January 5, 2026 – Select Board – Video & Transcript

January 5, 2026 - Select Board

Autoscroll:

recording in progress in the meeting of january 5th 2026 of select board to order we're meeting at 6 30 we are in person and also by remote access we're in the whalen town building this meeting may be recorded and if recorded will be made available to the public on weekend as soon after as possible after meeting the public will be excluded from executive sessions which we are not holding this evening pursuant to chapter 2 of the acts of 2025 this meeting will be conducted in person and or via remote access in accordance with applicable law if this meeting is own we don't have remote access only um when required by law or allowed by the chair persons wishing to provide public comment or otherwise participate in the meeting may do so at the meeting location or in person you can also access the meeting on the whaling um town calendar there is a link there which will allow you to then participate remotely um public comments should be limited to two minutes per person i apologize it sounds like i don't know what i'm doing they've changed the form this is much good so um joining me this evening in the building uh is uh mr faye mr whitney mr levine and um ann bransley our fifth member is participating remotely because he ends participating remotely all votes will be by roll call mr mccall the town manager is unable to join us this evening but we are very fortunate to have our assistant town manager kelsey powers burlap who will be adjoining and assisting the board this evening so tonight we're going to have a call to order review the agenda for the public we will have announcements in public comment we have appointments to committees we have two one for surface water quality and for the permanent municipal building committee approximately 650 will discuss and review the proposed fy 27 budget including but not limiting previous discussions and updates that will be followed by a discussion review of the select board's objectives for fy 26 including but not limited to progress and next steps a discussion and review of storm water tracking approximately 7 45 we will be holding our annual call meeting petitioners workshop and we will invite uh moderator miranda jones to participate in that be followed by a review of about a half a dozen articles the board wishes to insert for consideration at the 2026 annual term meeting so at 8 30 we will have an annual discussion and review of our legal representation followed by the town manager's report consent calendar minutes of december 15 and december 19 20 25 we will review correspondence we'll have select board reports and concerns there are no topics not reasonably anticipated by the chair 48 hours in advance and with a little luck we will adjourn at 9 00 5 p.m well ask the board and ms i was for let if they have any announcements we're all set this brings us to public comment um quite a few people in the and you'll let me know if these people also have the hands raised on a lot so okay um do you want to get a sense of how many comments i would like to provide public comments so what have i got one two three four five five or six seven okay and one online that's about eight okay so mr levine who is my partner in crime here as the vice chair is going to be the time keeper and will definitely keep everyone to two minutes i have a sneaky suspicion we all might be wanting to speak on the same topic so i'm going to ask that you hear your point being made already we we are paying attention we do get minutes we will know what you've said it's okay to say i agree with what so-and-so said or i endorse the previous speaker or something to that effect okay who would like to start yes please and again i think i said it earlier come to the table name address yes so yes please thank you thank you tell me when i'm on the clock whenever you start all right good evening everybody my name is adam mascara i live at 29 shaw drive and i'm a direct abutter to the veritas christian academy project on constituent road i'm here as a taxpayer a parent and a resident who deeply cares about this town i want to be clear at the outset what you will hear from me or anyone else today who as you mentioned will be speaking to the same topic today is not about opposing a school or a religious institution it's not about a town fighting the dover amendment it's about a community that needs your help that's fed up with inaction and not being heard it's about scale transparency and whether wayland's processes are functioning as intended to protect its residents as i speak tonight hundreds of trees behind our home have already been cleared the forest is gone it cannot be put back but what is most concerning is that this occurred while an appeal is pending not because residents failed to act but because our process leaves tax-paying citizens without meaningful protection there is a serious disconnect between how this project was presented and what is now being built planning board reviewed what was framed as grades six through eight with a living number of buildings and approximately 100 students however we all know and they know that the applicant's own materials website and early presentation reflected a much larger campus vision k through eight was so much more than a school it's a village the infrastructure now being installed including a septic system size for over 400 people does not match what was approved by the planning board this is a campus size development at a major town intersection with an aquifer protection overlay district with impacts that were never reviewed comprehensively as a single project when projects are reviewed in pieces the town cannot fully assess cumulative impacts traffic environmental effects or long-term neighborhood disruption i'm going to pause there because we have probably too much to say i'm gonna let my neighbor luke speak to what this means for wayland as a town because this is not just about this project and it's not just for our neighborhood who has this in our backyard but it's what wayland could look like if we don't do anything thank you thank you luke shadlow uh i reside at 22 shore drive so uh firstly thanks for having me um you know i live in the neighborhood i'm not a director butter um but i want to build on what adam shared and and focus on what we see our broader governance issues so this is not an isolated project wayland's now facing multiple dover protected projects that include parking sports facilities residents and long-term construction when reviews are fragmented and standards are unclear the burden doesn't fall on the applicants it falls on residents and taxpayers who absorb traffic environmental impacts roadway noise and years of disruption under wayland's current bylaws residents cannot appeal a planning board site site decision right we are forced to wait until the building permit is issued and you end up with a situation like we have right now with veritas where we have affected an appropriate appeal that is being heard by the zba and uh unfortunately the the project is continuing right uh the applicant is obviously doing this at risk but uh it is still continuing uh it's not a balanced or functional process and it's not how other towns do this uh creates risk and uncertainty that is just unnecessary dover amendment doesn't require the town to abandon thoughtful planning or environmental protections here towns have adopted clearer standards fuller scope review and interim safeguards that allow concerns to be addressed earlier in the process and provide protections for the town and taxpayers we're asking the select board to treat this as a broader governance issue we're not here to litigate a single project um you know we have people speaking at the zba next week that will address things like why the building permit includes infrastructure for a 600 person campus versus the 100 100 student are we at time yeah yeah okay i'm simply asking this like board uh pursue a task force or something to to really work with the community and dresses thank you thank you i think your key freshness it's it we need to treat this as a broader issue issue yeah i mean we'd like to see a task force set up that we can you know engage with and work with you guys on on how we we address the vitals to to think about this absolutely and may i why don't i take someone from online show up please alissa i'm recognizing you please state your name and your address please hi um elisa carter um 19 sherman bridge road um i'm calling to i'm calling i'm here to um request that uh notify you that right now they're um considering tom holder to address the issue of the 1971 agreement between the neighbors of um sherman's bridge road and the town um and um which he doesn't even believe in and um because he is involved from the beginning on this project that is um so dreadful to most of us um if not all of us in one way or another and many other um parties um because he is uh the director of department public works it's also on the board of uh the public works committee commission sorry um that he just um would not be a good person to address this and instead really really would like to ask on the select board to step up and engage with the neighbors on this topic it is very serious um it is a valid um agreement which has been proven when it was used uh again in the 80s or 90s um to make sure that something awful didn't happen to our bridge and if we accept money from the state for this bridge which is the proposal and which is a lot more money than we we would need to spend if we did a wooden job then that door can never be closed and that leaves the state um able to take control of the bridge and do whatever they wish replace it with cement like they tied someone tried before and um we would be left powerless here in the town of wayland this is an important historical site a place of regular consistent recreation um the project would destroy um miss carter we need to wrap up okay that's it thank you a lot of information that i've sent you thank you thank you thank you um as as as the chair representing the board i think i would like to say that we are always willing to listen to public comment but we like it to be constructive and certainly not to speak in a bill of anyone who either works here or doesn't work here or would like to live here or not live here so i i asked you to please follow that guideline that we use thank you all right let me take somebody in the room anybody else yes sir go ahead please thank you uh stand here yeah i'm sorry i'll come in sit there so you get picked up by the mic name and address please sir i'm sorry name and address yeah mike smith 25 drive drive yes sir i need to give him time so okay good evening uh my name is mike smith as i said and i'm a resident of wayland speaking as a homeowner and parent whose property directly abuts the doverman project the veritas academy um which was recently approved by planning board i chose to move to my family this is town because uh strong public schools uh where my children could grow up and balance in a community-focused environment uh preserved open spaces in nature which is part of this town's character and why people invest their lives here uh it's a small town neighborly feel where residents trust that decisions are made thoughtfully and with care uh the approval of phase one of what is clearly a multi-phase expansion by the christian academy raises some serious concerns uh particularly from a governance and stewardship perspective um a property directly directly directly abuts uh impacts abutting properties including loss of privacy uh natural buffers and long-term properties the town appears to evaluate phase one in isolation um without sufficient consideration of the full four phase build out the dover momentum has been applied applied without meaningful guardrails limiting the town's ability to protect residents and neighborhood character um i want to be clear i'm not opposed to education or religious institutions what i'm asking for is appropriate oversight transparency and long-term planning once expansion begins precedence the cumulative impacts traffic lighting noise drainage and land use cannot be undone and immediate neighbors are left carrying the burden of decisions made without full analysis i'm asking the select board to step in as a steward of the town ensure future phases undergo comprehensive cumulative review advocates advocates for reasonable conditions and mitigation and reaffirm that the town's responsibility extends to protecting existing residents not just enabling expansion sir thank you um so anyone else in here would like to speak and i'm going to say again that if you hear things you've already heard we don't we got it so you can always say i agree with so hello my name is mary beth hagen i live at eight yeager way um my neighborhood of butts um the very standardized project and i want to call your attention to um i sent you an email 5 30 this afternoon with the documents that are in the public records that um my neighbor um sabaya and i um had put together and i think if you look through there there's a number of you know um issues that are raised and i'm not sure they were really fully read considered addressed um and particularly one of them um that has to do with drainage um i don't think we have consistent standards in the town for um so to scale the drainage facilities for any kind of a project the calculations depend on one of the plug-in numbers is the permeability of the soil and sort of the gold test for that is something called the slug test and as an example for 24 school street okay we did that test that's a one acre property and it's got a 10 uh foot elevation uh slope okay this is a property of 10 acres that has 80 feet of slope 80 feet elevation of difference and a lot of ledge and this was not done i'm not confident that um the facilities you know are going to handle all the runoff and protect my neighborhood from this um it's a serious concern so i'd like you if possible if you could read those um my second comment is with regard to the um surface water quality committee and that um from let's see i guess august 2024 to about april 2025 i sat in a lot of planning board meetings and got to see all the members of the planning board and during that time um jennifer steel um annette lewis and robin borges that really did the lion's share of all the work in shepherding this project just tons of documents to read detailed feedback and questions shepherding the whole process through doing analysis and the other two members two members one of which i think is being um submitted as a nominee to the surface water yeah um i just wanted to mention that i didn't see the engagement there this is a project in the aquifer um protection overlay district and there's a lot of disruption there just um a lot of earth movement um you know a lot of density of building build out there you know large septic and i just i never heard you know any commentary on you know the the effect on water quality um and i just i just wanted to lay that out there thank you thank you yes we did get your email and of course it's 5 30 and we're getting to come here so but you'll get one of my standard answers probably 11 o'clock tonight thank you it's very well written i do want to set a surface water quality it might be a misnomer that committee involves itself with the water quality of several bodies of water in town and in particular bird pond dudley pond and part of north pond of lake chichwit i've been their liaison for many years so i'm pretty familiar with this they are not involved with every body of water and and all that it's a very limited it's an advisory committee to the select board so all right do we have um do you have somebody online that i should say uh susan susan hi susan your your recognized name and um address please okay can you hear me yeah okay wonderful my name is susan garfield 24 sherman bridge road and i wanted to support the comments by both sets of neighbors in the room on the veritas project and the sherman bridge um i'd like to ask that you take into public record all the letters that the community uh community members of the sherman bridge road community have sent in asking for your part participation and support to help re-guide the planning for the bridge to make sure it's safe and effective for pedestrian and um community use as well as to stem traffic flow flow for safety and that you also recognize that these two public comments are very much related to each other and that we are all looking to protect the character of the town as well as its health and safety for existing residents on the sherman bridge project is really about making sure the bridge is constructed in a way that it's both safe and effective for residents as well as community members to enjoy for years to come and the veritas project is really making sure that our town's character doesn't get annihilated by um folks that are coming in and representing one thing in initial plans and doing other things in future build out so just wanted to support the other members of the town across both programs thank you thank you um is there anybody else in this room who would like to yes please thank you find me because i don't like to speak very long anyway good evening my name is megan smith and i live in weyland my husband i oh 25 shaw drive thank you my husband and i chose to move here from charlestown because of what weyland represents we wanted to raise a family surrounded by trees nature and a close-knit community that respects its neighbors we chose weyland because of its values it values thoughtful growth civic engagement and looking out for one another since moving here i've tried to give back to the town that welcomed us i substitute as a school nurse when needed i'll be working at the preschool two days this week um i alongside with my neighbors ran the dc trip last year for to help foster a love of history travel and diversity for the weyland students this community matters to me not just as a homeowner but as a parent and a neighbor that is why this project feels so deeply personal a 450 student k-8 school built directly behind our homes will fundamentally change our neighborhood it will increase traffic at an already dangerous intersection it will bring daily noise light pollution and safety risks it will alter how our kids play how we live in our homes how safe our streets feel um and yes it will affect our property values like every homeowner here i pay property taxes and they go up every year my neighbors and i are held to strict standards for setbacks environmental protections and neighborhood impacts yet this project under the dover amendment is not being held to the same standards we're told it's this is about religion or education but it is also a private institution charging 19 000 a student amassing millions while converting tax paying homes into a tax exempt campus that does not serve weyland's kids it doesn't feel fair it doesn't feel transparent and it doesn't feel like respect for neighbors it's not opposing it's not about opposing schools or faith it's about whether families who invest in this town financially emotionally and through service are protected and when large developments move into residential neighborhoods you can wrap up mr okay i'm on my last episode we moved here because we went promise community tonight i'm asking the select board to thank you um how many more would like to speak in the room i know you do sir okay great how about if we just limit it to those three is that okay with everybody so four we can agree to four everybody's good right oh i love that please join us sir
