategy yeah right and communicating that by written report is i mean it's not conducive to change which is what this committee is for i mean we're going to make better change and worst meeting report and a year later we're getting feedback and well we have a different direction for the town in those out years i think that's probably a broken process yeah but you know obviously the things everyone knows it's just more from my my first time yeah yeah we're venturing a little bit yeah a little bit astray of our agenda so i'm happy to put an agenda item on the next uh meeting about possible changes to the report and also i can put an agenda item on just feedback on the process yeah i put it personally i put it at the end if we have time because we we've got to get through the next meeting but i can put it on you know it's good to know what works what is it working nice um you want to say something here else i do but i don't see where i'm in the topic here yeah i'm looking yeah but what is it um i kelly and i worked on this bylaw i'm just going to say one couple quick sentence then i'll get thrown off for being off topic here but and we really designed this committee really to be very independent the town manager act has the town manager creates the budget and the capital budget and makes a recommendation to the finance committee the select board does not get involved in the budget development um however uh because we like to know what's going on i invited miss lappen to join us and it's meaning to explain your work to date carol i think we should have further discussing on the future at a future meeting that was a topic not reasonably anticipated that was me you weren't sure ms martin was going to be here i hope i didn't go too far off astray but i hope that helped let's let's talk at a future i'll put it on the agenda for future meeting to do a feedback on on how this went and i i think it is an important discussion to have so i just want to have it on the agenda though okay um all right so no addendums at this time to the report um can we any comments uh any edits on the minutes of january 14th i had two on page three this is assuming i lost track of what i sent you so if i've already made these i apologize on page 300 topics not reasonably anticipated the second paragraph it should say uh dates and times for the next two meetings and then the dates uh i think i made this correction on when you have january should be wednesday january 21st is that what it says or does it say 20th anyway i think it should be wednesday january 21st which is tonight i had originally typed the 20th so those are my two edits anybody else has any other questions or edits yeah you have the 21st okay so i had already made that but i don't think i had changed the three meetings to two anybody else have any other edits no no no yes there's no holidays in the six holidays right we already have we had i'm just making sure that there's the agenda i gotta get the agenda in for the 26th by tomorrow afternoon correct this is a question for you uh as of the 5 p.m weather report it's looking rather snowy starting at noon on sunday snowing all night uh possible 12 inches of light fluffy snow in the monday morning so i'm sure by monday evening the roads will be clear um but i don't know what happens if town building decides that their staff doesn't have to come to work on monday uh do we still expect robbie to be here well let's we'll post it and then if yeah can we i guess question for robbie if staff is not here i know we can post i like i could host a zoom with because we have this new link which we have but is there anything that somebody needs to do here to get that up and running or can i can just log in from home oh oh i just i just have a picture on myself you know should it should be okay yeah yeah if i if i'm if i don't join at all i don't think you yeah yeah so do you have to do that from physically here or can you do that from your home if you're not here at work on monday um i think you can do it from home just just to make sure make sure make sure make sure i just to make sure that works works first okay worst case if you get word from the town manager's office that we then you'll just send out an email to people saying we're not meeting yeah okay okay all right so it's still going to be a hybrid i plan to come i'm assuming the roads will be clear yeah if for some reason that's not the case right roads aren't cleared or they won't let us in the town building that's the town building great you guys know well our liaison has the same issue because they have a meeting on monday night so no we don't oh you don't well i'm sure we're not the only meeting scheduled for monday i think there's a zoning board but anyway okay so we need to approve the minutes again a motion to approve the minutes of january 14th has revised second okay and we are all in person so we can do an all in favor all right
okay so recently i know we did a couple uh did one just talking about feedback i will add that to the next to the future meeting agenda um we have monday scheduled to leave so i'll look from there so the week of february 2nd so you have to go to the select board on the second so that's monday right yeah can you be out two nights that week yeah two nights that week hey i can't be just a question of tuesday the third or wednesday the fourth i'm going to be i'm going to be out all that week the week of the second third and fourth unless it's hybrid i can't i can't do the third i can't do this one's hybrid but i couldn't be here do you go forward i'm good for the fourth so that's like form hopefully let's try and get the floor that's okay okay i'm not trying to go a lot more week just
get something you know we don't have to necessarily hopefully we'll be done by before then i hope but if not it's a week after school vacation week so uh we'll give you the money no the week after that yeah so let's yeah so let's see we'll be getting in mind stay generally good but the whole week is starting for me so i'm trying to move to the bottom that's okay with that yeah i'm sorry uh the 11th yeah 2 11th yeah yes right 6 p.m on that one too yeah let me try and get those okay okay we've got a motion to adjourn that's h 24 so seconded all in favor all right all right passes thank you robbie recording
the meeting may be recorded it's reported that we made a job open public on white hands as soon as possible after the meeting pursuant to chapter two of the acts of 2025 this meeting will be conducted in person or beyond mode of access importance from the law you may watch it participate remotely immediately on the website or in person in the slide or in person if there's any public comment comment to the agenda so 6 p.m this call order reviewed and good public announcements we do not have any announcements six and five public comment and the virtual response 6 10 limited review of articles submitted by the downtown meetings
6 30 review of fy 27 requests that were now recommended for inclusion 27 capital budget as well as fy 28 through fy 31 department lower class to determine whether to include in the fy 28 to fy 41 capital and including by the disorders 8 p.m discuss and vote amendments if any to get these reports the town manager 8.45 review and vote for improvements of july 14th 8.55 topics not reasonably anticipated by the chair for eight hours prior to post day penny and setting the times of our meetings and 9 p.m is adjourned do you have any members of the public
and i lied i do have an announcement um that is so that we didn't see i did get draft draft actually the actual report out uh yesterday so that was sent to the town clerk as well as the town manager and the finance director and also included anybody who's ex-officio otherwise members of people but department managers that uh given us information as well as chair of the findings committee the chair of the school committee and the arts lab work nice work i think um rad for being my my peer reviewer or my proofreader um and obviously brian for all the tables and inputs that he has provided throughout the process i would not have been able to to do this without that so thank you both and she needs to look at you know yeah so carol is saying she can't access the meeting from the calendar page and somebody
as far as you know is liz not able to attend tonight uh liz told us that yes that's what's going on okay all right so did get some feedback from the whole folks or just to me when we get to talking about future requests i'll do that um um some problems work reminding me that you know some top holder um sorry i said that last time again when we get to the the agenda item on future capital requests i did get emails that i had just reading out from tom holder and um commentary on projects so i just wanted to make sure we talk about them all right and then carol is joined carol you got in can you hear us yes thank you i don't think the link's working the one on the website's not working the one on the calendar page it sends it to the um agenda versus to the zoom page the first agenda item um i hope to get through the select board meeting materials um just to make sure there wasn't anything else but i do know from from carol um that the select board voted to submit um an article that they asked for our opinion on um whether or not it was capital so um talk about that one carol do you want to give sort of an overview of it sure um real quick in 2024 there was a budget task force which brian participated in and there was another one this year that both brian and i participated in and obviously we're looking at you know the budget's very tight and how do we find additional revenue sources and both committees recommended that we look for some new growth opportunities in town so we the passive option is we wait for a developer or we go and look at some town land so this was presented to the board in november and then we instructed the um town manager to have us let's look at some properties that might be available for for developing and unfortunately the town owns a lot of land but not necessarily too many large parcels so there is a parcel over on 25 holiday road that has on just under 14 acres so the select board discussed this this now we're probably end of december beginning of january discussing this the land does not belong to the select board so the options were go to town meeting and ask the school committee to transfer the land to the select board and then we could um you know do some due diligence or try to just do some due diligence and then when we went to town meeting if we thought we were going to proceed with development to um be able to say we're asking for the land transfer and this is the reason it's almost like a chicken and an egg situation where if you go to town meeting and ask for land they'll say what are you going to do but you've got to do some engineering and appraisals and perk the land in order to come up with um some potential uses so the select board has put in we've only voted to insert we haven't excuse me submitted uh initially that and we're looking for about 200 000 the number needs to be refined um and we're going to be doing what i said some engineering um possibly appraisal possible some perking to that with the intent of um to come back next year to town meeting if all pans out with the development plan so it would not be a capital build project in the future if um at the moment that's what our hope is um i did have a conversation with the town manager and the um finance director this morning because i said you know we really should have a funding source in place before we go um any further and it appears kelly you and i were right we are going to use the it's called was it receipt of real estate um sales um so that's in a nutshell real quick so i just forwarded in about what they have to do about before they do the article um my we don't have to decide this right tonight we've got some time to think about it um but i think my concern was it is over 20 000 right presumably a study of the use of the property has a useful life of more than five years however um in going through the capital policy it's not going to be used for a future capital project right it's a study to decide whether or not it's saleable right for what i i hesitated on whether the capital policies were meant to be exhaustive lists of what you know what constitutes a capital project or if it was meant to be a broad definition of what a capital project is and so i wanted to it's not my call right um wanted input from the committee on this and i see it's our new committee and the policies all the pieces of them may have been in existence in the past right they are in our platform already um wanted to to discuss it
