July 6, 2026 – Capital Improvement Planning Committee – Video & Transcript
July 6, 2026 - Capital Improvement Planning Committee
We will start a meeting dated July 6th, 2026 at 530. And it is in the town building. And I don't know if we have anybody remote or not.
But it is available on the morning. So it is a hybrid meeting.
Okay, it is a hybrid meeting. As I mentioned, before we started, Kirstie and Patterson may be able to join us at some point.
Ex officio.
This meeting is being recorded. And if it's recorded, it will be made available to the public on WACAM as soon as possible after the meeting. The public will be excluded from any executive sessions. Pursuant to Chapter 2 of the Act of 2025, this meeting will be conducted in person and or via remote access in accordance with the law. If this meeting only has remote access, no in-person attendance by members or the public will be permitted. If this meeting has remote access, one may watch or participate remotely with the meeting that can be found on site on the site. 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 in person or remote as applicable. Public comment should be limited to 2 minutes per person, and I know Ms. Martin, if you'd like to sit closer at the table, you're welcome to do so. Thank you. Thank you. Well, your chair. I want to let Brian into all the answering of the questions. Oh, it's nice to show up. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So, review the agenda. 530 was called to order. 535, public comment and members' response. 540, we'll discuss capital planning process and the timeline with ex officio CIPC members, including the town manager, finance director, and department managers as available. Discussions will include, but not be limited to, a comparison of the five-year plan and the annual town meeting warrant versus the CIPC's fiscal 2027 through fiscal 2031 report as amended to April 29, 2026 and related questions, feedback on the draft capital improvement plan, submission form, and outstanding capital project status. At 650, we'll discuss the use of transcription tools to produce future meeting minutes. 7.05, discuss succession planning, CIPC chair, vice chair roles, finance, and school committee designees. 7.20, review and vote to approve minutes of June 24, 2026. 7.25, setting time of the next meeting. 7.30, adjourn. 8 o'clock, World Cup game. 7.30, adjourn. 8 hitty. 4.30, adjourn. 7.30, adjourn. 8 o'clock,now YEAH. 8 o'clock, COVID-19. 8 o'clock, Monday, half of the week. 8 o'clock, March into October of 29. 8.65, Friday, last year. 8 o'clock. 8 o'clock, Kubernetes. 9.30, faucet, Monday night. 9 o'clock, échanges Oracle, heure'clock, Monday night. 9Coup Pegas, Monday. 9 o'clock, Monday, Thursday,8 o'clock, Friday of the week, to 10. 5. ontядes. 9 o'clock, Monday night. 9 o'clock, Sunday night. 10 o'clock, Sunday night. 10 o'clock, Sunday night. oh no he's right now analysis us us too and then the and he is his way cam and carol right one thing even though there's no member remote you may as well just mention which part committee members are here present yes in person uh in person um myself uh john klein uh brian excuse me early and kelly lapin are here in person so the next item on the agenda is uh to discuss the capital planning process and timeline uh with ex officio cipc members uh and actually kelly i would like some assistance here just in terms of uh carrying on the conversation and uh some of the some of the substantive aspects of it yeah there's there's a few and a few items in here and we can go in whatever order you guys want to go in i think there is still some follow-up michael from the last time you joined us on questions on differences between cipc's report and the ultimate recommendation that went to town meeting and we we tended to we tried not to fixate on every difference but on differences where we had gotten a different indication of either that project wasn't needed any more or was needed in a different time um so i'll start there is there any update on those questions that we discussed there was some follow-up when we left the last meeting i don't have an update this evening part of the biggest problem is those of us overlapping not being in the office at the same time um and we've had a couple of issues that have come up capital and otherwise in it but i think facilities that we've had to attend to so it really has provided itself to it but i can um work to get those back to you do you have a expectation of when i think that's critical to starting the process so i i one of the things that brian and i in the limited time we did have we're working on some of the issues really that are operating budget related due to override uh collective bargaining but we did talk a little bit about timeline about sending out to the department heads the capital requests so one of the things we want to do is do that this week and we wanted to have this conversation about formed okay um in terms of i know michael worked on some of his projects we have some people here i'm working with uh dick lombardi upstairs on some of his needs so we'll we have enough to i think to keep it busy discussing this okay all right so if you could just i'm no longer chair brad's acting chair at the moment if you can get back to him and let him know the expectation moment we'll see that because i do think that's a critical right because you're a step to have your recommendation in october so the idea would be is where in the first full week of july have people getting back their requests by the end of the month so that you have august september exactly yeah and to the extent when they send those requests back right some of those discrepancies are resolved fine but i think that if they're not right those are open questions that need to be resolved before the before we move forward yeah depending on what gets sent out i populated it your collective request at the last meeting individual cip excel workbooks for each department manager and i populated with the amounts that appeared in the five-year capital plan that appeared in the warrant and so to the extent that a number of our questions centered around um geez we were told this item wasn't needed i will assume that when department heads get their assuming to send out