hi brian morrison uh 243 rice road it's that's my mailing address but it's one highfields road so i am here uh to discuss not only the veritas project that's going on which i'll be honest with you um is far greater than i had anticipated and i'm pretty appalled that this went through because the scope is much bigger than it was uh it was said uh and it was obviously they've been working on it for some time but uh i obviously am not in a butter to the veritas project but i am going to be impacted by the copic church expansion which is i think um going to go down the road of the veritas project a veritas project and i quite frankly don't want to see that uh and before we get to that point i think there needs to be some pumping up the brakes on um of allowing this broad application of the dover amendment to just let everything sail through um it's it's when i read what they're going to do and my understanding of the amendment it's does it not jive uh if you think they're going to cut down a lot of trees at veritas wait till you see what they do at the copic center uh church uh rice road is a two-lane road i go there four times a day it is the traffic and the amounts of people that are going to be on that road uh it's going to ruin the road that i mean we we live in a farm-like setting that's why we moved to weyland we wanted to move to rice road long before that we moved to weyland i think it's going to severely impact the way that the traffic levels the safety um and it just does not fit uh what we're going through again i'm not opposed to it but i think the sheer size needs to be absolutely looked at uh we can't go down the road of having another veritas because uh i was shocked that uh when i was out of town and i came back and everything was clear cut that's going to happen um so i just want the select board to understand that there needs to be a significant amount more uh due diligence done on this and this can't go just sail through yes sir um sir
one jason talk rigby 147 old connecticut path um i didn't have anything prepared but um
i think what the reason why i wanted to be here tonight was the intersection and the effect that it will have on the intersection and not to mention the the traffic impact that will happen on shaw drive um it's already a cut through road um during rush hour traffic um the police chief himself just recently agreed to put a stop sign at the end of fox meadow in order to slow people down um all these people in the room are constantly out on the street yelling at people i mean he loves doing it he's crazy about it this guy's doing it back here i mean it's it's not a joke like people people drive like maniacs it's a windy road it's it's hilly um there's lots of blind corners and it's only going to get more dangerous for the 20-some-odd children that live along that strip um more importantly well not more important than the kids i take that back um i know that the traffic study that was originally done for this project only only considered phase one and it was 100 kids when it comes to public safety i think the select board should at least have the ability to have a proper traffic study done with all 450 students so that you guys can make a proper judgment on how it will impact the town in that intersection itself you're talking about 450 this isn't a 60 unit multi-family that's going to have cars casually coming and going this is going to be 400 you know 300 vehicles dropping 450 people let's use some rough numbers 300 vehicles all of the exact same time all during rush hour at the same time but the middle school and the high school are also taking place like this is going to be a cluster it's going to be a total mess and they're most of the people bombing through there aren't from our town they don't care about the kids that are going back and forth from these these schools they're just trying to get to work or trying to get somewhere that they need to be and they won't care about us and it's going to lead to more more more and uh more accidents i mean we've we've had we've had kids run over in in in the crosswalks there we got to figure out what's actually going to be the safest outcome for the town because 450 cars is going to be too much because then we don't allow the next person to do get notes all right who else was speaking i think you were sir okay now he took some of your time it's all right because everyone said everything i would wanted to uh say uh john toto uh 191 old connecticut path i've lived in whalen with my family since 1998. um i'm not a direct of butter i can see the project out my window uh and it does get bright even now and i can i can hear it um but what i wanted to comment about it it has been spoken about so i won't i won't say too much more uh the drainage um i agree totally if i think we remember uh whatever the rolling rolling uh lane had a big house built it was on an elevation all the trees were taken down and that it was a disaster i believe a house had to be torn down because of it um so that's how serious i think the drainage issue is and it should be looked into and studied um that's number one uh the second thing again the last um speaker addressed it uh the at five corners the intersection um right now even without on the days when school is not in session uh the traffic sometimes goes down to dablin road that's right past my house all the way down so right now i know it was expanded up there for strangely two cars to go into a right left turned lane i would say that if this is going forward uh veritas would would need to do something and with the town to all all the roads so it would all need right turn lanes left turn lanes and not just the two cars it would have to be for and plus cars because right now and i've seen it go beyond dablin so when you're talking about another 400 450 um that's a lot of cars so i think the impact will be uh quite tremendous uh with that um i do like the task force uh idea i think that would uh would be an awesome thing thank you thank you i appreciate the chance to speak i think there's one one left right and right am i right okay great um 11 rolling lane i'm not in a butter to so you're making megan flatly 11 rolling from the mic thank you i'm not in a butter to any of the um current or upcoming um projects but agree with all of the sentiments this evening um one of what i wanted to underscore is that um one of the bylaws in conjunction with the dover amendment is article 22 right which affords us um not only limited site plan review but um but also lots of powers related to mitigation right none of which seem to be implemented or um or um overseen and so that's my real concern tonight right is where is any of the oversight it seems as if there was a plan that was agreed upon and then there's absolutely no oversight whatsoever and in fact neighbors know more about the project than theoretically our building inspector and so this is what my concern is who's watching who's monitoring what's going on whose responsibility is it to be watching and who's that person's supervisor what's i would really like some answers about how people how people can just get one stamp and then just go about doing whatever they want because i can say as a homeowner i can't do anything and it takes me way more time than i'm comfortable with um to get what i want done on my own house so that's what i want to say okay i appreciate everybody coming tonight um clearly the board is very much aware of this project and we individually have received calls i think it was a good one to come in and you know speak as a group i'm sorry and you can't hear me you can't hear me okay well i don't speak that loud most of the time so we do appreciate that um ordinarily we don't let someone speak again but i will let yeah just one just want to make sure put another one up here i do yeah no just we want to be action oriented i'm missing one a minute excuse me one here sorry you can sit there till like um i didn't do i have any more hi jim uh we recognize you please state your name and address please don't um can we bring him over or is it okay um sir can you unmute oh so what do i have to say turn something off do you have is it your phone is it the one of you on for a second
it's not me it's at that post maybe they have their cell phone around and perhaps he's got the playing in the background something on the laptop uh if you could uh mute your background and then unmute yourself we could hear you sir all right just want to briefly say yeah adam s scary 29 shot drive up for a second time i appreciate you um i just want to make sure you recognize the passion of everybody in the room and us coming together and i don't want you to feel like this is a neighborhood complaining we want to give you guys really actionable things to be our partner in this and to help serve not just our community who are directed butters but communities all across wayland who are learning about this now as the trees come down and as they learn more about the dover amendment projects that are coming down the pike so i want to make sure we just formally ask to be on the agenda for the next meeting we have an active appeal but that's not stopping them so we don't have a lot of time they're going to continue to remove trees they're going to continue to dig and so if we can move quickly with you guys to create out the task force and be on that agenda next time so it's not just public comment but a discussion instead would be greatly appreciated um all our emails are i need more information so if you could email me all our emails are on yeah martin at rayland dot very familiar with the emailing uh pattern now thank you you got it thank you thank you carol thank you thank you very much i think i'm also going to close public comment or am i else should i try mr jim again it's jim ready okay otherwise i think we're good here hi jim carol martin i'm recognizing
you could say your name and your um address please
we've got the he's got this on that's me
streaming at the same time is that the issue is he streaming uh yes he's got the he's listening to the uh and so you have to mute that yeah in order to speak so okay all right i am going to close public comment and then we are going to move to the appointments we have we're going to make two appointments tonight um thank you everyone for coming in you're welcome to stay we're going to be here i'm going to take a two-second talk but um let's see you're about it uh
recording stopped recording in progress
the door stays open thank you you have to be quiet thank you hi greg okay so we're going we're going to have two appointment uh interviews tonight and the first one is going to be greg lusty for a person on the permanent municipal building committee he has been currently serving as a non-voting representing a couple projects so why don't you just give us a brief um welcome you might want to unmute and then perhaps you could just give us a brief couple sentences as to why you would like to be a now a voting member of the permanent municipal building committee thank you thank you very much everyone um so i've had the opportunity to serve as a special appointment for the council on aging building which finished this past year and also as a um call it an advisory support for the library projects and then uh by doing both of those i also was tapped to support the valen community pool with uh ben and jean um and that renovation project that occurred over the summer so um i have approximately 24 years and counting of construction background as a subcontractor construction manager and now real estate developer um i live in the community for it's going on a decade now i have three children going through the school system and i'm looking for it as an opportunity to to share the knowledge that i've acquired in my day job and actually support the community in the the um the town and making sure we're spending our money wisely on the projects that are put forth and make sure that we um can uh have this uh sustainable for years to come thank you so how we do this is very informal um each of the board members will have an opportunity to ask ask a question oh yeah i'm doing that and then um um we'll probably take a vote how does that sound sounds good all right who would like to start um um mr wendy would you why don't you start um greg thank you for your willingness to uh step forward um excuse me um no uh criticism of uh the municipal uh building committee but i'm curious how it is that uh an existing building like the uh council on aging structure costs over seven hundred dollars a foot uh to uh to rehab we uh we're recorded right do you want me i want us up here
yes he does actually
so all right so i'll preface it as when i came on board the project was awarded a contract with the uh the the construction manager was eminent so budget and cm were baked the time was baked so i came in from an execution standpoint i did not have the luxury of helping to opine on budget and design um what i will say is i felt the same exact way because i can build a brand new building twice old for probably that same amount of money um the the rub of it is is that well partly is the public process right so it's file so bid um the drawings in what we asked for scope retrospectively um was significant and there was lots of unique challenges with potential contaminated soil that didn't end up being contaminated um you had uh existing foundations that were left underneath the slab foundation from raytheon years ago and um and i want to say like foundations you might think of something small like a frost ball for a um like a residential but this was you know think of raytheon being a manufacturing facility for fence contracting um equipment there was rebar i say no joke there was you know two to three inches thick where they're cutting through that to be able to run underground plumbing for example um and it costs a lot of money and slows down the project as a result of that so there was a lot of things of that nature that occurred um there was some additional electrical um for the solar panels that were trying to be added late in the project that caused some hiccups and delays with the project as well from that regard so there was opportunities i'll say for improvement um and i understand adaptive reuse is an important thing for the community which i totally agree with i spent a lot of my career doing adaptive reuse projects um but they are messy um projects generally speaking and really it's incumbent upon the design process to really capture things well you probably would have always spent some version of that amount of money um the difference is you spend it up front and capture it in an efficient way or you capture it at the end or during when it's an inefficient process that ends up adding time to the project hopefully that answers your question a little bit but it does yes thank you uh and if i madam chair may have a follow-up um i i take your point it's it's a comparatively small building and so you you've got a lot of general conditions and sort of fixed costs that also i'm sure contribute to that um what's your sense though about uh new construction uh recognizing that costs are very unpredictable these days but if if the town were to undertake new construction for for say a typical office uh modest build out um recognizing the restrictions of the ward commission uh what's your ballpark guess as to what the what a construction cost might be today so for for an office building for you municipal office building or private commercial i'll just turn off it's it's a little bit difficult to say because there's a number of considerations you have to take into account um you know if you're going to do a net zero building you know which is uh you know what the code you know generator applies or something approaching that at this point it also impacts on um the requirements for the actual uh tenant uses and then um how how actually the contract type is probably the biggest one do you want to go file sub bid do you want to do cm at risk so chapter 149a um those are considerations that can substantially swing the cost because a file sub bid right they are doing what is admittedly compliant per what the drawings say they don't infer if it's discoordinated that is all change orders and a lot of times um some contractors will do what the bare minimum to get the contract that meets the contractual terms knowing full well they'll change order significantly because they know of all the gaps that are in the job and that's how they end up making their money on the back end which which is time and change orders um that doesn't really answer your question i'd have to know the size of the building um you know is a 20 000 foot building or 200 000 foot building because there's obviously economies of scale to get a general sense of you know construction costs or cost per square foot but um i mean if you're interested in having a cyber conversation i can you know kind of pick through that with you and kind of figure out what that might look like i'm assuming you're saying that for the purposes of you know the town building for example which i know is in uh need of repair and maybe the school system buildings and things of that nature so um i guess it's probably a leading question there well uh that's a good answer to an unfair question um uh but really i was just sort of interested in what kind of premium uh is associated with the kind of ward commission requirements uh with you know the multiple prime contracts versus a cm or something but anyway uh thank you for your answer and thank you for your willingness to uh serve continue to serve thank you you're all set oh yeah i have no questions for you greg but uh become highly recommended from eric juffles who's um served on that committee for many years and uh that's good enough for me well thank you well he's also my boss my day job so you kind of made sure i made sure i was going to show up for this well we didn't know that you didn't mention that he didn't obviously he mentioned that i didn't mention that to him mr levine greg i i appreciate you stepping up to this role and you know you've already been involved somewhat for the three projects that you mentioned in your cover letter so this is a tremendously important committee for us and will be for some time to come so we appreciate you lending your expertise