so if i think carol start out by saying um focus at the moment is how do we generate new growth revenue for the town on the other hand if all the same work was being done under the purview of the school committee in advance of proposing a new school or if based on the work uh the determination was we want to use it for recreation all of which would be town capital assets i think in those scenarios probably is within the purview of this committee uh i don't know that the select board other than the genesis of this was how do we generate new growth that that they're necessarily able to limit what the ultimate use is so i kind of view it as unknown um if it's strictly going to be used for private development um although even there i could foresee a scenario where you do this work uh you get enough positive um back in the testing that you decide you want to rezone it so there's legal work and so you're you're sort of enhancing the ultimate value of a town capital asset i.e raw land land or could become developable land um so that under that scenario you could argue that it is within the purview of this committee if it's strictly you know perk it appraise it and maybe a preliminary feasibility study not real engineering work and then you're handing it off to a developer through an rfp process and they do all the permitting everything else now you've spent money on what is a private development and i think that last scenario my view probably wouldn't be something that you know would come especially in the purview of the capital plans the question is what is it at this stage um i guess yeah i agree if the ultimate goal and it sounds like the ultimate goal isn't necessarily known it but if the ultimate goal is that the land would be ultimately uh sold to a private developer for development and i tend to agree that i don't see that as a capital lesson and unless we had to do like remediation and do some other work to then hand it off maybe but in this case which we have had to do so if we and others you know use all your thoughts about right similar somewhat similar situation right where the town decided to sell it to the developer and in that process turned out where those asbestos on the property and you had to do project enough so it can turn that way i a good point brian right that at this stage you're not going to determine the outcome yet of how you're going to use it i think carol in my my personal opinion depends a little bit on what this what the project is excuse me one second kelly you're coming in so garbled i wonder if you need to move that little microphone to to the right of your there thank you so i'm sorry your personal opinion yeah my personal opinion is it does it might depend a little bit on what the content right or what the request is in this study right is the study very narrow to i want to you know figure out how much this land is worth so i can sell it or is the study tell me what this land can be used for right based on it's its current you know condition whatever i think it matters a little bit on intent in the study but i think it could be a capital project if that intent is broader than just tell me how you know tell me what i can sell it for right um so do you have a sense yet is it too early in a sense yet and what the yeah so that is the because this is one of these things that's just like i said popped up really around october november and then we started looking into it um so we haven't totally defined even what we think we're going to need for funds we're guesstimating 2000 it'll be it'll be refined as we go through the process here but i believe the consensus we've not taken a vote the consensus of the board is to develop new to have a new growth resource here new tax growth and the highest new tax growth option we all know would be development um i think though realistically if you've been in there and we this is out of my area so forgive me if we you know did some testing or perking or whatever and found out that wasn't and had to come back and say okay this is good for a field then i agree it becomes a capital project and it gets into the queue as a possibility for a field location for example um but i believe the intent is to increase our tax base that's that's our goal goal i think that i think if that's the intention it would seem that they'll be directing the appraiser to praise it the highest and best use they'll be suggesting to the firm doing the feasibility work for them um you know to look at housing options of various sorts uh they'll be perking it for for seeing what the maximum number of bedrooms uh are i think if that's the intention um maybe you say for now probably doesn't fall inside our definition but as the process evolves um and certainly when it gets to the end of the process as carol just said if based on their preliminary work they conclude that it can't be used for those other purposes or there's a groundswell and again this all presumes that the school committee uh is agreeable to give up control and custody of that parcel which they're in the middle of long-term planning for elementary schools and this site is one that they've held for potential elementary school um and i have no idea how feasible it is or isn't and so uh you know i guess i'm not troubled by saying for the moment it doesn't it doesn't kind of fall within our bailiwick but it could yeah i i i'm i agree let's move forward i'm comfortable at right now carol based on what you described it doesn't fall within the committee but if that remit for what that studies look like if we're coming down the pike towards town meeting and it turns into something broader than selling it right then i think that could change how how we feel about it and i don't know if there's a i still want to set precedent but there's suppose there's also a path where i don't see what it's strictly within our remit but you still want us to look at it to avoid right but anything any concerns being brought up that it wouldn't go through this process so i'm on the fence i think as it stands right now doesn't feel like it necessarily fits under our review but if that were to change it might be too i think um when i wrote to kelly i think you realized i was kind of on the fence too it's the first year of the committee and we have been the sponsors of creating the committee and we certainly did want to be the poster child for the first ones that uh said oh geez oh after we got to town meeting so i thought it was prudent uh to come forth and say this is what's happened we actually as i described didn't even have this on our thoughts or we hadn't even had a conversation about this until mid november by then of course we're past time to submit capital so um i did want to speak to you i can what i can do is um as we go through the process just sort of keep sending you some updates you know if we do now until meeting if you read i'm sure brian has already read them if you read the articles that were submitted you'll see the little background information i wrote about 150 words there basically said that the intent here is to see if we can find a source proactively find new growth to help the tax base so and we do we have reached out just have started reaching out and speaking with the school uh department and the school committee you know about the land certainly we're not going to go to town meeting without having had those conversations a little more formalized than they have been um i think if it's as you described carol and kelly has summarized um it might be useful and it may have to appear in the finance committee's write-up so you would have to whoever's the stock board liaison in the article might need to work with them might be worth putting in a sentence or two like you know just saying uh this this request was discussed with the capital improvement planning committee and for the for now based on the intent it was determined that it was it wasn't within their purview or something to to you know proactively answer the question um yeah i i i'm gonna refrain from doing any sort of vote tonight i what i'd rather do is as we get a little closer and it develops right and we have a little more information we we take a vote um just in case it changes in a way that um makes it okay i will keep you informed the best i can you do know all our article write-ups and you remember this all both of you have to be done by mid-march so um we will be starting our discussions of this probably this article in the february 2nd or february 9th um to start yeah yeah yeah you might you might consider carol i don't think it applies to respect to the appraisal because where the schools to proceed or want to proceed or at least investigate proceeding with a new elementary school there it's quite possible they're going to need some sort of preliminary feasibility engineering so when you talk to them you might see are there any things that they think on a preliminary basis they would need themselves were they to decide not to give up control that if you're going to be doing this work anyway it's cheaper to do it all together
i'm sorry but i really think that we are going to get um like i said have more formal uh conversation with the school committee before we go to town meeting i just can't foresee myself if i won't i'm not the liaison on the article but i just cannot foresee the select board then um presenting this to town meeting without having had serious dialogue and conversations with the school committee you know about potential use you know and does it make sense for it to be evaluated for potential new growth or do we need it for school buildings i mean we really but the idea is we're going to try and make a decision here well but the answer is you may not know until you do the investigation well that's true and they may not know until you do the investigation if the investigation says you really can't feasibly put a school building here that clears the way for them to feel comfortable giving up control if it comes back and says you could and you're still looking at the new growth option you've now used the money to get to a decision point and that then that's a decision do you then are you able to come back at some future town meeting looking to transfer control um so i just don't know if they'll you know you'll have the conversation i'm not sure they're going to necessarily have all the information they need to make a definitive decision before you go to town meeting and giving up control i can't speak for them it's it's a platform yeah yeah yeah if they're a hard no then yeah
you know essentially just close it up by saying essential the select board is doing the due diligence that we think needs to be done thank you um okay i'm going to say before i'm going to probably say for a little bit of a little meaning but i'm going to hop in if i may and say i read the report it's fabulous thank you you're welcome we still have work to do but uh as i said in my email i just wanted to delay getting up 27 or due to us so okay um i did not have a chance to look maybe carol i still have you here i could not look at the rest of the articles and have a chance to before tonight brian if you did yeah other than i don't know if there are any petitioner articles i haven't seen anything yet but i don't think any of the other articles um you know the only ones we thought might have the possibility were in the cpa articles and i i don't see anything that's changed there so so then it's just it's just me to answer that question yes please okay hi oh sorry i forgot to introduce myself in the beginning sorry carol martin on lake road remember the select board okay um there are seven petitioner articles one of them has to do with an asset management plan of our capital i think in there i think the request is for um the select board to either review it or something but i don't think it has it's not a capital project um and then there are two that i don't know what they are um and then there are four pertaining to the sherman bridge the bridge on sherman bridge road about regulating i had the couple of had to do with traffic one with the design that may in fact um be something that do you want to look at brian um i believe those articles were being certified and they may have been finalized today and once they are they'll come out to the select board okay yeah because on sherman bridge up to this point you know when i get them how's that yeah up to this point we've been told by tom holder that he's not anticipating needing any additional pound capital for that project so if the petitioner's article is asking for you know additional bells and whistles that will require capital that probably falls within our purview but having said that i would also uh and i brought this issue up while i was still on the fincom um um to the extent it's a petitioner article i'm not sure this committee can block anything going to town meetings during the working group petitioner article falls outside i mean obviously knowing awareness of it is important but we can't write a petitioner's article is a petitioner's article they're allowed to to bring it before the town so awareness good but i don't there's no we can't mandate that it has to go through this process and i believe it's the first yes i'm just going to throw a couple thoughts out that just went through my mind is it is petitioner's article they are entitled and by right by law code to be included in the warrant and heard a town meeting however i would get a ruling from our opinion from someone because our code now says uh capital projects don't get approved to tell meaning unless they've gone by the committee yeah essentially why i'm here because i'm making sure we're not violating the rule yeah i was going to comment on that carol so when when the um the bylaw language came forward i raised this issue and sought advice to town council through the town manager and the best i could get uh was a verbal representation by i think the town manager that he had gotten that input something that effect and i memorialized that advice or input in the minutes for the meeting at which i asked that question for fear that we would get down the road and there'd be no