the excel workbooks and they see a tab for an item that they told us last year that's no longer needed despite the fact that it's in the five-year plan that the department manager will say this this item is no longer needed yeah that's that's one one one way it's one way to dispose of a good yeah number of the questions um so i think it would be i agree with you brian i think it would be helpful for the department managers if you have a list of questions by by side when you're doing it to be able to be like oh yeah that's i remember this so just to to bring up the at this point in time we said it was this and then later it changed or vice versa just so that they're they can be refreshed on on the fact there was a discrepancy but i agree with you when they get the the final what went into town meeting they'll be starting from that point they'll be able to address whether they still need something or not all right so why don't we move on then based on that to the capital improvement um cip submission form and i sent it to brian and michael mccall i don't know that you sent it did you send it on to any of the department managers no just brian and i we're trying to discuss is there any way to i have i can i have some copies too i sent to you june 29th yeah probably thanks i have some copies it's great it might be helpful for the public yeah i'll put it up on screen but you have it on screen and i apologize the second page i ellie did you do anything with the pre-populated i didn't send that version because we hadn't you had asked us to review it and when i was sending it it wasn't no um no so let me get this up on screen but you can bring up one of those if you have it easy enough because it has the template in it but yeah you just people could see what the tabs look like maybe it's going to take me a minute i got to get on first sorry it's not working but yeah can you share the um the one that brian said that's not all the tabs in it okay
this is a zip file and then it's a zip file the open one for facilities since michael pay is here yeah so while while john's doing that i'll kind of walk through what our thought process was so there's really two tabs in the in the file to start with one of them is sort of a general question it's not meant to have a tab for every project it's meant to be more for uh two things quality control on how many projects do you have in each year in the five-year plan to make sure that we've got everything because we've definitely had problems in the past where we've gotten some submissions at all of them so that's a good check the other is from a long range so beyond the five years um this was intended not to be every single project needed beyond the five years but michael especially in your case like hey we got five years but in year 10 there's a looming project and i want to make mention of it right so that there's awareness of that beyond the five-year period and start towards a longer range plan than five years but we know we're not going to have like listing out years five to ten it's more for the what one of the things that we should be thinking about and have on the horizon um that we're thinking so that's just one tab that's the first page of what i passed out yeah yeah it's the first tab you were just talking about yeah and then after that the the next tab is getting similar to the old cip form but we tried to take out some of the things that never got filled out that really weren't necessarily something the department manager would know right um and so they weren't going to fill it out um and focus on the things that we tended to end up asking each of the department managers in our meetings so that you know perhaps that could that could get reported out at the beginning and not have to be you know the subject of a lengthy meeting um and the goal so that's to the next two pages i do apologize that i printed this and um it's a lot smaller than i intended it to be so it can be made bigger if it's printed um brian has started brian early he started to go through process of taking everything that was in the request the town meeting and creating a tab for each of those projects so that the existing five-year plan will be available to the department managers as a full workbook and then i'm working on making it so that that whatever you populate summarizes back to your summary of all your projects and spend by year so that it creates that end product um file that that we've used in the past and so i think the goal tonight was to walk through the questions and talk about what's you know is that feasible not feasible hey that question doesn't really work for these things we shouldn't have it on here right the goal is not to have a form that doesn't apply or isn't going to get filled out the goal is to make sure we're getting asking for information that we can get right and avoid the back and forth and lengthy meetings on stuff that you know could be could be completed outside of of evening meetings so with that i think we can just probably stop start from the top and walk down and pause feel free to jump in and pause where we have issues yep one more yeah so idea being first first is project name department name and department manager name would pull in from that first tab because it'll it'll automatically populate in every thing that you open so you don't have to keep filling it out um and then to the extent project manager is someone different than the department manager that would be filled out boards and committees to approve isn't going to apply in every situation but some people have that um some don't and then included in the prior capital plan so when we populate this it'll be yes for everything that's pre-populated and anything new you want to add you would just copy that template tab and create a new project but it should be no for anything new right that wasn't already in the five-year plan so that'll effectively be pre-ordained right um in the original file and then project category is something that finance committee always tried to separate the projects by and my experience over the years is that they weren't necessarily like a guest and sometimes it was right sometimes it wasn't um so that's probably the first place i'd pause and say is that something that's