thank you for continuing to serve i think um bill's question was was probably a very very difficult one for the average person to answer so it was awesome that you had all that information so thank you thanks and i and i thank you as well so now i'd like a motion please to happy to move that at this board um appoint greg lesky to be a member of the permanent municipal building committee of voting position for the term mandate of june 30th 2028. okay any other discussion so then we'll take a roll call vote and yes uh tom yes yes yes and carol yes motion passes five zero mr levine greg um in the coming days you'll receive an appointment letter from the town manager's office and at that point bring that letter into town building and go over to the town clerk's office where you'll be formally sworn in which will permit you to be a voting member of the committee and they'll give you some materials at that time on conflict of interest training and other volunteer municipal information thank you thank you thank you thank you have a great day you too we also have uh a veteran um resident who has applied for the surface water quality and i think we lost him so he may not be here if he isn't i'm happy to move for his appointment if the chair permits probably can you to see if larry's there no okay so mr fey happy to move that this board approved appointment of larry kiernan to the surface water quality committee for a term ending june 30th 2027. okay okay any further discussion all right all those in favor tom yes yes yes yeah and i'm abstaining okay and carol go left motion passes four zero one okay um the next item is hi brian recognize brian having a join us to have a discussion and review the proposed fy 27 budget this is including uh but not limited to updates since our previous discussion which took place in november there's a bunch of things that happened welcome brian i think there's a supplemental packet that has a couple um uh charts and slides in it everybody wants to look at that and i don't know where you want to start um brian also brian your name says mike arnold yes they had some trouble getting me the uh proper link so okay all right would you um you want to you have the floor brian thank you for coming
so i was asked to come and give an update on where we stand in the fiscal 27 budget as it's being developed we did have the tax recap this past december the only real new thing that happened since our uh summit that we did i believe in the sometime in november is that a new growth number came in higher than expected it came in 900 000 we were carrying a number of 400 000 so that's really the only new thing that has happened since since the summit was the difference between the new growth brian brian hold on just one second you your voice got garbled it um what came in at 900 was new growth right right so the only thing that's changed since the summit that we did so we've done two things recently we did a 10-year forecast uh i believe in sometime in october then we did michael mccullin myself and kelsey did a a fiscal 27 forecast about a month ago we did the tax recap was finalized about a month ago as well the only thing that has changed is that new growth has gone from an estimated 400 000 to 900 000 so that goes to right to our unused levy the other thing that has happened is that at the polls residents voted to support transferring the dpw the remaining debt service of the dpw from levy debt to excluded debt so those are the two things that have changed since really the last time that we did a presentation about a month ago at the summit so where we are in the the development of the budget is that i believe that michael mccall may have sent you a very large excel file um it it's a document that we use it's one of our draft work papers that we compile to put a budget together it compares fiscal 27 proposed numbers to actual fiscal 26 what you're looking at is draft numbers only a lot of these numbers or most of these numbers are still in formation on the school side the superintendent as well as the school business manager should be providing michael mccall and i with their budget estimates probably within 10 days the superintendent has been out of town um on vacation so i would suspect within the next two weeks that we'll be getting the school budget from them the state aid is going to be announced at the mma meeting in january at that point we'll know exactly what the state aid numbers are for fiscal uh 27 so that will give us a better footing to prepare a more solid budget as we move forward to the town meeting the only thing i on the town side if we take a look at the town budget three departments we still need to get back to is dpw police and fire with respect to their budgets the main issues that we're dealing with right now in preparing a final budget uh at the end of january is that we have the fire contract that's not settled it's not settled from 24 to 26. we don't know what the dollar value was of that is we do have our advocate call the reserve in the fiscal 26 budget but we don't know the ultimate settlement it's still in negotiation and it's still in arbitration michael mccall is actively working on the other contracts that would go from fiscal 27 to fiscal 29. i already talked about the school budget um the other thing that we don't know in preparing the budget for fiscal 27 is that the fire settles prior to the town meeting we'll have to have an action item to move fiscal 26 monies into the fiscal 26 fire budget so that's an unknown if that doesn't happen then we have to have an article to put that money in reserve into the general stabilization we don't know the health insurance number yet as well as we don't know the vote number yet but reasonably by the time we get to say the third week in january we'll be able to come up with a defensible budget that considers everything has happened in our forecast which this budget started in july so we'll be reasonably put together a budget that we can defend that will hopefully turn back a lot of unused surplus levy we don't know that number yet only because there's a lot of unknown so the next two to three weeks is when really these numbers come to fruition and at that point we'll be able to make a better estimate on the taxes for next year the unused levy amounts and the actual uses for free cash as i talked about with a couple of people today the complication for this annual town meeting is the unsettle colas we're going to have two things that go to town meeting funding the budget for next year one is the operating budget number two is going to be a separate article to fund the cola if the collective bargaining agreements are not satisfied by the time the warrant is printed we're going to have and they get resolved between the time they're printed and the time town meeting starts we're going to have to have a mechanism in place to move a couple of articles around just to satisfy the budget for 27 so that's the complication for 27 not so much the tax increase and the unused levy it's how we're going to handle the musical chairs on these coal agreements if they do come to be settled other than that i don't have any other updates on the budget like i said most importantly the school is going to be giving their final budget to us within 10 days um i talked to the school business manager today on it so like i said in a couple of weeks two three weeks we'll have a lot more information thank you there's two weeks to use okay um does anybody have no in the supplemental package is this spreadsheet that brian has been mentioning and it does show some numbers and if we scroll down on this it shows that we are now looking at uh deficit looks like a 534 right we have that's a positive carol i'm sorry that's that's a positive levy okay good but um it also has an arrow here on uh and in green the new growth is only at 400 so could you walk us through so we understand the impact of that additional 500 in new growth will have on this budget or could we don't know that yet what i can tell you is the additional amount of money will add to the surplus levy amount i can't tell you the dollar value impact because we don't have a final budget but that will be that 500 is in play for something right yeah the 500 is in play the the you know the bands to debt service i mean the bands to bonds that the select board did as well as the unused levy i'm sorry the the levy to exclude with the dbw those are the three numbers that really impact ultimately what's going to be the unused levy amount and and we don't know that number yet because there's too many big unknowns out there for example the file that you're looking at is carrying the school budget at five and a half percent that's a conservative number most likely the school budget is going to be far less than that that will impact the unused levy and make it go up so there's a bunch of things that will swing it one way or the other mostly my suspicion is that the unused levy will be somewhat greater than the five hundred thousand that you're looking at now however we don't know that yet until we get two two or three more weeks out
i'm going to just open it to questions i knew that when he mentioned the new growth there was some concerns so go ahead hey brian it's doug thank you for that update um my question is around health insurance there's been a lot of coverage recently in the press including a boston globe article today about rising costs facing mass towns and so i'm wondering it looks like we came in with a placeholder at a 12 percent increase is that what you tend to do year over year and what is the range will we be potentially looking at for our health insurance rate increase well that's a good question usually we go into the budget cycle with a number that's conservative last year it was 10 percent that we went into the budget forecast with ultimately it was the budget increase came in less than three percent historically the year over year health insurance budget has ranged between four and six percent so we always carry a higher number going into the cycle in this particular year fiscal 27 because of what you just talked about we went into this budget which really started in july with a 12 percent increase so the budget you're looking at now is projecting health insurance to go up 12 we won't know the ultimately what the increase is until we get to the second week in february when west suburban finalizes their rates and the reason i ask is because as i was reading about this a number of towns are getting hit so hard and they're talking about 10 to 20 percent increases year over year but from what you're telling me 12 is being conservative so we should be okay using that as our placeholder yeah if you take a look at the historical increases from west suburban there's only been a couple years where we've even hit 10 percent i believe it was two years ago or three years ago we had uh in there at six percent and it went to ten but that was few and far between if you took a look at the average over 10 years it's been around you know four to six seven percent there was a couple of years i believe maybe 12 years ago it went up 10 and then about two or three years ago went up 10 but the historical trend has been much less than that we can't speak to what they're going to do in february but my guess is that they'll most likely use some of their fund balance to mitigate that kind of an increase increase so brian i i wanted to hop in and say maybe you should um remind the board that we are self-funded because we're in west suburban and so we're not as if i'm correct susceptible to the market because we're a much smaller group we're self-fund and so the fund that brian was just referring to is that when we have access we bank it and then sometimes they use it they offset the cost of the premiums did you want to talk about that a little bit but how we sell fun and that kind of protects us yeah when the different communities i'm not sure exactly how many but i know wellesley's one way wayland there's a bunch of them shrewsbury there's a few there's a bunch of them so when they different communities pay into the pool and the expenses come in less than expected that excess money goes to fund balance and historically what they do year after years is use a portion of that fund balance similar to free cash to but to mitigate their increases last year they used a lot of it last year they used i don't know i can't give the dollar value but a big part of the reason why we only got a two or three percent increase in in health insurance is because of the use of um fund balance so they really drove down the fund balance to only come up with a two or three percent i don't know where they're going to do this year my guess is health insurance would probably be around seven eight percent but that's just my guess i thought we would be more susceptible to bigger increases if we were a smaller group like this these these 10 communities versus like a lot several towns are now turning to the gic which is state because it's so much bigger they can absorb those costs and they don't go up and down like that we actually have done uh historically i mean a zillion years ago when i first heard about this should we go to the gic or should we do this and we actually i think we get we have a better program better quality program it's not less money but we seem to be fairly insulated from it from the market okay and they they spent michael's own how's it you said on that michael michael and yeah we do all their own analysis and everything so and anyone else have a question here um bill or yep sure uh brian uh thanks for putting this together uh and we recognize that it's preliminary uh i noticed that there is a line item dbw seven hundred and three thousand five hundred i assume that is the debt exclusion or the as a consequence of the debt exclusion it appears in the lower right hand corner yes you're correct and uh is the uh uh the extension of the bands baked in here as well yes that would be put into if take a look at sort of the bottom of the chart under debt service the the number you have in there you're looking at a 6.9 million dollar number that's net of the that takes into account what we did with the bands and the bonds thank you um and and do you have any questions on this no i mean um usually there's some we're reviewing this pretty you know what like two months uh from the last time we reviewed it so there's always some elasticity within these budgets and it sounds like brian correct me if i'm wrong there there's nothing that concerns you uh within this overall budget yeah that's correct okay thank you brian on that um so brian i had asked brian i think i gave you the wrong uh chart that i wanted i was somewhere along the line either from the task force meeting brian or one of the presentations you did for us there was a bar graph that showed what our contribution will have to be annually in order to um fund this 58 million dollars of uh pension liability and you know i said 900 for 27 and then what we have to pay in 28 29 and i i i've seen that so maybe you gave it to the task force i don't know but i was hoping that that's why i had asked for this but i don't think this i wanted to show how much that impacts our budget i mean it's 900 100 000 additional this year just for this extra pension liability and when we did the bands that's what was left was the 900. so you can see the impact it's going to have on our budget so am i okay brian did i say it right yeah i would think carol once we get past this budget you know once we get to may and june you know the focus will be on getting a group together to take a look at what we can do for long-term improvements in the budget over the next 10 years and you know the pension obligation bond would be one of them maybe restructuring health insurance obviously collective bug agreements we're going to have to come up with you know structural improvements to the budget because