legislative history i was trying to get the language changed yeah in the in the bylaw so that this wouldn't be an issue and the best i could do is get what i call legislative history um and so i'll dig that out just for benefit of this group as to what was in the minutes of that meeting uh now whether in the future someone wants to say well i'm sorry that's not what the bylaw says um that that that becomes a different issue yeah i don't i guess my opinion is i don't think it's it would be harmful for the committee to look at petitioner's requests and have comment on them i just the we put in in the bylaw that everything has to go through right if it doesn't go through our process it can't be included in the town managers recommendation but the petitioner's article would be outside could be outside of that anyway well with town council what i was trying to get town council a pint on for us was that it would be repugnant as they say the state law because there is a state statute as to petitioners articles going directly before town meeting they don't need to get you know voted into the warrant by the select board for example so uh anyway i'll circulate the minutes from that fincom meeting so everybody has it i would not expect us to uh feel obliged to have to opine but i agree kelly that uh it's helpful for us to know what's going on and particularly because it may ultimately affect what tom holder thinks the dpw needs to do um you know for example if it was directing tom the dpw to do something specific and then tom holder come came back and said i've got to revise um you know our capital request for from zero to something if that's coming internally that may be a different story um the other thing it's it's not you know money but i would be interested in whatever this other article is once they're available about an asset management plan for town capital assets is that what it is carol yes but i'm i'm i mumbled and bumbled before because i'm not a hundred percent certain exactly so i'll wait till i get it if you don't if you don't get in a couple days brian um let me know and i'll get to it yeah also they'll get posted on yeah but yeah so it'd be interested whoever's petitioned that what what their particular uh interest is and um i would like to think if it is town-wide capital assets that they would come forward and share with us kind of what their thoughts are what they're looking for and then my last thought is which we didn't think of kelly when we were on this committee is that um is there i know your advisory to the town manager but is there a situation where the capital improvement and planning committee uh planning and improvement sorry committee wants to all pine on uh on our a capital um item that goes before town that hasn't gone through the process do we do it through the finance committee comments do we do it through the do we have to make a yeah okay so maybe we have to do it through the if you have
over the years on the finance committee right there used to be everybody and their brother put a vote in in in the finance committee um write-ups and that got limited down to only the finance committee and the bodies that right actually had control over whatever the particular article was so i don't think we want to add cipc to like a whole separate process i think we can consider if you know i wanted to add right a paragraph or a sentence or two on cipc's position position on a particular article i think that would be okay but i don't want to create a whole separate no i like that but i'm thinking there might be somewhere you want to reach out to the finance committee and say here's our position on this article talk to the liaison you know we're learning as we go here about how we're going to do this so yeah and at the moment we're we're talking about about possibly two articles the first one we talked about which um we said depends right probably not initially and the other one is the petitioner article which we don't think i mean we might have an opinion on it but it's not that relevant yeah um i agree with kelly and i think our report should i you know had we had any of these available prior to issuing a report which we typically won't to extend our report has to be done by october 15th um uh but i suppose that's not to say that on some agenda prior to town meeting this committee might you know want to look at article i mean it has to there might have to be right i know the bylaws says october 15th but given the way capital goes and the way budget creation goes the likelihood that we could issue something on october 15th and never have to issue an addendum before town meeting it's like no no right because stuff's going to come up and the bylaw says other than emergencies i don't want to get into a debate about what's an emergency i think there's going to have to be a process to just we're going to have to amend right take another we get something hot by the 15th but we're going to have to amend for new information prior to town meeting i just don't see a way to do it otherwise makes sense okay um so i'm we can revisit i'll put it on the other one once we have all the articles i'll send them to you guys if there's these petitioner just so that we have full view and to the extent anything changes carol you'll let us know on the on the holiday road one um i do before as we're getting into future projects uh fy28 through fy31 i wanted to bring two things to your attention after i sent out the report i got two emails um one from michael feta he said his only concern is the public safety hvac which we had not included in the 2027 plan um we pushed it
that's medium number two wasn't it yes it was um he said that that is on its uh one compressor out of four um i'll be utilizing some age dollars to purchase the equipment so we'll be ready for install the requested 27 dollars would be used to complete the work um including some controls and updating the vavs um i'm happy to discuss so that changes a little bit i mean so i would say if we're going through the 20 to 31 projects i think we might have to revisit if there's something i can swap out and my other question we did put it as our like hey if there's anything else available this would be a good candidate for their surplus capital right dollars to to cover that i mean why don't you talk about tom holder's email and then we talk about process because it seemed to me unless we draw the line uh you know ultimately the town manager has to create a budget and so i think i'm not saying we amend necessarily so i would say as we're going through prioritizing the rest of it it's good to have that in mind well it sounds like that one might pop immediately to right top of the heat but it sounds like he's saying you can't wait till fiscal 28 yeah and so that to me sounds like town manager you need to figure out how to squeeze that one into the fiscal 27 budget and if you need to knock something out or find the resources yeah right um uh and then the other one is it is it worth asking him relative to the school hvac which is 500 somehow thousand that we had as medium number one yeah um ask him of those two which is is is the public safety building more urgent i'm gonna i didn't ask him i'm gonna assume it is because that's what he okay we he calls out he's calling them out right um okay and then um holder we learned that the construction costs for the dudley road water main replacement has increased to 1.17 million rather than the 1 million currently requested he sent me an estimate we're requesting funds for the base bid only asking that we increase we add that to the capital budget and i think similar to what you just said these are things that i this one in particular because it's a change in estimate we're not going to we can't go back and redo the capital plan for every change in estimate i don't envision that as being part of the bylaw requirement that we've seen the project right isn't like well did you see it in that exact dollar that it's going to end up at that's got to be a town manager um right okay i got a tweak especially when we've already submitted yeah right yeah so yeah i mean if we're in the process and probably we'd update it but once it's submitted yeah because everything's going to be up or down that becomes a different issue yeah and these are just two examples of what traditionally has happened at the fincom level where how many days has this been four for now less than 24 hours right so that was which is a little troubling i mean i don't know when tom holder got the s-man but but we've been we've been sending the uh minutes and the spreadsheets to our ex-officio members and uh and and to his credit mike fea has responded a couple times to me along the way saying so far i think i'm fine but obviously there's so much detail and um maybe he just realized that that so the the report is from tate and howard and it stated yesterday that's that's on tom holder's piece yeah yeah yeah yeah and then on mike fea's pieces that he may have just dismissed it in terms of how we were categorizing it in massive detail so but uh yeah it's it's a little frustrating uh you know with all the disclosure to people that you you still find yourself in a this and this is very late i mean normally the capital budget from the town manager has been delivered to the fincom probably late december uh so i'm sure that's right and then continue to change up until and through right through town meeting so it's not as if when it got delivered to to fincom it was ever so usually it was emergency type things but the question is do you feel a need from a process standpoint to have the committee review comment on either or both of these emails um um right i i would like to come comment back right that we appreciate the additional information at this stage right it's up to the town manager we've reviewed both projects it's up to the town manager to make adjustments um and you know make your case with him accordingly right but i don't i don't think that we have to do anything else yeah i just want to actually keep giving us the information because obviously we'll you know i don't want them to call let's go to him stand and not tell us so yeah so i can i if you're okay i will i'll communicate that like we want to keep we want to keep sharing the information with us right because we want to stay and continuous like knowing what's going on but at this stage it's up to the town manager to to make adjustments for for things like this yeah and i'm not i don't know if you want to even say it but if we were having this conversation two weeks ago i i in light of those two requests i'd probably figure out how to make room in what we did for those two items with that that additional request uh so i don't want them to feel like we're unsympathetic to oh no i'll i'll be nice about it like it's not it's nothing against it's really just the process we have to draw the line with the submission of being there it's that moves to execute yeah well to your point isn't isn't there's gonna be a lot more of those next year assuming we submit a report on october the 15th there's gonna be a lot more post report yeah i think i divide them into two categories though right so in both of these cases the projects were submitted to us we did review them we made a decision based on what was reviewed in the case of the hvac we decided not to include it but we did put it like hey it's next in line it might uh sorry michael mccall is how manager has complete ability because we reviewed it it's considered in the plan to pull it in on dudley road bar name replacement we reviewed the project that the estimate changed that's going to happen all over the place unless i i would say unless the estimate was a million became two right something where it substantially changed the nature of the project i don't think that's any different than the ones we didn't include like it's still up to michael mccall to say okay we're going to keep these amounts right as we get closer if new projects come up or right completely new that weren't considered i think that's a different story that it gets into is an emergency because unless it's like you know back during covid years right when this happened you didn't have this committee but there was considered right ventilation needs at schools were an emergency it had to go in right and that got handled kind of the tail end of the process i think even after it's been found um so that's fine but if it's just like oh well you know priority changed i want to i want to do this project that wasn't on the list then i think it has to come back here otherwise here i mean other other than that the only other way to another way to deal with it which would be unfortunate would be if we're dealing with this for an october 15th report and taking position would be to have to carve out a contingency uh if we're looking at resource resources available saying we're going to have to stick you know a half a million dollars and not allocate any project to it knowing that inevitably there'll be things that pop up which is a another way to do it that way you could also do like opposite of what we did where we said hey if there's any more money there's these two projects you could do the opposite and say if something else comes up the first ones to go these are the first ones to go but i still think by the bylaw we have to review the actual request right so i just there's we're gonna end up needing to do addendums i just these right as of right now these aren't things that i think qualify for that um so i'll respond accordingly we appreciate the additional information we want you to keep sharing that information based on the bylaw and where we are in the process this is this is the time and the fact these were included right in what we consider the town manager has the wherewithal to add them yeah projects are approved they're just they were considered they've met the requirement they were considered by crpc town manager has the wherewithal to adjust um or adjust amounts or adjust projects as he sees fit that was good okay so next up is to start the process of talking about