valuable helpful easy to to ascertain um and i'm particularly interested in you know carol as select board member if you think that's it because that's ultimately information we'd ended up putting in the warrant of like what kind of project is this so if you think it's valuable to be in the warrant that's why it's here if it's not right that's worth it um so the the the cell actually has a drop down and you can just pick from the numbers so in the comments where there's one two three four so one is building repair two as equipment no i think i'll jump ahead of the um project description and uh justification is that can be copied into the warrant what goes in that cell it it should be it might need to be edited but the goal would be that whatever is going there is that the base for what goes into the warrant is is that expandable yeah you can just drag the you can drag the row down to make it bigger yeah it can be made as big you just and i know can't see it right now but if you double click on the bottom of any row if it's not big enough and you just double click it'll make it as big as whatever you wrote in there i notice although i think it's helpful information to collect and the project category and it's historically been included in the warrant i don't see that it was included this year okay so yeah historically it was i mean off chance that the finance committee wants to include it going forward i would suggest that we collect that information and it shouldn't be too difficult to pick from one of six categories and like another you're probably going to get it right yeah okay okay any questions comments so far now can i just ask real high level just the the layout that brian used is similar to the one that i used in other community based only off of the dor's form this reads more vertically the other one has more horizontal just generally your layout did you pick a different format or are you just trying to get as much information i'm just why it's vertical versus in horizontal because when you go to automate how it spits back out into other reports it's a lot easier to automate things that run vertically than like hey pick a cell over here and pick a cell over here and one over here it's much easier to automate excel to create the summary report so i know historically we've done this all manually right it's all been manually typed into cells but it doesn't have to be that way it's it's easier in excel to automate when things run vertically i'm sure you can still get that data and i was just curious because i'm used to seeing see how the various the impact on the budgets i'm used to seeing the budgets go the headings being on the top and you know you know i'm saying yeah so it's just it's a different layout so no no i agree but the historically the cip form in wayland at least was only for year one well there are some columns for the different years two different things right there was a summary tab summary file where projects were listed and amounts were listed in the columns to the right but the actual cip form that had a project description and had more information in it was only filled out for the first year and that's the that that tab or that workbook was what was generally used historically to start what was put in the warrant over the years my experience was less and less of that form was getting filled out and more of it had to be filled in at the end stages of warrant production by the finance committee which is probably not the place it should be done just because it tends to get as we saw this past year things got mixed up ended up in the wrong place um they weren't accurate descriptions of of the project that was listed so my point michael is if you filled this out and you filled it out for a given project we can automate the production of the more typical here's the list of projects here's all the amounts and here's the years and if you change anything you can automate the like push the button and create the updated report but what we're missing from that summary which we found last year was okay after year one i don't know enough about these projects unless we sit down and talk about what they are right yeah so said add to that this cycle will be a bit more work because each department is going to be asked when you agree to complete one of these for any year in which a request is likely to be made when you get the next year obviously they'll have that all populated from this cycle we're coming up on and that can all be kind of brought forward amended um so i think it'll be a little bit more work but some of the descriptions are going to you might describe you know high school windows one year and then you have it three years later just required windows so you're going to have basically the same description cut and paste yeah so the hope here too was for projects that are multi-phase that we're seeing each phase so you know the fiscal year listed is the year that you're going to town meeting asking for the money but it's actually part of you know a three-part five-part project uh town building roof so we're seeing the whole right the whole project from soup to nuts hopefully um and understanding that all in one place rather than i've got some some piece of it over here some piece over here and some piece you know out five years from now so that was part of the goal of doing it this way and that for example use roads tom doesn't need to fill out five forms for roads it's the same project right being requested in five fiscal years he can fill it out once and then that also helps make sure you've got consistent um description across right across the years is there and i can't see at the bottom is there a tab that says um project and then the word multiple or yeah there's any of them yep this next one they click that one this should be an example where whatever the description of the project is who's requesting money the facilities budget in two different years that's so it's vehicles for michael's department yes we'll go back up i need to keep going i'm sorry so rather than having a complete two forms you just you're going to have same amounts and the description will just indicate that it's for a similar project or vehicle whatever it is over multiple years make it a bit more efficient