we have a structural deficit so we hopefully we can come up with long-lasting improvements and how to mitigate some of the override numbers and that would be one of them thank you and then i think we have on our list chair capital you've included a capital budget file but i don't think that's the from the capital improvement planning committee is it no michael sent you the capital budget file you're looking at is the one that we completed last year i believe i believe michael sent that as a just a the last update we had for a capital budget we have not received a capital program capital five-year budget from the new group michael sent you the file that was prepared last year and completed by us i think i got it at home i don't see it here all right does anybody else have any questions you know for brian brian you alluded to a couple articles we will be looking at the articles after we do the petitioners workshop um if i don't i don't want to ask you to hang around if you don't want to you can you can come back and we'll do those or we could um maybe send you a text if we have questions on those okay how would you like to do it i what are you going to be doing them now well no we're going to go to that uh petitioners workshop i think or do we want to do those two articles out of order you can text me i'll leave it running that sound reasonable yeah well we're at 7 45 right right so do i have a little time yeah what does the board want to do just the two articles that brian alluded to okay let's do that and then at 7 45 we are going to stop do the petitioners workshop and come back so um in the regular packet not the uh supplemental there's an article x which is a transfer to the general stabilization fund does anybody know what page that's on in that packet it's page 23 madam chair 23 okay we're doing this a little backwards but that's okay we're flexible exactly so it says transfer to the general stabilization fund and um with brian brian did you want to speak to this since you're here so there's two articles i believe you're looking at now we're actually going to need three but i'll leave the third one to last so the first time you're looking at is the fact that in the fiscal 26 budget we have appropriated 526 000 for the fire contract the fire contract is not settled that money will go to free cash that is not why we appropriated the money given the fact that if the fire contract is not settled the prudent thing to do is to transfer that money by by free cash to the general stabilization fund and then once the fire contract is settled we have to go back to town meeting anyways to fund the budget at a future front town meeting we can take that same 500 000 out of the general stabilization fund and fund the fire contract if you don't do that you're going to have to reappropriate this 500 000 next year which will impact your override number this is a process that i've seen in other towns do where they take money reserved for cola and they put it into a fund outside the general fund so then they bring it into the general fund when this set the union contract is settled what it does it it avoids reappropriating the same dollars through taxation so in summary on the first one the fire contract is not settled the prudent thing to do is transfer the money to the general stabilization fund and then at a future town meeting take the money out of that fund and then fund the contract the second let's hold on just do one at a time if you don't mind does anybody have any questions i think it'd be easier for us to get through these does anybody have any questions for brian about that i think it's a pretty clever idea and did you have a question on that article no just a question on timing so let's assume for the sake of discussion that this article is presented and approved and that the fire contract is settled a month later are we saying that that settlement doesn't get funded until the next town meeting that's correct yeah if it gets settled when you say we approve it so we put it in the warmer in march it gets settled in april we go to town meeting in may it'll get funded right but if it's after that then you wait for the next town meeting that's how this wouldn't wouldn't we have to have a specific appropriation then at the upcoming town meeting uh under your scenario yeah can i get to that carol so at a future town meeting if we settle the contract and say the contract was for seven hundred thousand dollars for argument's sake we would take the five hundred and twenty six thousand dollars out of the general stabilization and we would have to find the difference in another budget right glad you watch this go ahead sorry uh but you know carol opposed uh hypothetical which is uh we uh we go forward with this we put it in the warrant and and the uh the contract settles prior to the town meeting so can we could we then appropriate that money at the upcoming may town meeting
so again can i jump in i'm glad you asked that question bill because that was the third article that's missing we we also need an article that says to transfer five hundred and twenty six thousand dollars from the fiscal 26 budget to the fire budget in fiscal 26 contract is settled prior to prior to the town meeting so in actuality two articles need to go to town meeting for really the same thing but they're going in two different directions one article is if it's settled you'll have an article in place to fund the budget another article if it's not okay hang on brian for one second so you pass over the one that you need right and you don't do the other that's correct we're going to explain all this logically if we started at the beginning but why don't we start at the end so i'll write that now the first the other article that's actually in the warrant uh list the article list for tonight it concerns not the prior contracts but the future contracts that were being currently negotiated so that's brian the one transferred to uh the fy 27 coals union contracts that's the next one we have in our packet on trades okay so what the town typically always did was they put the call the reserve in the general fund in the unclassified budget as a salary reserve in many years the contracts were not settled and that money went to free cash then the following year we'd have to appropriate two years worth of cola what this article does is it appropriates one year of cola the fiscal 27 cola appropriates it by taxation into the general stabilization fund if in fact whenever the contracts are settled that'll be the funding source to fund the contracts if if the problem is and i brought this up earlier i'm glad marana's on the screen to hear this if we if we go to tell me i have to recognize marana go ahead if we go to tell meeting in one week before hypothetically one of the big unions settles how do we fund that contract because we have two two articles in play so this is something that michael mccall already and i talked about we're going to have to have a special meeting about how to deal with all this and we were going to invite miranda to it because a lot of shuffling will need to go on at tell meaning to move some of these articles around and the placement of the articles would be important so this the article we're talking about now is the cola would really have to be after the general fund budget so we were going to have a meeting about this anyways because of the complexity of it in the in the moving pieces but this article is needed for the upcoming town meeting okay so just want to say this so tonight when we go back in order here we will be voting to submit and insert two of these three articles the third one was discovered today that we need and we'll see that on the 14th all right all right does any other questions and did you have any questions for brian on any of these these two articles that are in our list i know you were interested in the articles no i understand them okay great um so what i'm going to do now is brian i think we're i think are you all set with us do you think yeah i think so yeah okay um i am going to say one thing about the budget and that is that um it's the capital budget normally comes through with brian's um proposed operating budget because it gets done by the finance team but with the new capital improvement and planning committee the capital is coming from them and um you know they only started what end of august beginning of september so they've gotten a lot done they are putting their report out and their recommendation um i think in the next week or so and from that we will see what the capital budget is and i have asked miss lapham who is the chair if once the report comes out if she would like to come before us and just kind of give us an update of the process that they have taken so far where they see that what else needs to be done and just to give a sense so i put them in there just because operating budget is both um the budget is both the operating and the capital and so those two parts put together all right let us move on thank you brian unless you want to say yeah thank you and sorry we were running late we had a lot of um um public comments thank you thank you appreciate it all right so we're now going to have our um welcome miranda who has joined us thank you and we are now going to have our annual town meeting 2026 petitioners workshop um is there anybody here all online who is um interested in participating in the christian workshop i'm sure yes i could be picky but it's 144 we can wait one minute i can do anything to make sure we have everybody who has an actually this is not um a posted forum or anything but you're right i will get myself organized how's that sound tell me when i can stop
you were to brian's point on uh this last article transfer to the general stabilization fund to fund the contracts yeah um he indicated that i guess a meeting will be held in the future uh to discuss how to uh respond to a possible settlement of a contract prior to the town meeting would that suggest that uh this article needs to be amendable uh such that uh one could come forward with a an amendment uh that the moderator would obviously have to determine is within the scope but to the extent that there was a dollar amount cited for the transfer of the general stabilization fund and and you know would a uh an amendment that would transfer a lesser amount into this general stabilization fund and the difference being uh appropriated for the settlement of a specific contract i wonder if that's an approach that might bear consideration you know if kelsey was participating in those discussions or not but i think that brian was saying you needed to work out with miranda how to do that hopefully we'll have all the answers to that question on the 14th does that sound right there's a meeting okay so the only thing i'm looking at is in my moderator's rules about not accepting a motion to appropriate or expend the sum of money uh which exceeds the estimated costs at fourth in the article then under consideration by 15 percent except for motions under the omnibus budget article motions under a supplementary budget article that contemplate the appropriation of additional money for the current fiscal year so to supplement monies are previously appropriated so that that is the the moderator's rule that would i think would be would dictate how we deal with things or the one i want to pay attention to so um but i'm happy to work with you folks on it whatever we if if we think that a settlement may happen shortly before town meeting that is obvious that could obviously impact the amount of money that um there may be a motion to amend the amount of money in it we have to see how much it is so but this would be the rule that i would be concerned with i guess the question branda i but you know if hypothetically uh this uh contemplated the transfer of a million dollars to the general stabilization fund an amendment were offered to transfer and said 800 000 to that fund and 200 000 to settle a contract the uh the total amount would not change right yep and i don't think it's outside the scope okay i wouldn't think so so i would like to start the petitioners workshop on time all right so we're now going to have the petition on annual tell me in 2026 annual town meeting petitioners workshop is there anyone in the room who is here for the workshop you are okay thank you great um so we do this every year as uh the courtesy for those who are thinking about putting an article in to see if they have any questions it's going to i'm going to provide some information but i think if they have any specific questions this would be a great time to ask them um and first i want to say is if you haven't already there is a section on the web page that is entitled a town meeting and under there there is a little subheading on the side 2026 annual town meeting and if you scroll all the way down at the very bottom you will see some links about filing a petitioner's article and that gives all the information about you know how many signatures you have to have and the timing you have to have and it also um so it's a it's a it's has a chart it's actually in our packet if you have access to the select what packet you'll see it says warrant article process and it gives the dates in red gives a general outline and then it gives the dates in red for this year so for example it says we're going to hold the petitioners workshop on january 5th which is today and then the next item it says that on or before january 15 at 4 30 p.m articles need to be presented to um the town manager's office right they have to have the signature certify the town clerk actually they go to kelsey in january so so this is i'm sorry
they have the signature certified before they submit them they should be brought to the town clerk before they're brought down to the town manager okay do you want to speak about that um so the deadline is uh january 15th at 4 30 p.m so any additional articles must be submitted to the town clerk and have the signatures um checked before they stayed stamped down in our office by 4 30. so wait a minute you just have to go first time book to tell you that by what date what time time January 15th yeah for 4 30. no that's when it's due at our office so how much time does the clerk need to verify their signatures in other words how much time do the petitioners have can they go the day before two days before i'm i'm actually thinking about this because i'm trying to remember the process from last year and i'm i don't know if i've got it switched in my head that they submitted to us first and then the town clerk goes and retroactively uh verifies the signatures and lets them know whether or not they've they've um i'm just reading it just there there's only other signatures are verified by the town clerk so yeah i think actually they submit it to our office first by the deadline of 4 30 p.m on january 15th and then they are brought down to the town clerk's office for being for the signature to be ratified however if one wants to make sure that their signatures are because you can't go backwards if they're not you don't have enough signatures i don't believe the petitioner's article can go through like you don't have enough valid signatures so it would behoove the petitioner to um verify that at least a day or two in advance i think it does take the town clerk's office at least 48 hours we're getting more than the required amount that they're more than the acquired amount so a couple might not fall so and the number of signatures that they need for an annual town meeting article uh 10. so now we are going to say really a good idea to get about 15 or 18 so that should one not be legible or verifiable like else you said you don't accidentally get haven't and then able to move forward right so this is this is all all these little deadlines and the schedule is right here the next um after the deadline on the 15th we'll also want to attend the finance committee holds an article workshop where you get to come and briefly describe your article to the finance committee who of course is going to be making reports on these um on articles that they deem to have financial impact to the town that is going to be on i think it's a wednesday january 28th sorry the 28th i'm looking at the the process right here on online right it's going to be on january 28th which i think is a wednesday it says 7 7 p.m i thought it was 7 15 but it's 7 p.m it's not a debate it's just you go and present a couple sentences about if they might have questions they assign you a liaison from the select board they will sign you a liaison to talk to you from the finance committee you know right um now one of the questions that happens here that this talks also about being able to edit the article because you've submitted 150 words that's your explanation is 150 words of what the article is all about and um one of the issues that has risen up because sometimes you would like to have access or speak to town council and there are a set of rules and i didn't see them in here so maybe we could i can give you my copy if you like on this but i'm on the website as well um town councils are legal counsel and sometimes petitions would like to speak to town council so we make the select board uh has put together uh the ability for petitioners or residents to meet with town council we go through the town manager's office and you make an appointment and then you will he will make the arrangement i think you have access it says right here for up to 30 minutes they don't give advice on town meeting floor they if they do not um write these articles but they will make suggestions for you um to ensure your article represents legislative intent so does anybody want to add anything um i've got it okay this is wonderful to hear um so but we do not we are not providing we've went into a little bit of a problem a couple times we don't have unfettered access to legal house if you have some legal issues that need to resolve you probably need to seek some some uh counsel or some advice outside of the town's counts um is there any questions you have would you like to join us and then give your name and and may i hand you this because this i did print i thought i had the chart as well in case somebody came but i don't with garden stuff if you can't find that chart online but you should be on the town website that's what it looks like yeah i found it very easily under town meeting on the town meeting town meeting i actually i do promise with you i don't do very well finding things i found it right away so i'm thinking i'm thinking you should somebody else should be able to find it yeah it was under warrant article process guide for petitioners right so um just want to give us your name please and did you want to talk to us about your article you want to ask questions we're an article process