i felt so accomplished yesterday guys um um that's exactly yeah and you open my revised spreadsheet and said yeah
which uh looking at number nine i think we're on well they have version nine they have version nine i don't i don't think i sent you guys version 10 yes that was a special one for kelly is that because there was something else well i put that extra tab on it so i'll just do nine so it's the same that's the new tab that i added with just fiscal 28 for now figuring it's going to take us a little bit of time to get through that one yeah till we get into a kind of a global concerns and given the amount of money that's involved but i will send out a actually a version 11 because there as we get these kind of emails i'm going back into that spreadsheet i'm just highlighting the uh you know the changes that are being requested and obviously based on our conversation tonight to accept we start ranking some of these things or recommending some of these things i'll put that in and circulate it it's the very first tab yeah so all i did was i i used the same template that we used for fiscal 27 which came out of brian keveney's capital budget spreadsheets um i figured we'd hopefully presumably start with all the highest ranked priorities um including the adjustment we made to road improvements and then just for purpose of discussion immediately following the high we'll come back to all these but feeling following the high ones i i slotted in all of the fiscal 27 medium requests including the medium number one and two that we were just talking about uh on the potential theory that those might be considered by some members to have a higher priority than the mediums that are being requested in fiscal 28 but we have to discuss that right um and then the same thing for the low priorities i just slotted in the low carryovers first and then the fiscal 28 lows and um and then the objective tonight is say okay when you add all those up if they were all included very bottom you'll see just big picture that's 19.8 million dollars of capital requests and in the five-year capital plan last year for fiscal 28 it had 8 million 272 so we're 11.5 million dollars over what at least was in last year's plan and um and then so one we have to just deal with sort of order of magnitude how do we get that down to a manageable figure and then second step is um spreading that which i didn't do myself spread it across the page uh to a funding source uh but i figured it would be best to have us go back through uh and uh see if you know people how people feel particularly about those carryover items anyway so that's what this tab is and i i don't know we'll get a path through this hopefully get through this one tonight i i'm happy to do a similar thing for 29 30 and 31 um and you know they might get a little bit easier because there's fewer requests as we get out yeah i think the other thing i need to do chance to do that now that first focus on is running out with production because i think there's a fair amount of hinges off of off of that um really for your capacity wise and strength wise um so i can work on that before as well because i think it's going to be critical and i did get the debt schedule from brian company and it has the existing debt and then it has proposed debt which was based on the prior capital plan um but what it doesn't have in the proposed debt is the mwra which i mean we've talked about it with tom holder is the only reason it matters in in projecting kind of that probably is we have a debt policy a policy not to have more than 10 percent of total operating budget um as debt service and that includes everything not just at least the way i would hit it so i think it says not more than a 10 target 68 percent with the mwra i don't know how you're gonna how you can meet the target at the mwra so i think you have to be mindful of those sorts of you know the policy limits on some of the stuff um which i'm not totally sure the prior plan well it didn't because because because the mwra wasn't in there so right and there were no number of other you know the high school little subject wasn't in there and or wastewater wasn't in there so it didn't fully incorporate that stuff in so i think there's going to be some capacities capacity constraints if we're all in policy but carol carol are you still on i think so drop off yeah my audio wasn't working to me yeah i just had a question uh so thus far and i'm hopeful going forward this committee is attempting to complete its work within the parameters of the capital and debt policy you know various thresholds percentage thresholds um kelly was just talking about you know the the size of the mwra debt that million eighty year or so that service over 20 years uh could along with other existing and projected debt cause us to go over the 10 percent of total operating still over 10 if we're but target of six to eight but the eighth is pretty hard to to be uh but i guess my question is uh policy is policy is policy but at some point in time there will inevitably be a project or two that can't get done unless policy is waived who who do you foresee going forward this is just a general question who do you foresee being the the waiver of a policy uh debt or capital policy of a parameter um does that require the select boards approval you think i think well like you said it's a policy versus code i think this is a brian question um i'm going to throw it back to you now brian is debt exempt debt excluded debt is included in the metric correct calculation now also the um i did see in your report by the way the question of whether the mwi it's actually called long-term water supply um is going to be funded through water rates 100 that's what's being presented to town meeting control that and the deal right to be definitive and i had i had explained to them uh the members at the last meeting i think that uh at least your board and brian kevin had had a discussion where brian explained the possible other approach which was issuing exempt debt uh you know have the general fund issue the exempt debt and then have the water fund reimburse the general fund for the debt service and i don't know that you ever definitively took a position uh on that i know bill whitney asked about whether you had um either way the water fund ends up paying for the debt service but i got the sense that brian was expressing a little bit of angst that if water rates in some year were not sufficient to pay water bonds um that the town would have to pay through a subsidy and if it was a subsidy from the general fund it would uh be within the levy and that's why he was suggesting you think about you know putting on the ballot exempt debt but having it be 100 reimbursed is that still a still an alternative which in part is why kelly i thought partly is why you worded the way you worded it um yeah it's partly but it's also because it's not our hurry and i'm not until those decisions are final final i'll feel comfortable um i believe the board has taken position on all of those items brian we did review the alternative suggestion that mr keveney brought forth the biggest concern for that wasn't necessarily that the water rate the water revenue didn't did was not adequate to fund the debt service because apparently the dor when you do the tax recap will tap retained earnings before it comes back looking to the general fund so if the water fund has like a million dollars of retained earnings and they had a 400 000 deficit their retained earnings would be um reduced by that deficit the real issue was that the the note if you will the debt excluded note stays open because it just it's it it's there so the balance could be spent this was brian's biggest concern with this suggestion after he made it he came back and said uh you know there's always a possibility that another another select board or another you know finance team would say oh let's spend the balance of this debt exclusion on this debt exclusion note that's been authorized because it's open it's just open so with that the select board said no we didn't care for that and we voted for just water rates to be funded the the construction cost to be funded 100 through water rates okay well i i misspoke and i didn't i didn't get this because bill whitney seemed to be questioning whether the board had actually definitively ruled out that other option but uh obviously you're you're the chair of the board so uh anyway back to kelly's point then we we have no purview over that decision anyway right but it's what is that it is what's currently on the table as is what is going to be presented in the article and in town meeting they select what is concerned of course that should to your final other point should the deficit one year exceed the retained earnings the general fund will be on the hook and there will be no conversation and no vote at town meeting but that would be a really huge swing so okay so back to my question then if and you you suggested you know the answer to the question i posed about weaving a policy you say starts with a discussion with brian keveney i believe so i think he was he he's a much better source on that in terms of how we would go about it i do believe that very long ago when i first started finance committee when we set the metrics we said generally you know ten percent because you have to like to your point we understand that if you have a large project you will exceed your debt metric so i'll read it to you because it is yeah so brian when i think would be a better uh source for that question myself debt service targets full debt service ideally no more than 10 percent of the total operating budget with a target of 68 percent so i would read that as because the word ideally isn't there okay we're trying to keep it under 10 but it recognizes the fact that it might be over i think if you're over you got to explain it right to to the residents that you're going to be over uh and it does specify so that's a total debt service total operating budget and then it has a sub bullet within levy a goal of three to five percent of the general fund budget so that is the other reason implies to me that that's total with excluded and self-supported um because otherwise why are you doing it three to five percent of what general three to five percent of the general levy debt is a goal of three to five percent of the general fund budget okay so that that one wouldn't apply to water that service but then over 10 percent debt service ideally no more than 10 percent of the total operating budget okay with a target of six to eight percent so because it says total debt service and it says total operating budget that to me is all is general fund plus enterprise funds so then the question for us as we start to proceed through this would be and we don't know what those numbers are at the moment but if the mwa happy hollow project debt service were to and and i hear you saying you don't think it does but if it were to push us beyond 10 percent um or a new school building were to push us beyond the water by itself is not going to do it it's going to depend on how much other borrowing we set so so my question is um and maybe we need to go through this first but if we felt we were going to if we were trying to keep it within that limit but we were bumping up against the limit because of a very large project from our perspective do we set aside that large project and say as long as we can meet those criteria except for that project or we're going to go over a little bit but it's because we have this large project that's skewing the result i think we have to make the decision based on right all the other criteria laid out and then if we go over i think we have to disclose that right it's going over because of okay so we'll try to stay within the limits as we go through this but if we find we can't get some critical things in there then we make the case here's why we're recommending you okay but until we see the numbers kind of that debt service we don't know whether we're going to bump up against it exactly and so what i did for purposes of the report for apple 27 was i looked at the existing debt and then i was able to do a good enough swag right to know that what we were adding wasn't going to tip it um but it does beyond one year i can't do that on the back of an envelope so yeah and well it's hard because you have the high school it's still amortizing which is a pretty big number but that goes off yeah not too distant future and then you got this big water number coming on and then you probably have another big school debt service coming on somewhere down the pike um those are really and those are really the biggest projects unless there's something you know like new town building or something but why we have carol do you want to drive