since we're asking for more information it's a little later on but you want to hit it now kelly in terms of the uh when you have a multiple you have multiple requests over fiscal years for a similar project what happens when you have to rank the project oh well i'll wait to get to yeah we can wait to get there you can still use this form for the rest of your discussion and brian from a early from a prior year appropriation were we able to populate that or no um i didn't go back and check okay um i don't think we had very many yeah i think last year we might have had like one it had an ongoing project that they needed more money for an example of that would be station two so first year would have had a cip had to go back to town meeting ask for more money had to go back third time ask for more money so the second time if you were filling one of these forms out you might populate the fact that there was money asked in prior years correct yeah because ultimately that is something we report we tried to report out at some meeting this isn't a new request it was a subsequent request and the reason it was a subsequent request was because things that got found changes go right along the way my guess is most only zeros yeah
how do you if you're now going to pre-populate the five-year plan not the joker value but if somebody already has something they want to move the year it's already in the plan so you'd have to say can just change they can just move it change the form so if it was the 5.4 in 2028 in the free populated they can move it down will they change it in your five year at the same time in theory yeah you'll re you'll reproduce the summary so we have a starting summary of what the right from the warrant of what it looked like we know what it looked like to start with we send these out they change it the ending summary which i'm working on we'll move it right that'll be um it'll spit out in the year that they moved it through and you'll be able to compare the year over year totals is there a master five year that these you're going to be if each department it goes in edits it's just like a you know google docs when you share a sheet everybody can come in so we're not we don't you guys don't you go you don't no i don't yeah you don't use google docs so we we can't do that right we have to give the way i envision it is we have to break it up and give each department their their tabs of their projects and they can only edit their projects and then when they bring them back very last right we can summarize the total for the town um by pulling them all back into the same file so what i did is there's two tabs in each workbook it's two identical tabs with one exception first the second last tab is the five-year plan detail that appeared in the warrant there's the warrant excerpt um and then below it is all the detailed projects sorted by department sorted by fiscal year right and i tried to group them uh in a way that um you know then i resorted that looking to try to again get to multiple similar projects over multiple years for able to prove us being the most logical one so this allowed me then to say okay that'll be one form for those first four projects if you look down at facilities on each separate workbook i have a return formula that is tied back to the individual form so the numbers and the forms come from this five-year detail any number that's changed in the cip forms in their workbook is going to come back and create a variance on this nothing to do with what you're talking about this is just an internal check so that when we get this back we'll immediately know where they go through all the tabs what's changed dollar-wise year-wise um and then any new tabs will be yeah the tabs are separate and then um surprise that and again what kelly's talking about is that once we get what we think are the submissions it's grabbing that data and creating the five-year of our talks with plan okay i'll ask one question yep brian this is a very simple answer but so on the road work that's an annual request they've already got the four in how do you add the fifth one in without reinventing the wheel did they just break there's a row for it can you do this um exactly the template or the first time the first project time just in the next year yeah any multiple tab there should be a uh fiscal 33 you can there's 32 is already on there and found free and after to the extent there's some of michael's projects extend beyond the ones so next year i could for example tom will take the same file yeah click on the same tab that same file will be in there and it just adds the next year yeah well because right now the way it's set up it's set up to populate the year based on um the general tab so if you flip to the general tab yep we haven't gotten to next year yet but we'll make it so it rolls yeah everything's for it a little everything that'll be a question that gets asked yeah i know just change that just show i don't have an enable disorder okay so if that does that change to 20 29 and the general tab it'll shift to you but we haven't gotten to rolling next year forward we're trying to do this next year um so if it's the tab that says uh 23 and after are you looking for a total like if i have yeah we had tom building in mind for that one right if you've got five depending on how we divide up that project i we envisioned right if we looked at last year we had like five years of individual requests and then there we hadn't gotten to the ultimate rest of the work that had to be done i'm envisioning that being like however many things that you have in your site right so if it was we're going to work on roots for five years and in the six year plus we've still got to do xyz and that's a million dollars you put the 10 million dollars in there it's just trying to keep the site of how much like we talked about last year how much are we spending right on this building and the more informed we are about the total spends right to work sure more informed decision the town can make about what whether to proceed with that or do something else absolutely yep at some point we get to the 10 year we start actually planning 10 years and it will be 10 years here right for now yeah i just wanted to make sure it was you were looking for a total