okay short-term memory is iffy um sorry elizabeth party elizabeth carter okay what you just told me okay go ahead i thought you'd flip up a comment no okay that was elisa elisa elisa me too did you want to talk about have any questions about the process um well this gives me a lot of information 150 words not my strength sure the adhd kind of goes all over the um you speak into that mike i'm i'm not hearing you so it doesn't amplify it doesn't amplify sounds okay can you guys hear me online now i can very well yeah okay i will i'm also getting over a long cold um yeah one question is um this may not go as a what did you call it um legislative article but may be you know sort of agreeing in principle kind of thing um and so uh what's the difference and can you put it forth as a legislative and if that's really not going as i've seen in a meeting before make it well about a uh a resolution yeah that's a speech recognition so miss carter i am probably the only non-lawyer on the board no yes i said probably you're surrounded but everyone else is a lawyer except us and i was reading the paper where it said your access to town councils is she will help you with to make sure you have legislative intent in other words supported legally correct so that okay so that the moderator will say this can go forward and after anything any other legal questions i need someone else to answer them well now i know what that means it is properly it basically means that it's not repugnant or it's not illegal or doesn't conflict with mass general laws or the town's by lawsuit simply you're not presenting something that you know you have a conflict of of um already stated law and already passed law and then proposal to clarify you can propose something that is contrary to a bylaw in town if you want to change it you can do that right i think what um just passed by the saying that the format or the form that you use has to be legal so that if it passes the friendly general it's probably what was right that's fine can i just add one thing for you sure you're looking a resolution which we've had in a couple town meetings in the past it doesn't request any binding action you're trying to get a sense of the town meeting voters i kind of heard you saying non-binding exactly and that's what we call the resolution so we had one last year at town meeting which involved what should we do with the vacant land next to the middle school and we had a proposal about a community center what is the sense of town meeting is that a good idea if you have this book from last year you'll be able to see one um in here and it still is online too well it's online too all the articles online resolutions elect to doug's point they're different so you know we're very excited we haven't had someone show up for petitions workshop in about three years so this is supposed to have at least one buddy and yeah so if you have any other questions for us great otherwise i think these are the tools to use the key deadlines the key thing is january 15th um it has to be in by then yes madam chair i just put up on the website that the guidance for access to town council under that petitioners great so that should be up and live and ready right so if you were there you should be able to get all that and if you have any questions you can send us a note or you're actually um miranda did you want to miranda of course runs town meeting as the moderator and so do you have anything you want to add to the petitioners workshop discussion um no i i don't i um i think particularly if this is your first time ask as many questions and ask for help as much as possible don't try and do it on your own there's there's plenty of people to help you with this and if if you have if you're drafting something and you're struggling you're more than welcome to get in touch with me is she looking for me the camera or am i just some voice coming out of somewhere i know you're the camera's not there as much as we often think it is so um yeah i i would um you know you you can get help so don't think you have to write i have no idea what the your petitioner's article would be on but you know if you want me to i'm happy to take a look at it beforehand to make sure that it's something we could get through yeah it has to do with um the town banning at least on town property by town departments etc the use of any product with uh glyphosate which um has been shown to not only be um neurologically bad for humans but really bad and and in part because of the other things that are mixed with it and round up and other cameras that you know kill um beneficial insects pollinators dragonflies damsel flies um tadpoles um in addition to um you know many other problems bees it really messes them up and um so you know if the town would agree to not use the stuff and then yeah we've we've had articles like that in the past and i would use them as a guide would be the best way to um is is why reinvent the wheel you might as look at might as well look at some that we've used in the past trying to ban certain products um and use that use those if they made it through it's it's a good guide where would i find such looking fire warrants and i'm going to tell you i remember about seven or eight years ago we had i'm looking at tom some finance committee so it had to be six or seven years ago so go back and it was um uh takeout containers wasn't it plastic bags i think we had one two years ago when i for my at my first town meeting didn't we no it just happened was it last year yeah it was on the floor though it was on the floor so i don't know if this is actually an article it was susan weinstein yes it wasn't an actual in the place field it was different this is i think she i think there was an article though it's not a position this article so that's all the thing is a good example i think the one is that paul dale put in a couple of couple years in a row and one of them was he was the lead petitioner and it was i believe in the plastic bags i believe it was the plastic containers um and that's it yeah so and black she's in recycling so the more so the wards you can find them online and all you have to do is look at the table of contents to see what the warren articles are to see what what hits for you they have all of them online yeah they go back pretty far um is it jones randa jones yes moderate that's right all right so i think miss kelsey would like to speak so recognizing um i was going to say um easily accessible warrants as they were printed for the last 10 years um at least are on the town meeting website so it's wayland.ma.us slash town dash meeting and that'll bring you to the main town meeting page and then there's like blue boxes on the side and you just click on town meeting warrants and that should pull that up for you the minutes which isn't as clear but if you're really diving in i mean we have minutes for town meetings going back to the early i want to say the 1900s and that's located in e-code um that can be a little bit more difficult to find things but if you're looking for something and you know it's in a specific year you'd be able to find the discourse around it how people voted and the text of the article so um you know there's a lot of resources um miranda can show uh miss jones can show you myself can show you where those documents live on our website and there was also it's a great resource i know mr bay has a question but i also want to say there's hard copy of all the town warrants at the library and they can just sit there and come through them and i think that might be easier so thank you miss carter my memory may be wrong but regarding the article from last year's town meeting that concerned the rat boys i think it was told because i think it was the policy of the town not to use that ingredient anyway so not on the playing field so that was the issue they weren't going to remove it i think they were going off topic i guess my point is you might want to just double check the town maybe the deep view of what public works as to whether they use whether they have a policy not permitting what you want to exclude we'll check with them first before i go through the trouble all right does anybody else have any uh hints or any more questions um all right well thank you thank you i really love it all right thank you miranda appreciate it sure we all done anyone else we're going to talk about some articles that we're going to submit so i think you'll say if you like or you can go west if you don't mind i haven't i haven't had sleep since yesterday morning no that's why i'm going to um madam chair i'm not sure everyone here is is not here for the petitioner's article you might want to double check because no one else did i i've already asked what do you have for a different petition i was here for the workshop
hello miranda and sir i i i can't i can't hear the person particularly well
hello oh hi doug how are you thanks all right excuse me and sir are you here for the petitioner's workshop no okay so i think we're all set i'm going to close the petitioner's work job but you can't i see it's all good for it uh i can read instructions so it's better than okay i'll give a quick recap 90 seconds if you go on the web page under 2026 annual town meeting you will see there's a bar there click on it they will have an entire chart with all the dates of that and then there's also we just added in the list of the the rules for access to town council because we do allow petitioners as residents probably don't have legal council we do allow you and i think it's up to a 30-minute session which gets scheduled through the town manager's office so that's it and they're due due january 15 and with your requisite signatures you need 10 we recommend you have more than 10 just in case someone not legible or no just not legible maybe they haven't registered or what have you and then the other date that you'll see on this important is you want to go on the 28th of january to the finance committee workshop where they you know where you get to present briefly what your article is about but so all right everybody and there's resources online there's resources in the library if you need to look up prior uh warrants and where you are all right i am going to close excuse me i'm going to close the workshop yes did you have one more question wait what is
sorry so e-code on our uh when you go to our main website and you drop down the about us you'll see it says town code that's what e-code is and town code e-code is where all of our bylaws and all the meeting minutes for all town meetings with not a computer code that i'm gonna have to look no no actually quite easy to use right thanks thank you all set everybody's all set everybody's all set okay i'm going to close the conditioners workshop maybe okay and now the next item that we're going to do is i know we skipped number six i'm going to stay on number eight which is uh since we're here let me just let's go through the articles so in the packet you'll see we have a a chart here this beginning of the chart and it shows the articles that we have uh voted to either submit or submit and insert to date thank you everybody um and you can see that we have through z which is 26 and i believe we have a couple more coming which i'll tell you about again um it's going to be a question this year doug's going to be the um the chart updater so as we take votes he will let you know what where we're at so if you look on that chart you'll see that we have not um taken a position on q r u v x and z and so i thought we would talk about each of those first and go from there so the first one um is acceptance of mgl chapter 60 section 2s we probably should put on there um the name of it um on the title that kelsey we probably should put that and this one is about um did you want to speak to it um so this article is adopting uh chapter six 60 section two paragraph two uh mass general law which allows the treasure collector um the ability to abate uh tax bills of 25 or less um this was requested by the treasure collector because uh as it currently stands even if somebody has one cent left on their tax bill and doesn't pay it we cannot just write that off um it has to just say there so um in my just i wrote up a little bit of a justification just saying that sometimes the cost benefit analysis of continuing to uh chase down the unpaid tax uh bills can be more expensive than the actual overdue tax bill itself and i know that we have some overdue tax bills that have gone on for tens of years that we've never been able to collect on that are less than 25 dollars so um this would allow i guess more tools in the toolkit of the treasure collector to be able to balance those um unpaid tax liens and also uh allow her to do a cost benefit analysis as to whether or not it makes sense to continue to uh spend more money in order to gain a lower amount of money um and and also the the abatements are if and i really hope i'm saying this right i hope my fiance is listening i believe that that money that is abated is also taken out of the overlay so there isn't a negative it's it's balanced out by money being held aside by the assessors in the overlay so i don't know that's so um i do want to say that we're missing the map on information here which has has put together and go with the with the article the questions tom um just to clarify i believe the statute says less than 25 dollars in our agenda it says 25 or less so i just i just think that needs to be clarified yeah definitely whatever the statute says is what it's what should be yeah it says it in the article committed taxes on savings less than 25. right so but i think in the title it should say sometimes we say yeah summarize the article but it put it put a title there like 25 abatements or something like that dollar no less okay does anyone else have any questions on this one yes but um i take it the less than 25 comes from the state statute it just strikes me as such a diminished amount is 25 the right number but i suppose the town doesn't have the authority to exceed 24.99 this probably was written to your point many years ago it made sense i mean are we all set though so what i thought was we might just go through all of these and hopefully just do one vote and they'll all be a one vote for submit and insert that sound good so far okay so then the next item is um this one is near and dear to our hearts um this one is the sub chapter 53 section 18b i don't probably need a title phrase so it's clear but this is what would allow us a select board us the town us the town manager's office to communicate with residents um you know in more layman's i'm going to say language about a valid question and then we would be able to put out like a flyer or brochure or some information on the webpage or the newsletter about we have this upcoming election this is what the question on the ballot or the questions and we can specifically say a yes vote equals and a no vote means and then i think that's what we were looking for the vote we had in december so could you have never done that for an override vote in the path you never were able to explain what a yes and a no and an override vote was
not legally that's not what you said okay um anybody have any questions on this one no i just had a question here because they're like do we really need all of this an entity of the laws provided below i don't know that we normally put all that in or do we where are you um okay what page of mine only you'd be on page 17 117. what do you have right here it says the entity provides governing body shall mean a city or a council and governing body of the city madam chair is that not that's that's the language of the law is that we don't do we we don't have we just have to accept it we don't have to then add it in as a bylaw correct right because jaylen wrote this yeah touch on this i don't think we do okay um we can look into it we'll need more sex all right so it's interesting you in the background did you mean the word the entirety of the law is provided by a problem okay all right okay and then under the background information here um and here we've done this by the way i want to reiterate this we had a sidebar conversation with the chair of the finance committee of which ones these articles that we're putting forth might not require they might not consider a financial impact article and therefore not need a full write-up and so we've done a short write-up to begin with and if if it's deemed we need a larger one we'll go back and add rather than make all these big write-ups and then we're trying to reduce the size of the book so um and this is as in the bottom information revealed to each voter seven days before the election but we could mail it 11 days if we wanted right