home that point even though it was bolded in your memo before we find epistle 28 just since we're about to talk about the rest of the capital i do think it's uh in scope i think we're going to talk about f528 or f531 the the future of the town building is absolutely critical to this town to this planning there is as i noted we noted in the report there's significant all of our terror right to the town building that is in the capital plan that is currently slotted fy28 and now there's a little bit this year two million this year and call it five million in the other years why our understanding from talking to um facilities is that is like scratching the surface that just you know and making the building that is not a rehab right that's not doing all the things that need to be done and so it's really important that that the select board or whoever needs to thinks about how this is going to work because otherwise we're going to be throwing millions of dollars into this place uh just to get keep basic functions going and i don't want you know a situation where that's done and then i think the select board has last year started to express some interest in having this discussions and so with the change in the i hope it was my turn sorry all of a sudden wait a minute um with the change in the leadership and facilities um i think we can put this back on a future agenda most likely we'll have a conversation like after we put the warrant to bed but i'll put it on the draft agenda list how's that sound yeah i would appreciate it yep done i mean it'll be like april may june but done yeah that's fine the concern is just this as you know and brian knows from beyond that you know a five million ish number for town building has been kicked getting kicked out in the plan every year for the last five years that's on top of several million dollars that was was already for work here if you really sit down and this is what we asked the the facilities director to do when he's working on sit down and figure out what this building is going to cost that in our opinion the town needs to know that before they vote on any more right temperatures related to this building that they need to know what the cost i think the select board is an agreement i think this just has not um moved up in the onto the um what i call the draft agenda list so i'll get it on the list and then like i said once we get through the warrant we'll get back to some of these other topics but to your point you start your work in october or maybe start putting your projects your plan together in october so i think this probably should be we're continuing tonight carol we have i know but
your plan you're putting your plan together so right right the plan has to be done october 15th so all right well we'll see what we can get it done in this you know sometime in the summer how's that thank you all right so anything we do given that we have a large carryover amount for town building improvements that like they have pushed off which i think i mentioned at the last meeting and you can see in this tab he didn't he didn't i don't think he necessarily concluded all these are the right dollars and they all are going to be spent and he wants to request them all fiscal 28 i just put them there as a placeholder but it's a big number and so it crowds out if we leave it there it crowds out potentially other important projects and so again so let's talk about that let's get to that one and say what do we want to do with it my position is that the only town building stuff that stays in is the group work that he faced across the years and the rest of it has to wait until there's a decision on the future of the building unless my unless michael said it's like hey it's like the elevator so there's one other thing that has to get done i'm not putting that my opinion you don't put the whole nut in fly 28 not far enough along in understanding the costs to do that so those are the five items starting with the million eighty five thousand down to the two hundred thousand but we also have the painting town building exterior painting for 125 000 so that's five thirty thirty six six items yeah town building enforcement tiles or is that moving down to the line what was that line 33 33 oh it's up on the medium yeah that one definitely you have eight items yeah that's seven where's the eighth one i see 44 45 40 oh wait 46 is a repeat 46 a repeat of 33 oh no 46 is the actual project so 33 is the engineering yeah and that's because we pushed out yeah but to that point if you if the engineering is in 28 the project wouldn't be in 28 and when you want to think so well that's because we yeah we push the 75 and i guess that's my point it would be included even engineering wouldn't include the project yeah i mean i if we spent anything i'd be inclined yeah the engineering 75 000 it's like it'd be better to find out what's involved if he's ready to do it yeah that's kind of yeah but then so yeah so the 75 the million 85 the 700 to 500 250 the 200 the 150 the 125. well the 150 is public safety building yeah oh i'm sorry so the one yeah i separated them so so so those are all all those last ones other than the 75 are in the medium category anyway but we're saying within the medium category no one feels like i don't want to speak for everybody here but there's a general sentiment that we don't want to deal with those in fiscal 28 yeah i think if we're starting at your so starting at your mediums from the things that didn't make the cut enough like 27 right because everything's helpful i think those still don't make the cut until we have a better agreed a better plan yeah i agree so just so i understand so we don't we say they don't make the cut does that mean they automatically get put into 29 for for right now for what we're doing i think we want to work in a consecutive fashion so i would say for those you're pushing to f by 29 same exercise we're doing here right those pop on for 29 um and we evaluate again there yeah yeah agreed
am i correct in assuming all of the high priority items would be um or we'd be recommending to include in fiscal 28 yeah yeah we talked about the town building and realizing that at the moment we have a target of 8.2 million dollars 8.3 million dollars if if we're using last year's capital plan as a target yeah i mean i don't know if i'm using last year's capital yeah so we do all the highs yeah again there's nothing in that we we kind of went through these not in great deal until the last meeting but there's nothing in that list of eyes anybody's got any concern about they're all again life safety yeah i mean there may be it's just the right amount to be split but yeah i think the right projects i mean the only one that i even i wonder about this will need the interesting input of you know we put the care the number one we did the elementary hvac and then 28 is the middle school and i think the order of which is deemed failure and that could be switched i don't have you know whether or not one is high versus medium like you know i mean yeah yeah yeah i think they're both going to end up in the plan anyway so but he may say no i really want to do some of the units i think we might want to put on that one just to see if you would still want to do both next year assuming the money doesn't get freed up this year or for 27. everybody knows that's about some kind of yeah yeah the other the one that was medium or 21 versus 25 yeah 21 25 and 26. yeah for the road improvements what we had done for 27 was we had cut that in half right and then and it yeah so i would say that one row 27 is uh that's just gone yeah that's not happening yeah so we already have been 28 9 15 in the high so we started to reset the plan right yeah i would agree
so for the moment do we want to assume that the public safety building hvac will find its way into the town manager's budget um no i think we right now assume it's based on what we learned it's a high priority do we want to bump that 28 and he pulls it in right that just comes out and yeah i agree
our recommendation has to align with what our recommendation is okay so we want that to be a no longer a medium or a medium high but move that up to high yeah it's because that's the same thing for the elementary i would yeah yeah so i'll move up i know what's going to happen they have over but they can't all go the same year most likely well maybe it's just yeah it's because they do them at some time and they've got to have buildings for different programming so it's hard to do them all at once right i'm looking for you know medium highs as well there may not be other items we're going to move into the high category but if they are medium high they're they're going to fall above obviously the rest of the medium so we keep moving down our list here so to the 400 000 for the roads we're not carrying that over correct correct i'll delete that from the list or
the swap loader um again that's a truck that tom holder made it you know a good strong case for but we ended up approving two of the three for fiscal 27 um yeah we've got i mean we've really got four dpw projects here in this section we've got the water system radio system upgrades um and the dpw facilities rehab and upgrades yeah i think the first three i'm i'm fine putting them at medium high or even high i suppose yeah i like the medium high kind of keeps it i mean it doesn't make sense but you definitely get them out out of the middle medium yeah so yeah i mean if we're gonna if every year they need one or two critical vehicles that's one of them with stormwater we pushed the radio that ties it on the rest of the system so i think it makes sense it joins everybody else i just don't know on the facility rehab and upgrades exactly what's involved there so yeah and i feel like i've seen this before broken into pieces this year or two about this there was a i think it got combined on the project but i probably want to move it i want a little more information but do you think there's a general philosophy we have to be thinking about what our philosophy is on maintenance type upgrades of newer buildings right is there like do you do you start if you've got to make a priority decision do you start the buildings that are in the worst condition that you can't recover from but make sure you're on top of the maintenance uh rehab needs of the newer buildings so that they don't end up in that position it's a first in first out kind of versus last i just don't i don't know the right answer is i just i cringe at letting assets that we've spent significant money on deteriorate okay well that one though i agree with you i'm not i don't maybe i just don't recall exactly what's entailed in that uh yeah so much to get more information yeah uh we skipped the website we're talking about tbw but um i can't i was a betting person that'll be in the fiscal 27th yeah i can't put it in until the it balance gets those it projects get done all right so just so i'm keeping track of so the the three dpws i'm going to label medium high
the website i'm going to leave is medium carry forward 20 27 dpw facility same thing leave it as medium carry forward um and uh what do we decide i'm in town building force may tie in or push that with the rest of them and just leave it in a medium but we're going to push it to 29 or push it a year anyway well we will when we're out of them yeah right when we run out of money okay so should the rest of you three feel that is similar to the other town building okay uh then the biggest number on the page um so i can't put that in order until somebody answers my question on send a reminder because it's maybe they just got lost whenever using box yeah i don't think anything has changed and that's not understandable so it's not even to the point we can decide i mean the question's been raised many times yeah and i don't understand there's a plan like there was a plan but what was included in that you're supposed to be a committee it's supposed to be so i'll ask again but i can't move that on until i'll get my answer so in terms of how people are looking at that at the moment i'm showing it as medium carry forward from fiscal 27 but it previously had been in fiscal 29 in the prior year five-year plan um we want to just label that a medium and lump it in with all the rest of the mediums until we get more medium because i the way we're going to run out of money yeah and then these mediums are going to get you're going to roll them over right and i'm going to keep doing that for as long until somebody tells me what's in that request probably prevents i mean it's kind of generic but i need to use that major hard part or something yeah the next the next three i just need to know what they are like so i know the dw flooring when we talked about this is the one where he says essentially he picks so many square feet of flooring to upgrade everywhere every year that was yeah but he took some we had more years in and he took some out he did take some out so i think they've gotten further with because they they've already had a bunch of update on this they've gotten further with it than they originally anticipated so do we ask on these at least on these three just for an update of based on on 27 and where they'd rank these is that let me ask this question do you other than getting more information do you maybe just got to get through the next list of mediums but we can also take some of these mediums and do what we did with the two