number because if you break it out 23 to 30 you know what i mean yeah no just a total okay i don't think it's necessarily like for like roads where it's a repeat i think this is really oh yeah it's meant for a big project it's not everybody's going to need to do that right it's going to be for the big projects that are on the horizon um another example you have you know design money for a large capital project that happens to hit in in the fifth year and then the project is coming in the sixth year typically we wouldn't see that anywhere necessarily right that's more what i think we're after here but the bigger long-term projects probably be picked up partly by the description on the general tab right where you're going to identify things that are yeah probably 10 or 15 years yeah yeah this was more meant for for things that are continuation of spend that's in the first five years versus completely new projects so like the school if the schools were to proceed with you know building all new schools that's that's going to go on the first tab at this point right that's not ready for i don't think um yeah sort of general description not not detailed out yet any more questions on so far
so then operating budget impact um i'm going to use an example here kelly want to use the community center as an example of the kinds of things that would appear here hopefully yeah i think there's other examples but the the community center is a good one right where building a new community center meant there needed to be i think janitorial staff right that we didn't have before so detailing out what that cost is what staffing impact right if there's an additional maintenance cost at the home building right is there a cost that that's not factored in it's going to go on the operating budget it's just trying to identify that as a for awareness as a part of the capital project i think we've gotten somewhat better at that over the years but when the town voting on a project they should understand um in both directions operating budget impact in other cases there's been projects that were being done manually or with contracted right equipment we were renting and so the decision to buy a piece of equipment reduce the operating cost of um equipment rental right so it's it could go either way um but i think this has often been one of the sections in the old form that was not completed um and it won't apply to every project but there are some projects where it should be considered um and completed right for so that the town is fully informed yeah i'm sorry did you just indicate that there will when we have it there there there could be scenarios where there's decrease in operating costs so the high school septic system so there's going to be a decrease in the annual pumping so that would be the kind of thing that would show up here so you know net decrease
the useful life was you know again things like radios where we should be budgeting it for every four year cycle or whatever we want to do like this is so we don't appreciate it right this is where it would go at least we could see hey this should be repeating a 10-year plan was like that yeah and i think there's a lot of requests like that where we we don't agree yeah we don't adequately understand how often it's going to happen um and then we get a lot of well it's the end of useful life but we knew it was going to be end of useful life right sometimes we don't know sometimes it's software companies that say we're not supporting it anymore but often we know that it's going to have an end of useful life but we don't have it in the plan for the for the end of useful life so that's trying to help us get to you know does this does this need a repeat we didn't think to put it into a separate land but in the other category i would find it helpful for example if you knew that there's a warranty so if you have a roof done and they give you a 20-year warranty on it that'd be helpful to just put a note in you know 20-year warranty so again people can anticipate if something goes wrong
and i'm still hoping for the ones that have revenue we don't get that many of those this is probably so cool wishful thinking the minutiae when i got here i was told we don't buy our cruisers in the capital that is correct and i've always thought since we're doing these types of changes and we're doing useful life i think typically most cruisers in most meetings get two maybe three years i mean is it worth writing that wrong well isn't isn't our doesn't our capital policy say it should have a useful life of at least five years i mean and i thought that was uh was that moody who who raised that i don't know but louise was the one that implemented to run nothing implementable when we know what cruisers is removing them from capital budget oh no they've been in the operating budget for america right but it was believes no it was before louise so i was before we back to front yeah but it was since you came i'm not saying we do that but i'm saying since you arrived here and i as we arrived at the same time he was always in the middle it was capital to begin with and we moved in party we don't unless it was 2013 we've been putting the cruises on the police budget for our but the issue is i as i recall is it's it's the useful life isn't yeah it just doesn't seem right but i i think it okay i mean typically view it as a capital asset i think we've been told is that there's such wear and tear and mileage put on them that it it really i mean it really doesn't feel like the typical capitalized now from an operating budget standpoint it'd be great i don't know how many cars are in there for a year but it's great so it'd be great to get that out of the operating budget this year but it'll just come back at some point if you're borrowing i'd also be curious as auto shut off has become more prevalent as we buy new cars if that's still true that they have a useful life of if it's purely mileage i mean i i thought part of it was also the amount of run time like how often they were on because you're generally running 24 yeah but is that true with with auto shut off if you're we're still not you're sitting in the stadium's parking lot parking lot is the engine on the whole time or is it does it turn off it's cold wow i think