no questions on that one okay and we'll go to that so the next one i think i'm gonna um this one to kelsey allow print free digital legal notices which i think this was one you put forth yeah um so recently the towns of belmont and arlington i believe i know it's definitely belmont i can't remember was arlington um passed this as a as a sorry i forget the the word question oh home rule petition thank you um to allow for this um legislation uh currently right now for us to advertise it costs us anywhere between 50 to 150 dollars depending on lines and word count to advertise in the metro west daily daily news um that is required by mass general law with regard to most procurements over a certain dollar threshold and we do it for all legal notices and hearing notices so that does add up um conservative conservatively i would say we probably spend in total throughout the building probably close to 10 to 12 grand a year on advertising um and that would save a significant cost to that and there is also the argument that i mean how many people are really looking at print notices on metro west daily news um at least with regards to procurement you're also putting it out on things like combine and i get more response from contractors looking at things to combine then from metro west daily news so um it just allows the town to save some money have a little bit more flexibility and then also have more visibility because people are more apt to look online for notices as opposed to looking at a print newspaper we would have a great i think it's uh yeah i mean i would think people who were looking to do business in railing would be looking no wayland post or uh definitely not uh metro west um can we want to just look at the sentence for the first sentence in the background info it says the select board endorses this resident petition effort oh yes sorry yeah yeah yeah i copied a little word i know
i think it's you should say uh it doesn't say the select board supports um lowering the costs i like that one and then um on the second paragraph just one of the net where it says in the paragraph this is and it would also allow the town to publish legal ads on local news websites um i would just get rid of the friends and in the if they can and just say that meet legal requirements that's the reply to keep them in third persons anybody have any comments or questions on this one we're good on this one i think it's smart i'm sorry i think we are great all right now the next the next one i we talked about briefly and um actually i wanted to it was an article i still have a deal but i was saying yes this is about banning crypto atms in town and michael had i think got a white paper or something from maybe kp law or somewhere else something else in the summer and we mentioned this briefly and um i have to tell you i thought well what whatever but there was a big article in the province on independent there's maybe these machines on the cape true and eastern
yes i don't know what news outlet but a very large reputable 60 minute cbs news something like that i just saw it on um social media a couple of weeks ago terrifying of of older citizens going to these bitcoin because they're being scammed actively by scammers and they're depositing money into these bit these bitcoin machines having no idea of what it's doing what that money's for and that they're being scammed so it is also kind of terrifying to see that you know these machines can be manipulating you know our vulnerable populations as well let's say there are now over 600 crypto atms in massachusetts which is 100 percent increase from when mass and uh he began researching them in the late 2023 and it said there were four communities in massachusetts that have banned them although there's legislation pending at the state level so and anyway um i don't do we need all this purpose and intense stuff in our lineup i guess we do i'm sure do you know whether the mass municipal association has addressed this issue so i'm saying i think there was this they're waiting for um credit in here but there was legislation but there it's not it has not proceeded and in the meantime these are multiplying that was the issue let's see oh here we go at least 11 states have passed laws waiting in crypto atms according to state by uh the mass legislature has not yet acted on the crypto atms but at least four municipalities in the state have passed ordinances banning the machines this whole hogan gasp said who i believe i gotta find chamber of commerce hasn't either correct this is torn all of this this is my this is from provincetown independent so i just happened but i don't know why chamber of commerce and you know where the state chamber of commerce has has come out on this topic at all about these machines you know i didn't think so um but i know that there was a warning that went out and i suspect that's um that's probably what prompted what um carol is looking at i mean it's one of those where it some of the policies themselves are being supported by the crypto in industry because they don't want you know residents to get scammed and then have a bad feeling towards crypto so um i have to do some more research on the um on whether you know the there's an actual position on the state but um and do a little bit more research but i remember reading uh that it's it's a pretty supported idea to ban these because what it's not just that uh it's related to crypto it's that a lot of these uh atm um providers atm machine providers are not even part of the crypto industry and that's how they're scamming people so they're not regulated are they no so the i have to um look i i know that there was a lot of work being done by the crypto industry itself to try to say hey you know in certain capacities these are okay but um and i think the way that they did it i have to look a little bit more into it i think it's really interesting i saw this article and i did more research on it for today's meeting but um there's a difference in crypto um type atms and bitcoin atms because bitcoin has been partnering with jp morgan and some of the reputable companies out there so um i gotta just look at the language because if it's crypto atms this may be a very simple um article meaning there it should be a no-brainer if it's access to any type of crypto um you know even if it's reputable and attached to a banking institution already um that's regulated that might look different i was just going to say i i was able to find the article that i was referencing it was from abc news so in september washington dc's attorney general sued a bitcoin company um uh accusing it of pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars in undisclosed fees on the backs of scan victims and at the end they uh quote aarp by saying that at least 17 states have passed legislation in recent years regulating the machines but they don't specify what kind of regulations and some municipalities have moved to ban them outright thank you i think that is there any other questions or edits to this one um
i think well all right this one seemed a little bit disjointed to me but other than that i think we're good everybody good with that yeah okay um so the next one is the ones that find the next two of the ones that brian talked about so now we're sort of back and bowl if you will um to coach steve martin so this one is a transfer to the general stabilization fund you know because this is a financial one we might have to do some pros and cons on this one but um so this would put a 500 of free cash to the general stabilization fund uh to support future expenses it's the funding on the not yet set of fire contracts so this is just a number that will be plugged into to bill's point be plugged in later you know any questions are you've already done this one and then the second one same thing translates you on the stabilization fund to fund um a coalist for the fy 27 contracts so i mean it's a really good idea because you don't want to be funding the same dollar multiple times which is what can happen if the contracts don't settle in a timely manner so anyway all right now having said that i would love to have a motion and i think because we're all here why don't we why don't we look at doing submit and insert and surrender
do you want me to do it by the letters or you should spell out the names of each one how have we done it before um we've done both i'm going to look at tom do you think i think you can do as we set both in our agenda in the packet right here we voted to submit this is what we're doing right here you be that's sweet q r u v x yeah that's what we're doing q r c as if you are you be x the the summer but put those if this chart is accurate of course it's right then we still need to vote to insert so we want to do submit and insert yes for these items and but some of these we had we just voted to submit but we didn't insert right we'll do those we'll do it sometimes we don't insert insert because we're not sure if we're going to actually need it we don't want to insert and then have to take out all right well we did not insert because we had the mini meeting on the 19th and i wasn't sure i had a full quorum we'll do that on the fourth we can do that on the 20th as long as we submit these by the 50 we're good so all right i move that the select board vote to submit and insert um the following articles in our packet under articles q r u v x and z into the warmth as as listed in the agenda yeah yeah that's in that packet do i have a um a second second thank you is there any further discussion okay ann yes um doug yes bill yes yes carol yes motion passes five zero i want to talk about more articles if i met them um we i went back and looked at everything and i think on the 14th we will be looking at a couple that we haven't seen yet one is we'd like to submit one for homeroom home rule green burial which i think is being uh written up we'll have that for the 14th um we're also going to have a um the article that brian mentioned today the third article about uh funding having these having flexibility for funding should we need funding we'll have that and then there's a third one that i happen to think of the other day and i said oh we talked about this and i wanted to bring it up to the board to see if the board is interested in supporting this as well because she's shaking her head because i sent it to her and michael um we talked about we how much difficulty we have scheduling annual town meeting because you know between the holidays and in the in the plays and the the testing and the mother's day and what have you so we had talked about our current code says april 1st to may 15 and i think we talked about and i wasn't trying to reinvent the wheel and make it complicated but we talked about maybe extending it a little later into may technically as you all know because you're all lawyers except that they were not that we can hold time meeting anytime through june 30th but historically i just don't see us saying oh we want a junetown meeting so my thought was throw it out to the board see if we still want to and yeah this is just one of these housekeeping ones that like maybe it'll be easier to schedule i know the moderator has difficulty uh we only she only had one date available this year and if we were to do it i'm going to just throw it out like to may 25th or something like that or what day you would like so food what y'all think do you envision any pushback from anybody on this what would be the pushback to have the flexibility
do you envision pushback tom um i don't think so the thing is this right if you extend it the board still has the responsibility and the option to choose the date that they want it just gives you a little bit more flexibility i mean i can't see us other communities do tell me in june i don't know that we're thinking that's what we want to do we could we could put whatever we want on here june 1st whatever but i was just thinking it seemed that two years in a row if we had just had that next couple days after may 15 we would have had a couple options and that second one would have been a little more palatable to all concerned so that's why i was saying you know may 25th michael said to me today which sounded like complicated language um last no later than the last full week of may so in other words if memorial day was in it monday that wouldn't be a full week it would be the week before that sounded complicated to me but so i want to put that out and then kelsey did you want to apply as well i think it's great to give more flexibility i think mass general law says you can hold it in february march april may or june um and i think i read some guidance or research from the mma that says most towns do it in april and may so you know just giving us and i know that the last couple years were quite difficult for us to find a date that worked with everyone with all the holidays and the school schedules and such so more flexibility is is a win i would take that okay would you like to put in for a date so we can write the article in two weeks beyond what we have now two weeks beyond we have now we may 15 that would be may 29. is that for the start of town meeting or does that mean the town meeting has to be concluded within that period okay let's start well yeah we always talk about this stat whatever the statute says right or whatever the rule says it's bylaw it's a bylaw it's a bylaw the bylaw sentence and do you have a thought on this um i can't see much pushback on this and um
that's it that's as long as people know you know as i think everybody's already experienced it's just about um consistency and how we do things and people feeling like they know what's going on um but i think it's smart to give some more flexibility especially if uh kelsey is saying we should all right so i think the interesting thing is this will also move our election
well it would from year to year depending on what the select board chose right so if we were to hold the town meeting 18th that would move the election to maybe into mag versus whatever so the other thing was we talked about which i'm not recommending here because i think one step at a time a lot of communities have the timing and then the election is afterwards and you know but anyway all right let's just pick a day here somebody so that we can um get the thing written up for review on the 14th
what would you think we should have a day in the bible you said may 30. i would say starting later than may 30th or june 29 sounds weird does 20 days off september april sorry 29 sounds weird 30 is a nice round number i was going to say the 25th i don't know it's not a prime number
respectable number all right so if you can do that that to me financial articles it should be very quick do do do okay so are there any are there any other articles people are thinking that you know we need so we have three that i see that we're going to look at on the um 14th yes i wonder if we're in a position to talk about uh transferred care and custody of the uh so-called uh holiday road parcel from the school committee to the school so favor do you want to answer that or do you want me to just say this being a little picky so the way the agenda is written okay the way the agenda is written with with with a focus on certain articles and that's it so my recommendation is at our next agenda we include a more overriding language including all all potential articles are going to propose articles yes sir because the only thing is on next next item we're voting those because that's our last day to put them in unless we're planning on meeting again on the 15th which we don't have to post before the 14th so all articles have to be in on the 15th january we can't have a proposed conversation on the 14th my point is that i'm i'm concerned about our board talking tonight right other potential articles or other articles because the agenda doesn't really unless i'm being conservative here unless yeah yeah yeah let me see it doesn't work it's annual child meeting etm that could include that can i'm going to conclude all the articles but this thing yeah i'm just picky about this that's i know okay um so to answer your question there has been some i didn't think that's what you were going to say kind of a different answer um we've had some discussion about that and i don't know that we're quite ready uh uh to put an article and i think we were thinking we might want to like have some discussion during the year and maybe come up with a plan wasn't that a long time full-time meeting isn't it that's a long time between now and tell me we can submit an article right it's a longer time until the next time exactly and you're talking about this now so now i got a problem um that's made fun so hey carol i'm uh i'm gonna get off now um i'm glad we got it covered okay thank you we'll see you see you in your turn so let them uh the fan is leaving at um 8 45 8 35 35. um the long and the short of it is there was no article uh put together because we had another plan in place i thought okay but we'll put it together for the 14th how's that sound all righty um i'm gonna have to do the rest of this on under