that are sitting up there as medium one and two and kind of pick and choose a handful to put toward the top of the list in the event there's more money to be spent and maybe we just don't have enough information on these three um to do that yeah yeah my my kind of stance is if they were they were on the FY27 take them out i want to deal with that before i deal with fiscal 28 mediums okay because they were already pushed from a year uh like the medium so why would i why would i do that FY28 so this is purely so we can keep track of this stuff would you therefore prefer that i keep this label medium carry forward fiscal 27 and just keep showing it above the rest of the mediums yeah okay unless we consciously we haven't do you feel that same way on the high school baseball field as opposed to dropping that down into the mediums of all the other mediums i would say the only two i see dropping down are the 10 building force each each side five because right i don't because we don't know we got rid of the road carryover right yep the website because i don't know i think it's going to get put in this year i don't put it in my priority with the other stuff okay um and then the high school fields i would agree everybody agree the high schools will just become regular medium it's a couple questions about and i think leaving a medium is final the ceiling and wall repairs for 250 000 that's a lot of money and i'm not sure what that's or especially the high school it's not that since 2012 i'm not quite sure what the yeah i agree with what you said john i think that there's a number of michael's requests that um weren't necessarily specific projects yet but just based on experience that is inevitably going to be some work somewhere and it has to get done in the summer and he needs to have the money to be able to move quickly and identify what it is and do it so you know we can try to get at least that much confirmation from him i got the impression the middle school is tied more to windows and h because as they rip the hx remember they're going to go from the ones that have like piping below the ceiling that's the rooftops or something it was something the high school i don't know but the middle school he definitely had it all the time yeah that's an old building there's there's i guess it's more middle school but um practice that they started using in a murder throws to combine if they rather than have a project for fifty thousand for the high school and a two hundred thousand dollar project for the middle school and you do 250 so that you can contract you know one contractor same contractor and get the and your prices yeah right yeah yeah so that's my guess i mean if you walk through the high school compared to middle school one of them is right in marketing better yeah yeah so i guess where that moves me is that the three the ones it's the three school projects the high school building improvements the ceiling of all repairs in the district white flooring i would say are mediums that rank higher than because they're carry over than the mediums okay i agree i mean it seemed like he had plans so it wasn't like i don't really know exactly what i knew him like he just doesn't know what what room but yeah yeah i would agree i'm good with that which one expensive let's i'm gonna call up ballpark six six points or 5.3 million between the 3.7 million high that's there now then picking up the first two medium high number one and two and then the three you're 5.4 million if you get down where radio system operates because you only left out is so important movement 5.4 or 8.2
yeah 6.2 maybe about 2 million to go
the salt shed would grab a million of that and again it wasn't entirely clear when tom met with us again we spent most of our most of the department had to spend most of our time talking about fiscal 27 items um so it may be we need to you know reach out and get a bit more detail
you know you wouldn't want salt shed to be you know leaking on top of the material
i mean those for those for me the first three of us are a bunch of questions right salt shed you know why why are we doing it how to when we need we i don't know how the landfill ties in with the transfer station if it's just part of the future use conversation and also i think that's a and also whether or not there's any state in the ending there you know yeah so there is there's issues so the landfill the landfill is across the one that they're talking about there unless i'm wrong it's across the street from all the oxbow it's not it's not it's not the landfill the old landfill and my understanding is there were some
issues that needed to be resolved yeah i mean there's a committee that's been overseeing what quite that land to be used for and they're looking at all sorts of different options but i think to be able to fully utilize it for any of those options they have to finish doing whatever they have to do to the old landfill i'm not sure that i've ever i've heard recently that the state is after the town to necessarily have to do something yesterday i think this is more part of you know the forward-looking reuse of that but if they're going to reuse it wouldn't that be part of the cost of the the future development of it i mean it depending on and they again they they have all sorts of different options but as kelly said on the uh oxbow apartments if if they chose housing
it may be that the town's got to get the site at least to a point where it could be built on right right right um but you know that to me using that particular parcel is a nice to have but not a you know we absolutely need it i don't know there's a lot of good people focused on you know trying to find out you know come up with creative uses for it um not many of which are going to add new growth to the town so i i don't personally um put that one you know higher than any of these other mediums the salt should rehabilitation i really agree we need to know what's the scope and what's the downside if that got pushed and could some smaller amount of work be done to buy another two or three years um same on the route 20 rehabilitation design this item a total of i'm going to say seven hundred thousand dollars originally appeared in fiscal 29 uh the town manager's five-year capital plan last year and the economic development committee who's again with the planning board focused on uh creating more development opportunities up and down route 20 uh hopefully to generate more tax revenue um in order to access state money to do the bulk of the work on route 20 sidewalks curbing um there needed to be a certain amount of preliminary work done so they were successful in getting the finance committee the getting the select board town manager and the finance committee to move i think it was 250 000 of that up into fiscal 26 capital budget and the balance of it uh remained in fiscal 28 um but i'm not sure how much if any of that 250 has actually been spent so far and the uh the reality is that you know you hurry up and then you wait four or five six years to get on the state's highway improvement list so again um work on that quarter on route 20 which i place at a higher priority than using the old landfill on route 20 but it all would be improving that quarter right i personally would replace this one higher than the landfill cap but again you know i'm just not sure how much additional new growth we're going to get out of an improved route 20 corridor might look nicer and it's kind of like years ago there was a proposal to bury the utility wires in town center in the historic district at a cost of millions of dollars which would be paid for by the ratepayers through a surcharge and you say well it'd be nice to have but yeah you really want to do it so yeah listen i think we can we can ask i can reach out to tom with our information the salt shed we have um as far as you can ask for the 250 any of the 250 has been spent yeah i can ask if the rehab the 20 rehab has been spent at all in care if they think that they're going to be ready to move over time reasonably yeah i'm having a hard time with with that and the restoration without a specific like something really pushing the need for that putting that ahead of some type of stuff that we have out here yeah we had a non-compliance that we had to deal with or hey we do this and then like we're losing our place it's a different conversation right yeah if there's if there's money from the state for route 20 rehab i want to take advantage of that because it doesn't come up that often right that you can actually get a hold of that and i it also depends on as some of these new businesses open on 20 right how does that change yeah things as well yeah i mean of these three i would probably say 41 is the most i mean whether not it has short-term value definitely has value that i'd see that we probably could use but not milling to your point you know the matching funds i mean we have to repave the road like other stuff will have to happen there anyway there's so much happening so it could help us avoiding the cost down the line but yeah the road actually was just repaved um finally but um you know one of the things we did approve i think the other that's in here uh to go all the way down to the wastewater low pressure sewer replacement construction two million so in fiscal 27 we approved the design money but you know the useful life of the piping to bring all the septuages of the town wastewater facility according to tom holder is getting near the end of its useful life and he knows at some point the towns pushing to get this route 24 sort of upgraded with granite curving and sidewalks and etc again that's really and then when you do that it might have to be repaid yet again so knowing that he wants to get the low pressure sewer line sort of replaced because you get a trench all the way down through 20 again um yeah yeah so there's there's a number of these projects that are lined up in front of when we're ever going to be able to get on the so-called tip list state list and um but but it's also true that if you haven't done your preliminary work um there's really no chance of being considered to get on the state list so it's a chicken and the egg so let me tell him give us just again this seems like there's a lot of pieces that all tie into climbing dependencies like maybe he can come and say hey this is what i'm thinking i'd like to see this these two can happen in parallel this happens later i mean i don't i mean it sounds interesting i really yeah i need a little bit more detail yeah to his list yeah i just i think i just need to have him tell me about this maybe we just haven't come in yeah because he's got there's a lot of there's a lot of w between what we've moved there's uncomfortable moving and getting in there but that's a lot more right i'm also fearful here to go into it there's nine things in the back of his head that he's going to be prioritized he just hasn't put up the paper yet i'd rather have the conversation now before we actively debate debate these too far for 28. i'm sorry the uh yeah the you know the low pressure system of two million is in that it's in that 8.2 million dollar capital plan number i believe that just that that one project by itself will which we had as a medium you know again i think the question for him is are you looking to get this done now because you're anticipating it's going to take you know another you know until fiscal 28 to be able to do it because you're anticipating this other route 20 activity or are you saying it needs to be done in fiscal 28 because it's going to fail but if if it's going to fail then that to me that medium probably be for me anyway becomes more of a high or medium high priority and they can repair breaks but and i'm not sure it's low pressure i'm not i'm not not sure they're really going to have a break um but it i take it from what i've heard him say it does wear out over time but anyway that two million right if we have roughly six million in the high category uh in this three to six items in the medium carry forward column uh that kind of gets us up to the eight million already just for clarification going back to the ceiling and wall repairs you know that line 36 but is that is that line 56 is that the same because he had it he had it seized over several years and we pushed 27 we didn't sign the 27 so now there's there's double um pushing 56 probably did the next year just push so the next tab you see on here there's going to be a block of these that right populate in and and you know so the only good news is you get into fiscal 29 31. i think the bottom line numbers that are in here at the moment uh are a little closer don't have quite as many of these big things to worry about do you count uh just out of curiosity the uh the local playground cpa funded 400 000 i mean that's in here because it shows up as an article yeah i think brian like i would have to admit in the name i want in the neighborhood of eight but then when we go through and put the eight million how we go through and put funding sources right to the extent i've got there's a shelf things that have funds yeah right i feel a little differently about them kind of i think that's kind of that's borrowing or free cash right so would you view would you view that one as a medium high just to yeah i would view that as a medium high and i would view i would view the field maintenance uh we made medium high and i knew the field maintenance was