reports and concerns okay let us go back are we all set on that then in pretty good shape yep let's go back now and talk about um you know let me just do it real quick let's do number nine annual discussion and review of legal representation that's a five minute agenda item while we're here we'll get it done so as everybody knows should know you have not um this is one of our round two at topics that just seems to get pushed aside all the time i had space in this agenda so i wanted to when i have space i'm trying to grab some of these other ones and kind of clean up more of those things that we've had hanging around as you know we have not um looked at this for a while but i think that michael and thinks that we should do some kind of um if he was here he would speak and maybe he gave kelsey note on this to speak but um did you get one yeah just a little bit yeah um so the i believe the last time we tried to issue or did issue an rfi for a response was september october of last year 2024 and we did receive three responses from three law firms kp lobbying one of them and two other ones that names eluded me um and it has been over a year so if we do want to move forward with uh doing the process again um that wouldn't be an issue but we would have to just reissue and reach out to um the other law the law firms that we reached out to in the previous year and give them the new documents so i'm sure you know funds have changed costs for things have changed um so we would have to update the rfi the request for information or the request for qualifications um legal representation is is exempt from uh 30b um so it wouldn't be as robust as most of our normal goods and services procurements but um that is something that michael and i could start the process on but it would be a process it would at least be a another month or two before we would get any results and bring that be able to bring that to either a liaison from the board that will work with us to review them or bring them to the full board and have a full discussion of the results that we received like i said this sort of has fallen through the cracks several rounds um i do think that um when i spoke with um michael he sort of indicated that we should probably i don't doesn't say we can take a vote although we can vote on any topic that says it at the top of the agenda i'm looking at you mr president that we should probably and i'm not really sure we have to end the vote but i think we should have a consensus of the board at least that we would stay with katie law as our legal representative so maybe through june 30th and in the meantime we can figure out what our next step is going to be do we want to have this rfi issued and you know go through the process do we want to look at what would we like to do so let's just put it back out there to get this topic started do you think it would create any type of hard feelings or animosity just by putting an rfi out with kp lar not at all i think it's our responsibility to kind of understand what the law firms are out there what what their hourly rates are what service they would provide we did that over a year ago i would just ask this that's courtesy of these firms that that we have a schedule set in place now this will be the date the rfi will be issued this will be the date that responsible will come in and this is the date that you'll be invited to come to the to the board to meet with us to talk about um your submission and then this will be the date that the board will make a decision by to uh on legal representation that's all that's all i have to ask well i would do that i mean i'm willing to do that that's my chart yes and i agree with tom fay uh with mr fay sorry um that i believe that that's fair because they did work hard on their submissions three law firms did and you know michael followed up with them but you know giving them a a good yeah halfway forward i think is important and i know things come up yes always come up if you have a schedule then you know it's in the it's in account right so i'm reading this is what of course we're thinking alike of course i'm thinking that we should probably commit to stay with kp law for the years because now we're because we're responsible for going and uh hiring engaging uh town council and then we have this issued and we're going to be going into you know may and june so by then that's probably when they come through and then we'd be able to look at that and perhaps maybe make a decision if not in june by a time we have our annual objective setting discussion and that might be a good time to put that little discussion into that day because that's part of the things we do so that's what i was thinking but so so can we have a sense of the board or do we want to take a vote that we would stay i don't need a vote that's that plan sounds good to me okay that's messy okay yeah so let me report that because he was a little bit concerned because we're doing and then um and kelsey you'll make a note here too that's our plan so i mean okay great all right now let's move on now to i think we skipped um number six which actually is our objectives that we put together during the packet we put these together last july and um it would be a really good idea for us to go back and take a look at the i did a really general uh and i labeled it as author cm on the bottom so we know it was my document i took what we had the five um objectives and then put down things that i felt were progress i'm sure we can all listen more i did not go back to every agenda to see everything we did but i wanted to just kind of go through this so so on this continued implementation of the effective governance um the things we have done obviously we've developed and distributed a blueprint to streamline the atm warrant i will tell you today i received email from the chair of the cpc they're going to be voting their articles on wednesday and they're going to put in two articles one would be the transfers and the other fabrics looking chart really sorry it's um they're going to have two articles this year like we had suggested on the streamlining so that's one thing there's another thing so they have to vote it but it's like we're going to have two articles instead of six or seven now so that's pretty good um we developed and we're implementing this expanded advisory committee charges oh that's good i got that twice it's very expanded um and i just had down on this one um some next steps would be um to obviously try to get the warrant to a maximum of 100 pages and then um now this this is kind of where our objectives overlap with michael's and he'll be talking about his objectives when we you know he you know we look at his review but because he engaged the collins center and he's in the process of reviewing and implementing some of their their recommendations there's one he's already put into place is to reorder the hr department they are looking at different things like um hopefully payroll and we're doing some work on i.t but they didn't really things that we did or we've been directly involved in so i didn't put them on the list but they are part of this streamlining so does anybody have any comments on number one if they think we're doing a good job there or all right we got a gold star on that one okay i want to see if you were paying attention so the second one was advanced the creation of the affordable housing for the production plan with emphasis on possible projects including 212. obviously we've established the committee and we're going to be waiting for the the report from the committee which i think is it's going to ask you when do you think you're going to have that ready way 15 is when it's due that way 15. okay we're meeting on the 9th it's really kind of a full night i think and then i think after that not till the 24th i would note that mr fay is the the taskmaster scheduling several long meetings uh which have been actually very illuminating speak to people in this area so i think one could go beyond to say establishment is actively working to prepare its recommendation by 414. how does 223 sound great terrific right
so i did not and and i'm so happy to hear having long meetings because i don't want to be the only one um bill attend everyone and bill attend except one later this week okay i did not put on here you know anything else like seeing the ends and stuff but i know we've been kind of following that that was kind of from last year but does anybody have anything else they want to add to this one is there anything to be said about town center yeah i don't know what um sales occurred and the new owners we haven't come and whatever they plan you haven't come in and talk to us do you think or that would you what would you think would be a good next step i i i'm not really seeing much housing being developed at town center at this point if raytheon changed its position relative to housing over there then i would see potential housing but until raytheon changes position i don't see much housing but to your question and cheer up um i think that'd be great to have the new owners if they want to come in and chat with us and talk to us about for number three pardon me for economic development yes number three right excuse me we're on number two i know with that question i think i think uh so you think i've got the right answer here for number two yeah well i guess my question is do we want to acknowledge somehow the goal included town center if we don't think that's going to happen we want to set forth an explanation or i see i see i got you in other words mention the fact that oh because it did say with a change of ownership yeah or we could talk about raytheon we'll talk about the mta statue because that really was that's really the impetus that that gives the ability to do some significant uh building of housing at a town center right it's kind of like a chicken and an egg because the mdta's uh statue was the impetus but then we've got this raytheon issue so then i'm gonna chicken and an egg here not that it would be all affordable no right it would be small small percentage but but maybe actually when we do this maybe we need to make this a little broader i mean we specifically knew we wanted to work on 212 and you know i applaud us because we hold in on that we established a committee and we're getting that progress done right yeah uh you know maybe next year's would say something like the holiday road project you know is there anything to be said about the former mahoney site i don't know um if much progress has been made there does anybody know you don't do no we don't know the answer to that but i'm gonna write that down all right so now on number three this is one um this is the one by the way all of them i think we have done at the least amount on and that um but we have it in our head um about this do some measurable progress on the route 20 corridor um we did draft the charge we did review it um we are going to be having a joint meeting with the planning board it is on february nine right there february nine that's right yeah they'll be coming in to talk to us they'll be coming in to talk to us about their zoning articles and then they'll be talking about uh we were talking about uh there's some of those reports and see if you know what we think we should do how we should do it that kind of thing and um then i have down here continued discussions with town center we've gotten development opportunities but should we raise the issue with them about what we heard about tonight that's not until february nine i think we i mean we can talk about it on our own but then that could well i think i think we probably will have a number of topics because um you know and i think bill's working with um the chair to come up with some topics to talk on that moment yeah i think that's a good question too unfortunately maybe we need to look at that um because we have so few different meetings together back on a lot i'm sorry we have so few different meetings i think we have a lot to talk about with them which is great i really you know i i think we it doesn't there's no place to put it here but i think we have done an awful lot of gathering of input rather than from you know joint meetings and we've done a lot of gathering of input from you know the forums we hold so um all right everybody's good with that uh identify the financial constraints here you know um i think we spent a lot of time this fall on some financial issues and i think we have a greater understanding of um our financial picture i like that brian's coming in to seeing us pretty regularly and michael gives us these kinds of updates in these slides so that we have this information um i did mention earlier we've established this capital planning and improvement committee and they are just about ready with the report and i ideally the time frame is a little bit off because ideally we'd like them to have their report done you know by for december but since they only got established in the middle of august i think they've done a terrific job and the next step there is to have them come in and speak to us but um and then michael as you know engaged um the on-site insight folks we have completed our report which is outlining the needs and the maintenance requirements of our town facilities i think the report i haven't looked at it is quite large and um um very detailed i think in spaces and so we need to to understand specifically what needs to be done in this building you've got to pull it out and maybe someone will do that for us so anybody have anything else on this one okay and then finally the last one i think i mean because i'm going to ask you to help me on this on these uh policies um so we've adopted a social media policy electric vehicle first we have adopted a payment of lower taxes which is the pilot policies we've amended the non-union employee vacation policy we've endorsed a civil interaction policy within the town building and via town email and am i missing any you also do have finance or financial policies yeah i noticed i missed that and we implemented we finalized those financial policies that's a huge amount of work so thank you i think i was in my first one i don't want to do it um surprise madam chair that you are all people i know i think i dumped it all so anyway and then i just took this little blurb on the on that was on the top of our objectives and put it on the bottom you know that we do work um our overriding guiding principles here it was being a wonderful um so do everybody think we're doing pretty good on this do you think what's any next steps so you know know what to schedule no have i missed any policies kelsey i thought you did more than this because remember them all seem like you did this i don't remember and that looks like good list to me yeah that's right yeah you know i mean the thing is we identified the ones but in the time we identified them we said we may end up doing something else which is what we did the formalizing of the financial policy probably a job that probably should have taken about a good couple years by itself and we got that done pretty quickly and we really have to laud michael and the staff for doing that so okay um i think the next item on the um good job everybody by the way on all of that number seven is um if you and the stormwater tracking so tom will probably remember this because louise was the one that brought it to our attention um we have a way to get permit and we have 10 years to go ahead um the stormwater asset management plan yeah so oh i know what i want to say first so the capital planning asset planning committee was that in the we are funding stormwater repairs infrastructure changes whatever updates in the unclassified the select board oversees the unclassified project so the capital planning and booming committee did say the select board really should take you know like a gut check if you will to ensure that we're financing and appropriating enough money every year so that by the end of the i think 10 years 37 38 when we have to have all this in place we don't end up with something we're like oh oh we've got two years and now we've got to put in you know eight ten million a year versus having done it as we go along so um i asked michael about it and and he and kelsey spoke with tom holder but i will tell you that in the consent calendar tonight the grant that's in the consent calendar actually ties to the capital project that we approved last spring which basically is going to have the town create a stormwater asset management comprehensive plant and this will tell us how much we have to pay so now i'll turn it over to kelsey to fill in all the gaps that i've got um so briefly currently and i'm just looking at it right now currently there are stormwater management plans on the dpw section of our town website um so we have a stormwater management program um but uh as far as i know the stormwater asset management plan is going to be developed using this grant money to move forward but there are pieces of the stormwater management plan um that are being implemented by the department of public works and that information is on our website under the dpw section of the website yeah so i think the other thing is that many communities this is what you'll remember when louise spoke to us initially was they end up implementing a stormwater fee so that the funding is there to take care of all of these um and so we went as this plan comes through that will come back to us i'm just sort of getting this on our radar screen here um that will come back to us once we determine what needs to be done and the costs that need to be done and the time frame they need to be done we may have to look at how you know we have to look at the funding how are we going to fund this and how are we going to achieve this these goals and so we may end up may may end up a fee the fee is assessed on your impervious surface right yes services yes so your driveway um that kind of thing so and i think other communities have it but so far we've avoided doing it and they seem to be just i can i can add um a colleague of ours in the uh building lives in a town that uh uses storm water and i believe that person has about an acre of land and they are assessed about six hundred dollars a year for uh for storm water i love storm water well i'll say yeah it sounds like a year that's specific every year yes and that is for a 10-year period of of of destructing the i mean the the person that i'm referencing has a has a a fairly large sized house and a pretty large barn so i believe that the offset because of the print of those two buildings i'm i'm guesstimating here because i'm going off of very limited information that was just kind of told to me offhand but um that person is assessed six hundred dollars a year for them in that specific town that's very steve the dpw said is the annual water bill for a valent resident hence when the cpc mentioned this i said to myself let's get this before our board the board so that we're on our like i said on our radar because we don't want to get in year seven and find out we've got to assess a huge fee let's find out you know in the next year or so what we need to achieve this goal so that was mine by the way i heard it i said oh god we're going to look into this so all right anybody have any comments on this i'll sit you're good all right all righty so let's now i think we're on the town managers report so i certainly think um assistant town managers he's going to give us a tell me this is useful thank you madam chair um so uh uh uh late late um in december uh police chief edward burman uh tendered his uh retirement that's the right way to say it but he put in his retirement and retired from wayland for serving three and a half years out of a 32 year law per uh 32 year career with law enforcement um and as of right now uh lieutenant mark hebert is the acting police chief he has uh been a proud member of the department for 17 years he holds um bachelor's and master's degree in criminal justice and is a recipient of the fbi leader trilogy award um which is uh training uh law enforcement training um standards with uh supervisor command and executive leadership institutes um so uh the formal swearing in for um the acting chief will be on january 20th um and a recap since the last meeting um i know some people are interested in to as to what happened to fire station two um a couple of about a week ago uh while backing out with responding to a call uh a fire truck had uh caught something as it was backing out of the uh building and accidentally damaged the wall between the two uh garage doors which um unfortunately damaged it enough that it made it um destabilized so uh right now we are working through emergency procurement to shore that up and progress has been made you probably saw um there's two uh boards that are covering up the garage bay doors now um so temporary emergency work has been done and almost completed on that and we are working on the emergency procurement to actually fix that um in its totality um and that is ongoing and we're hoping to uh start that process for the next week or two so we can finish that um and the last thing is that michael had his office hours on december 29th which was well that's it that's it okay does anyone have any questions for let's see no okay let's move to consent on the consent is in this area has been amended to add in something so it's in the supplemental packet then move the consent calendar as amended within our supplemental packets on january 5th 2026. i would ask that item one be considered separately all items except items one item one what items are we doing and two a b and c two number a b and c two a b and c okay let's have um uh some further discussion let's have a vote on the consent calendar as all those in favor aye aye all right okay so that passes now we're going to go back to number one i have two questions one one is uh what is the source of the towns match which is 24 000 memory and the second question is uh when you look at the schedule of disbursement it is small amounts over a protracted period of time and i'm curious about that i can answer the question because it's back here on this thing i was referring to earlier so the town had to total projects 206 950 and the town had to you know vote to appropriate the whole the whole amount with the intent they would apply for the grant we have received the grant and the grant is the 124 so the balance which is about 70 000 is being funded by um free catch we won 390 and then there's the disbursement schedule for the grant goes from december 2025 until july of 2027. it seems like a awful long time to do a plan um is that how they do it from look into that provide an answer to you after speaking with michael and where um tom tom holder they need that sign though don't we need it signed by a certain day i believe i think at all to be signed tomorrow or whatever this one this grant approval came in in between our you know december 15 meeting and now so it's been a couple weeks since we i think it came very close to them so you know this could be one of those situations like where brian says and i'm speculating here you know we funded the project and then as we get reimbursed the money just goes into back into the general fund i believe that's all over i'm just looking to see on the deadline that i can't find that's great we got the grant does that sound okay i guess we don't have an answer well i don't know the answer but i do know i did give you the funding the funding sources were free cashed and that's less cash it also might be helpful at the same time to learn what the expected total cost will be for this program over the many years that it'll be administered not the not the study but not the plan but the but the implementation which i suppose is why we're having to develop a plan right to determine what total cost will be is that the purpose of this just develop a plan and then find out the cost i think it is but i'd be curious you know based on other communities where there's some sort of a ballpark figure you can appreciate this time it's not not so good i'm looking to that providing it's good if um um
what happens if we have to sign a grant before that we do some type of contingent yeah i think that would be a better move because i think this came in um like i don't know does it say the date it was around june december december 15th as the letter was dated yeah so we met on the 15th but of course it had come in that day so we put it in for today so i think we have to uh use at least 30 days nelson i since this wasn't i hate to plead that to me so i i i would motion be in order to authorize the town manager decks understanding that in such case uh a report would be rendered to the board addressing some of these questions and the alternative uh perhaps we could consider it a future meeting but that sounds like a good idea any further discussion okay all those in favor say aye some passes for and then well i have it on the um my list to follow up here well okay so that i think brings us now two minutes i've got two edits so for around the minutes of december 15th yeah do we have a a motion on us or do you want to wait and do a moment in both okay so december 15th yep a5
in the paragraph that says d levine moved seconded by c martin to appoint d williams to the personnel board this says to the personnel okay i don't think c martin can make sense you seconded it i think i can't even second i don't think so i don't i don't think i did that but we'll leave it be because and then in the last paragraph of that section after it says economic development committee strike the word in like the word what in i am i don't see that oh i'm in the right now yeah all right anybody else have anything i have one on a9 it says um at 722 the board of public works called this meeting's order uh mike wagerbauer called the board of public works to order
and then on the top the first sentence on the top of page four mike wagerbauer noted he met with the dls actually i think he met with the dor on a9 uh there are references to the mwra project and i wonder if it would be better to uh talk about the mwra slash uh happy hollow project or something because the 32 million pertains to the combined project rather than there's several references to uh you know which is reasonable shorthand but we probably refer to it that way which is why it's probably showed up this way but that's a good point i mean that's what it is any more edits all right i don't see any more how about if we move to the 19th the 19th so in the very top it says and brinsley participating woman i think i have to put in parentheses the 11 12 am there so that's when she came in
anybody else have anything i have one on a5 um after we talked about the policy it said there was a discussion about implementing the policy right and the solution was that the board authorized doug and myself to work with the town manager to implement the the pilot pilot well policy outreach i guess then i made that other suggestions yeah right i moved that the board approve its minutes from december 15th and 19th was amended every second thank you any further discussion okay all those in favor say all right all right okay motion passes four zero uh correspondence any comments on correspondence otherwise we will move i'm sorry yes don we've had correspondence concerning the the uh eritas project and correspondence relative to the rice road project bottom of the copic church and i want to commend the uh residents who came in tonight with constructive ideas to basically have a discussion and in my view better understanding by everybody on what the law is what the process is um on projects like these and whether they be governed by the dover amendment or not so i do wonder whether it makes sense for our board to talk about that at the future meeting the idea of a task force the idea of a public forum or maybe town council will be present maybe members of the plant planning board maybe members of the concom um to talk about these issues but that that's all i have anybody else have anything on correspondence um i'm actually going to sneak one in here because i didn't get to tell me to let me sneak a man elsewhere we got the last meeting we authorized michael on our behalf to refer the planning board articles back to the planning board rather than wait you know so we got them in january and they would do at the end of january thereby picking up a whole month of the process and hopefully we'll end up with reports you know before the wall goes to us and so he sent an email um to us and the four articles that they're looking at is a um a general housekeeping item one regarding adus one regarding mbta multi-family's and then they have a hmm i want about solar ground mounted solar installations now i don't know anything about them or what they entail i'm just mentioning those will be four articles we will see on the list that are coming forth okay oh slight that one thank you um now let's do reports and concerns all right sure continue on my comments i appreciated the chair's comment during public comment uh about people's people's need to respect both residents and town staff and in particular i'd like to commend you know bbw dr tom holder who i deal with quite a bit on different projects in town and i found tom holder be extremely forthright individual who works hard to solve problems people may not like the answers but they need to appreciate his hard work his extensive knowledge um i hope people keep that in mind the only other thought i have is this may be a bigger project than that we could pull off and that is whether q a questions and answers on the global issue of the dollar amendment might be helpful for uh to place in the town website for people appreciate
rights of property owners and uh rely on that uh can you say anything that would be helpful if you have a question and answer section on the town website on the topic of the dover amendment what what it permits property owners to do under the law when you said that um i think it would be helpful for confirmation that those property owners that rely on the dover amendment are complying with their applications and their pump and their permits and not going beyond it because there have been communities that have successfully fought against developers who rely on the dover amendment where those developers and property owners have not abided by um spirit and uh other statute in in permits that were granted so i think it's worth uh for us to to look at that and in this case relative to gravitas and uh in particular i'm having a hard time hearing you over the fence but the fan so it's be a q a on the web page with rights of the property owners that's what i've got okay it's just an idea i'm not saying i'm recommending it but just something to to consider it may help the town staff um are you all set uh two things one uh to your point uh the noise of the air conditioning or the mechanical system here uh has prevented me from hearing you madam chair several times during the meeting and i would suggest we either uh find a way to address that and if that's not possible uh seek uh ways to amplify our own voices so we can hear one another and the alternative and this is a suggestion you won't like i think we should consider moving back to the the former uh coa space because uh we can't hear one another and how can members of the public who are here so that's number one number two is uh we had an extended discussion at a prior meeting about the mwra and uh happy hollow financing and we had a conversation with the finance manager that ended up in a way that i found confusing um so i'm i'm just trying to understand whether it is the sense of the board that what is being proposed is the uh bond uh seeking town meeting authorization to borrow 32 million dollars that he paid from the water fund period as opposed to a geo bond uh money transferring from the water fund to the general fund and so forth uh so i
i am i i think that's the sense of the board but i just uh would appreciate validating or refuting that sense clarification of what we voted or clarification of what clients what we voted i think is reflecting the minutes which is that the ultimate that the source of the repayment should be from the water fund i think that that gets issued was the topic of discussion of at least a couple of alternatives
i think what we voted i'm allowed to hop in here but no i'm going on my list so i i would express that i think it was helpful to hear from the residents tonight uh some of us may have been hearing from various residents individually on the three ongoing uh dover amendment projects including coptic church the veritas school and the carol school and um folks are asking where the select board can weigh in here and so i think it might be helpful uh as requested but i would like to do it anyway is to have a discussion among the select board with michael and kelsey and then if needed be able to consult with somebody from kp law as well um what is always helpful for me having served on this board before and served in various roles in state government is hearing how other municipalities have potentially handled some of these issues um we can all do research online but especially a firm like kp law which works with over a hundred municipalities it might be nice to hear some of their feedback so some of the lessons we can take and potentially implement here at all um okay so the schedule has moved around a couple times so you're going to hear it's it from the 14th it is remote 100 at 11 a.m okay um we were having to do something and then that we got that move okay um that's going to be a i anticipated to be a short meeting um i am also concerned about this um i gotta find out get some information i'll put my heads together with michael on this this appeal concept i want to talk to i'm sorry i can't agree i'm sorry i want to put my head together with michael about what we talked about about this still amendment and the appeal process is this something that we have in our toolkit or is this something we need an article for um is this something that um we should discuss on the 14th i don't i i don't know if we have enough time to put it together but let's even get the law and all whatever to come up with i think katie law has a way to in on this right i mean we're not talking about you can't talk to me now you can't talk to me now you can call me up and we'll get home okay so i just i'm going to try and do something with that maybe on the on the 14th for everybody and then see what we can do about this holiday road article as well um because you have to have the article done by the 15th yes we have to turn our notes we want to meet in the 15th as well all right in the packet and then i think you got an email and it's posted online the february schedule you're going to see like for two weeks together the second and the ninth and i did that so that we would not be meeting during the february school vacation that's why it's like that if you want to have the every other let me know and we will but but i figured we wanted to have the school vacation off that's why we have the two weeks together it's a bunch of meetings here blah blah blah all right those 6 30 meetings i don't know what time those are going to be uh i'm the 20th maybe earlier because we've got a lot on there as usual we're back to very full so um i was also going to mention that i've noticed that by speaking to my leaders now before they put the articles in and they're sending them to me and i'm looking at them i'm able to say you know maybe we don't need quite much this you know get some streamlining going here if you haven't reached out to your liaisons i would recommend maybe you have a go reach out to them see if there are any articles i will say this i also saw the article from board of public arts is putting in extremely well written is very concise and this is a major thing we're going to go on so if we can make that concise we should be able to get them all concise that's all anyway um and other than that i don't think i have any any other issues oh yes i'm sure i'm very sorry to ask this but on the consent calendar for the item regarding the grant clarify the vote again for me the vote is that if it needs to be signed yes before we have the meeting on the 14th that we authorized michael to do so however with the stipulation that we would like the information that we requested on the 14th well yes okay and if not if we can wait to the 14th fine but somehow in my mind i thought that had to get back out by the i thought it had to be out this week so if i'm scheduling madam chair the 14th we only have one meeting or two from the 14th i don't come over here in one i i have it at 6 30 you said 11 right now it's seven there's always 11 yeah day day meeting okay 11 o'clock zoom mode no six i'll see thank you so that's yeah i wanted to just have these little ones quick remote that will then you know coming in so all right it's all set so with that and let's have a motion to adjourn please 924 925 thank you no move thank you all right let's have a vote all those in favor all right thank you very much for your time everyone thank you recording stop