medium because we're not something we're not funding any fields we're gonna put some some maintenance into it i don't know how we can yeah it's a trade we're not spending two yeah yeah um and then the shift officer command vehicle you pushed out a year already wouldn't you know oh no oh no that's the one i had that description error but that one is probably in the last month so that could be a mri on that one yeah people feel okay with that one yeah yeah it's again life safety i want to do the i.t project data center infrastructure i think we funded the things that work in cyber security this year i can't see funding anything else on i.t until we see balance coming down and it can be planned from the i.t director right because he didn't really give us anything beyond yeah i think he was still getting himself acclimated in the in the position yeah i agree and there's there's over a million dollars there that has to get spent so yeah i mean just 54 high school building improvements i mean i read that as improvements not fixing broken systems so being fine to me it's going to be a little bit yeah well it's he has it right it's it's circulation the they've got reviewed for him um fitness room and then he's got the hvacs and i'm having a hard time and this goes to like the whole assessments and i feel like i need a spreadsheet of all the hvacs of all the links and like what year they're from right it's a little bit of risk factor that's bad okay it just feels like there's like never any hvacs um which probably is but i think part of the issue too is there's you know like you said public safety building there's four of them on there only one's working so that means you got if we replace one we still got two more to go somewhere right how old's that building oh let's say 50. uh 20 25 years yeah it's already going back here i stopped dragging on the poor sluggers for 2000 2001. yes so any any other items in this medium category uh for the town and school projects that people and when we say medium high just again when i redo this we circulate it um again prioritize the medium carry forward from 27 above the medium highs the request in fiscal 28 which will then be above the mediums that were requested in fiscal 28 and then the lows follow just this this may sound weird but i'm actually curious for the custodial equipment this goes back to maintaining what we have like the fact that someone didn't ask it where it tells you that like are they not keeping things clean right yeah i mean this is probably like hey the floor buffer doesn't work anymore right or it's you know works sporadically right i i have a hard time so not not something something like that seems silly to me because that's what i'm thinking right yeah i mean the other yeah i mean the other thing uh well although i think michael did go back so i'll strike that i think michael did go back and relook at because the schools originally came in with it basically numbers that tied to their capital plan five-year capital plan from last year plus those extra two requests from kirsten um but i think michael then went back after we posed questions brought up firearms brought up some other things then he looked through all those prior plan requests and he moved some of those out so i think he's you know he's begun to look a little closer at these out years he just probably hasn't had that much time so i think i think well there's there's pressure on us to get this done right the five-year our five-year recommended plan um it almost seems to me that we're probably going to need to have michael back in as well at some point um just to make sure that we don't inadvertently not you know we put something somewhere and otherwise we risk he's just going to have to come back to us right yeah so why don't i ask michael and tom to come back i think they have the bulk of the dollars because so many of the dollars that's little dollars are michael's right he's the most knowledgeable on them um on where their facilities i think we have them come back and help us rejigger what's high at least understand what's highest priority so they'll be on the list for the updated version of this that shows what we're talking about tonight you can tell them please review that updated one yeah and then you think we got it in the wrong order let us know yeah well we still probably want them in because there we may still need to read yeah yeah absolutely yeah the rest of this isn't really clear i mean so desperate to get the cib one well i also think there's you know there's certain items here that they just know like the roads they know they're going to have every year so those are pretty good numbers um but the other things are kind of once you get past the current year that they know they really have to push for i feel some of the other things are more i got to get some numbers in there some placeholders and so part of the process is going to be a more detailed cip form getting them to realize that unfortunately they're going to have to real time put a bit more work on the out years because once we get past five-year plan now we got to push it out you know another five years and obviously those numbers become even squishier but but um and some of it is just round numbers and rough years knowing that there's going to be a lot of things that change
on the second page how do people feel about the transfer station garage which we had a convenient uh way to punt it because they're they're i don't know if they've started their study yet
so is that one that you feel like we just i don't understand uh 450 and then there was one point eight that was out further and i don't understand typically when we have two stage on the product on the project it's major design and you have construction those are here to be completely different yeah that'd be a good question for michael and tom at the same place at the same time because tom told us all he needs is a 450 000 prefab replacement michael said i need 450 to fix up what's there and then buy me two or three years and i i'm going to build a 1.8 million dollar new building which yeah yeah i can't even build not going to happen that's what he said i know and so you know we need to ask him where did you get your concept but on the other hand i can't conceive a scenario that we'd spend 1.8 million dollars building a building at the transfer station the transfer station can't like this goes back to the study it it can't pay its bills as it is it can't pay for these buildings to do them the general fund is going to have to pay for them i get really stuck right on that because i know what i pay to have my coverage picked up and so i'm like for what we're talking about in building costs i'm just kind of these garbage picked up right and i know not everybody agrees with me but it's it's hard for me to yeah so we leave that one as um as it is at the moment low carry forward yeah i think that's low until technology that it didn't didn't get done in fiscal 2017 which they agreed with um on the enterprise funds right excluding the transportation in this discussion
but on the water and wastewater right this is where funding source matters right the wastewater should be covered by the wastewater i just don't know what kind of financial shape yeah that's they're in good they're in fine shapes that'll be waste wastewater borrowing yeah you could you would do that project and this might be where like you end up over a meeting but you're doing that on the wastewater and you know i can't see same thing on the waterfront vehicle like i can't like see restraining there either because they need vehicles to run the operation and that's what their water rates were you know ignoring the fact that where it's been 36 million dollars um placing furniture at the jcc also you want to um you think without actually putting them into the new order do you think we want to just at least quickly rattle through funding sort initial funding sources and that way i can slot those into what i recirculate yeah let's go right down the list so first is there there's nothing on here that strikes you as uh being of uh high enough to warrant excluded debt is that reasonable the only thing that would be excluded nothing that we talked about putting in this year the only thing i think would need to be a discussion is if that field kind of move forward move forward but i don't like how they reference about five million dollars for excluded debt yeah you know like you talked about this before right it's hard for me to say you got to get five million after you just re-characterized so that's the only one i see that we don't have that we're not putting that in the initial plan anyway well we we still fill out yeah i still will fill out a sourcing so i'd be inclined to put it in the excluded column for now understanding that it's below the five million yeah yeah just yeah because we didn't fill it out before yeah because there's a place holder the only yeah if they pull it in to put it with the septic then it will be close to five million so yeah yeah they can't combine those that'd be hard to do you can buy things that are that are similar to each other but are better like you can make a notification for the septic and the fields because it's yeah i think they they could do a debt exclusion question if they wanted to they could do a debt exclusion question that yeah you know we're both those projects together well they could i just think the policy oh for the policy purpose yeah it's being by itself yeah right by itself yeah um it's why the town building project right which was in fy27's plan last year for fy27 you put them all together it was five you know over five million dollars it was supposed to be an excluded debt an article project potentially excluded debt but you start breaking it up into pieces you're not going to do excluded debt you're probably not going to do an article if you're doing it in pieces um all right so so that's so i'll do that one as excluded borrowing why don't we go quickly through the list looking for levy debt and then we'll come back so let me get uh yeah we did uh borrowing let me get so we have the animals we have that we have the roof of levy we had ac's we had fire alarm about water's levy yeah so going on the list i would say the roof is looming it kind of saved the elevator upgrades levy it's kind of all time building stuff together extra patient equipment's emails fund to testing machine telly that's going to burst free cash what we did before right yeah the radios are all free craft cash yeah radio a fire alarm did you say i'm going to go
for the schools but it's there yeah they're kind of these are kind of the gcc one one 200 so i would say free cash for though yeah just i'll put these in for now and then yeah i'll have a clean version to look at radios free cash yeah in car computer replacements free cash yeah epic signals we had free cash before hvac levy hvac with the fire alarm we did boilers we have this levy is lost i mean granted the school projects i can't help you guys all together yeah another hvac levy debt
up loader we did as free last time right the vehicles i think we typically try to do three cash unless it's higher than 400 500. stormwater system or that's infrastructure improvements i would be inclined to that is levy debt radio system upgrades free cash website zero no um free cash yeah facility rehab levy debt levy debt building forced main tie-in engineer either way free cash for now
uh 87 000 building improvements actually i'm looking now that these are carriers so we had freak yeah we have free cash for that one free cash for the 87 just read flooring we had borrowing
ceiling we had borrowing i'll just make sure all those match up with our fiscal 27 report okay i'll double check them okay so now the new ones the salt shed would be levy debt
that's levy debt so it's uh you just see how they funded uh 250 um they did the 250 out of uh real estate uh seats reserved for real estate just because it was a last minute request yeah i don't think that's necessarily precedent so you view that as a levy debt yeah we still free cash vehicle free cash skipping all the buildings pmbs psp what is the psp bms that'll be a management system
that electronic building management control system to do h like integrated hvec and heat and boilers or alarms so people have a view on that one free cash yeah that's an it vehicle free cash or no ambulance that's fire yeah that's emails data center infrastructure free cash take around a cpa
h-pack levy debt yeah roadways levy debt yes ceilings levy debt still the appointment yeah free cash cash they deal the capital of state sidewalks we did uh free cash free cash on the next two
library grounds start there vehicle that's water borrowing wastewater borrowing transfer station we did transfer station borrowing and both of those okay i'll slot all that stuff in yes and then i'll set up um fiscal 29 tab and prepare it for the carryover of a big slug with me instead okay yeah yeah i'm wondering if as we get out further though if we
didn't get to that with medium right it's just an automatic way
because we're going to have to go through anyway because it doesn't make a difference you just project you're done that they don't they don't just automatically slide so it's eight o'clock
they could get through a lot but i think the need is good progress
so brian you'll free circulate that number 10
it's going to be number 11. you didn't see number 10.
all right at this point i think uh item eight is if there was any addendums to the court that was you know in turn but i would skip my agenda so i'm sure for roll forward um and just in case you guys came in and said like kelly what did you do that's it's totally wrong um we talked about a few things that we've said we're not gonna we're not gonna amend right or report for yet so it's really just waiting until they actively working the rest of this so we get the rest of the five-year plan here so i don't think there's anything else to talk about unless you guys did another video and said there's something else we need to change did you get any other feedback that's a lot of work it did a lot of work it's great it's the hard part about it it's like it's good it's good stuff right i mean but there's so much more as you're writing and it's like ah i really want to talk about it and like don't have time um so i think one thing i would ask the committee to do though is to step away from it you know for a couple days and then re-read it and make your list of what do you think we are the things outside of the five-year five-year plan that we haven't addressed that we should address going forward um and i think it's going back to the list that we originally created right using ai because of like what goes in a capital report right what is it what's on that list that we didn't get in here that we want to have in the future and i know we're not going to tackle it right now for this year but i do want to have it sort of fresh involved fresh in our minds what those things are that we want to tackle for improvements in my ideal world we would be already once we're done getting this this five-year plan done um we're already going to like start the like okay what are the modifications like the template that we want to have because what i'd like to do is have a revised template right going into our planning for the next year already like here here is what we want to know so that we have a clear vision of what we need to find out right in our talking to the departments over the course of the year i think it will work that we didn't have the opportunity to share because of where we were starting but i think we we have that vision then we'll be able to ask the right questions i have one for you the long-term planning section
and i had a question would you envision the extent you
it could be your view right now just because you worked on it but um would you anticipate encourage future members of this committee to you know sort of just try to replicate a similar template as you call it of a report um and if so would you envision a number of the appendix that you have the bylaw the you know the current years capital request um would you envision those as be included each year in some of the sections in terms of membership and being kind of standard inclusion yeah certainly that's the template i think so that's the template because i i would hate having just done this i would hate for future members of the committee to have to start contract over here and that would be difficult so one of the things i need to do right between your exhibits and my exhibits is cleaning getting a nice clean like here's the the spreadsheet right the template right that easily produces that those exhibits but i would hope so that yeah something similar future committees may decide no we don't need the section right or we can modify you know maybe the open capital project section it's all caught up right it's all it's it's it's not all cut up there's always going to be some but it's not necessary to have a 10-year history right there anymore so something like that it becomes out of the system automatically yeah it may be automatically uh i also think to the extent we can get to a better cip right there might be a better format of information we want to provide right we get to it again kelly's perfect world in prep the cip comes in filled out and similar what i used to do on fincom where i i had modified but you could feed the exhibits that then were created for the warrant something like that where it's like no we're not doing this like take it and then put it in another spreadsheet we're we're feeding in the exhibits and it's spitting out right the consolidated um starting point so those are things that it doesn't answer your question brian but like those are the things that like maybe it will be easier because we we build out a better process but yeah like i would think you'd start with what we have and and work from there and it can it can be it's great like yeah long-term planning needs to go in there but it could also be like hey telly i know you added this but i don't really think it adds a lot of value right do we do we need a section or we need this exhibit this particular table as far as the appendices um my view is those first appendices that are all background should always be a part of it because i as a resident find it very hard to be like fine thanks yeah how do i and that way it's like no and for me even for me as a committee member i'm printing out this and i have it's my it's like the bible right i have all my pieces i don't have to go hunt down current pieces to double check right what the what the debt policy is so that's all i agree and hopefully those other pieces don't change very often right like the the policies i repeat but yeah so maybe i mean maybe as we build up the template maybe there's a sources like hey this policy came from yeah where did i come from i mean it's fluid to both of you but the rest of us becomes a scavenger hunt yeah not as fluid as you might think um another just um you might stop sharing just so i can see carol oh yeah or yeah i can't tell if she's waving at me here yeah i guess before i make my comment i want to make sure that um i don't want to i don't want us to stray too far off the posted agenda on some of these things so i'll reserve what i was going to have a couple other ideas for future reports but since that's not really a specific topic on our agenda um i would uh say that um it's more of an administrative comment um um i was a bit disappointed that we ended up with basically zero staff support and um i had envisioned when i came on this committee uh a lot of the work that historically had gotten done by the finance director and accumulating information put in his spreadsheet templates uh would all be done and we would be able to just pull from that and um for the rest of you i don't wish upon you um well we dealt with writing reporter i wouldn't want to wish upon any of you the need to sort of do the kind of things i was doing just because it is time consuming and you may not have the time to do it or the inclination um so this is more a discussion point going forward with the town manager as to what is his expectation of staff support for uh this committee and this is not a unique question for this committee lots of committees um don't have a designated you know planning board has a town planner but there's a bunch of committees that don't have a designated uh staff person to assist um so i think that's going to be an important question to get answered um but i'll reserve the rest of my i had a couple other points to make on on the report going forward to you put that on the agenda as a topic yeah i put it on it's yeah i didn't mean for us to start talking about it it's more of like give it a read and then yeah break those things down so that we while we're fresh in our mind we can make that you know the wish list which is tangentially related to the topic about the report and addendums it is future future addendums future addendums can i ask uh maybe the town process question i don't want to that's i forgot to say i had expected more of uh we present the report and i would have i mean i also would have thought we would have met certain numbers at least the select board you know to say like here's what you have why you made those choices versus this kind of one directional feed like we're sending a report and we i assume we'll get feedback but it doesn't seem like we're getting a lot of like conversation i mean maybe this is just how the committees work i don't know yeah just to me it's it's new so i'm asking we do have so a couple things we didn't care here as our back and forth that's already as i'm with the select board i am going to their meeting to present the report and we've talked about john will you hear we'll talk about you guys that's true so i i think i would say that setup is pretty typical of how the committees work together and we could have a joint meeting carol offer that we can have a joint meeting with the select board um to present it but i don't i didn't this this was consistent with my expectations at least of how this is yeah and i just didn't know what to expect so it's more about yeah i mean that the bylaw our marching orders in the bylaw to present a report to the town manager because ultimately the town manager is going to take that hopefully into consideration in developing his proposed town budget that he capital budget so i'm not opposed to some sort of you know more joint meeting at least in the initial year here just so the select board can get a sense of whether everything seems to be going according to how they thought it might go when they pushed for the bylaw but it would seem to me that would be better having that after we see what the town manager comes out with because you know i don't know it may be totally consistent it may be way over here i don't think it should be way over here but it may be more important in the five to ten years because that's more strategy yeah right and communicating that by written report is i mean it's not conducive to change which is what this committee is for i mean we're going to make better change and worst meeting report and a year later we're getting feedback and well we have a different direction for the town in those out years i think that's probably a broken process yeah but you know obviously the things everyone knows it's just more from my my first time yeah yeah we're venturing a little bit yeah a little bit astray of our agenda so i'm happy to put an agenda item on the next uh meeting about possible changes to the report and also i can put an agenda item on just feedback on the process yeah i put it personally i put it at the end if we have time because we we've got to get through the next meeting but i can put it on you know it's good to know what works what is it working nice um you want to say something here else i do but i don't see where i'm in the topic here yeah i'm looking yeah but what is it um i kelly and i worked on this bylaw i'm just going to say one couple quick sentence then i'll get thrown off for being off topic here but and we really designed this committee really to be very independent the town manager act has the town manager creates the budget and the capital budget and makes a recommendation to the finance committee the select board does not get involved in the budget development um however uh because we like to know what's going on i invited miss lappen to join us and it's meaning to explain your work to date carol i think we should have further discussing on the future at a future meeting that was a topic not reasonably anticipated that was me you weren't sure ms martin was going to be here i hope i didn't go too far off astray but i hope that helped let's let's talk at a future i'll put it on the agenda for future meeting to do a feedback on on how this went and i i think it is an important discussion to have so i just want to have it on the agenda though okay um all right so no addendums at this time to the report um can we any comments uh any edits on the minutes of january 14th i had two on page three this is assuming i lost track of what i sent you so if i've already made these i apologize on page 300 topics not reasonably anticipated the second paragraph it should say uh dates and times for the next two meetings and then the dates uh i think i made this correction on when you have january should be wednesday january 21st is that what it says or does it say 20th anyway i think it should be wednesday january 21st which is tonight i had originally typed the 20th so those are my two edits anybody else has any other questions or edits yeah you have the 21st okay so i had already made that but i don't think i had changed the three meetings to two anybody else have any other edits no no no yes there's no holidays in the six holidays right we already have we had i'm just making sure that there's the agenda i gotta get the agenda in for the 26th by tomorrow afternoon correct this is a question for you uh as of the 5 p.m weather report it's looking rather snowy starting at noon on sunday snowing all night uh possible 12 inches of light fluffy snow in the monday morning so i'm sure by monday evening the roads will be clear um but i don't know what happens if town building decides that their staff doesn't have to come to work on monday uh do we still expect robbie to be here well let's we'll post it and then if yeah can we i guess question for robbie if staff is not here i know we can post i like i could host a zoom with because we have this new link which we have but is there anything that somebody needs to do here to get that up and running or can i can just log in from home oh oh i just i just have a picture on myself you know should it should be okay yeah yeah if i if i'm if i don't join at all i don't think you yeah yeah so do you have to do that from physically here or can you do that from your home if you're not here at work on monday um i think you can do it from home just just to make sure make sure make sure make sure i just to make sure that works works first okay worst case if you get word from the town manager's office that we then you'll just send out an email to people saying we're not meeting yeah okay okay all right so it's still going to be a hybrid i plan to come i'm assuming the roads will be clear yeah if for some reason that's not the case right roads aren't cleared or they won't let us in the town building that's the town building great you guys know well our liaison has the same issue because they have a meeting on monday night so no we don't oh you don't well i'm sure we're not the only meeting scheduled for monday i think there's a zoning board but anyway okay so we need to approve the minutes again a motion to approve the minutes of january 14th has revised second okay and we are all in person so we can do an all in favor all right
okay so recently i know we did a couple uh did one just talking about feedback i will add that to the next to the future meeting agenda um we have monday scheduled to leave so i'll look from there so the week of february 2nd so you have to go to the select board on the second so that's monday right yeah can you be out two nights that week yeah two nights that week hey i can't be just a question of tuesday the third or wednesday the fourth i'm going to be i'm going to be out all that week the week of the second third and fourth unless it's hybrid i can't i can't do the third i can't do this one's hybrid but i couldn't be here do you go forward i'm good for the fourth so that's like form hopefully let's try and get the floor that's okay okay i'm not trying to go a lot more week just
get something you know we don't have to necessarily hopefully we'll be done by before then i hope but if not it's a week after school vacation week so uh we'll give you the money no the week after that yeah so let's yeah so let's see we'll be getting in mind stay generally good but the whole week is starting for me so i'm trying to move to the bottom that's okay with that yeah i'm sorry uh the 11th yeah 2 11th yeah yes right 6 p.m on that one too yeah let me try and get those okay okay we've got a motion to adjourn that's h 24 so seconded all in favor all right all right passes thank you robbie recording