we would have to find out because they they don't get standard say for explorers they're called police interceptor eagles right yeah i only have ever seen anything in the capital budget west three three years ever well the capital policy says useful life in five years so i i think if you're going to make an exception since we're here talking about it yeah one of the items that item i was for operating budget discussion okay yeah no i think it's worth the discussion i think you would want to amend your policy if that was something you changed but well it's it's tough it might be in your life makes it seem like an operating expense because you're really not getting a whole lot out of it before it's done okay any questions on the operating budget section project readiness and schedule um i think this is trying to get at a couple of things one for projects that are you know multi-step again michael probably falls in your arena more than most um but maybe some of tom's too you know where is this project in terms of its readiness at the point you're submitting it um right it's ready to go designs um happening your conceptual planning stages i'm most interested i don't know if these categories are i'd be interested in your feedback right on what the categories should be um i think there's a lot of projects that wouldn't have this right it's you're buying a piece of equipment it's a little bit simpler than that um but particularly the bigger projects that are over a longer span what we're trying to get at with both the readiness and then the dates is an understanding at the point when we're asking the town to approve the money how long is this going to take before it should be spent so that then when we're doing project status going forward we have an understanding of like okay we're behind you know we've got outstanding capital because we're behind the schedule that we thought we were going to be on or we're ahead and having a better um understanding that's something i don't know i don't think historically whalens have a real good um handle on collectively individual department managers might but um this is trying to get at do we have too many projects in one place going on right they're not getting done we need to if we're going to allocate resources we should allocate those resources to projects that that can get done um but that's really hard as a committee to to assess if you don't know what the expectation was and i think for those of us who don't live in this world right i don't know should the project take a year two years four years right depends on what the project is it's not the project itself it's where it's happening right anything that happens in the school i can't start till i want a good following the year because we approve it this year i have the plan for it i can't do it during the school year from july one of next year is when i can actually start the project so the monies that we approved i'm just starting projects and we hit the ground running but but so that's where it gets a little tricky um the money seems like it's sitting but it's really not it's waiting right but if if if you were to lay that out where you're doing flooring and you say yeah approve july 1 of 26 i'm going to be doing design right it will be complete sometime in that next year construction will start at least if we lay it out ahead of time we've got an objective to measure against if we never lay it out we don't know what we're measuring against so this data just stayed with the project because it doesn't show in your the two different five-year plans so it's just for project vetting when you're sitting with the yeah yeah yeah and this may be another area brian we didn't talk about this where we have to this should be specific to the year one ask versus the out year asks right you can't i i can't see where you can do this for a project three years yeah it would just be for if whatever you're requesting for this year yeah the year you're asking for would be that that would make closer yeah then would you need a mechanism as the fiscal years go as something slides down you have to do an inquiry numbers so if he put something in in 32 right now yeah but he doesn't have any of that information as it slides over well in the roll forward of conceivably in the roll forward for the next year when this whole file gets rolled forward at some point 32 will be the first year and he would update recording okay he would update the dates when it falls into the first year it's a good tracking mechanism actually it'll help with so the department's going to see all the project tabs so they would go back in yeah yeah for my department yeah for your department yeah you're not going to first yeah for your department you don't want to share mine is cool you don't want to peer review everybody else good thank you yeah we'll be looking for the same tags and multiple department files i mean some of this information could be and those those are five categories those are those will work they're general enough where it's makes sense okay all right so now prioritization of the funding request so this was one area we did talk about so overall project rank was meant to be for the first fiscal year only so for facilities projects only you're going to request let's make it up 10 projects order those 10 projects for the first year one to 10 in terms of you know your which which is most critical to be done down the line and and that was to help as you guys all saw last year right there's a limited amount of resources you can't decide right what's going to get done from one department to the next but if it was you know there was a limited amount of money and you had to go in order which what's the order you would go in for projects within your own department just to inform the allocation of resources so that's the first one and then the ones below that and i didn't actually say you probably could have reversed this i think we initially had what kelly's just about to go through which sums to a priority ranking total and not that this would happen but we were concerned that if the department manager could all ones in for every project they'd all look to have the same priority so we said okay if that happened by default we're going to also ask for a numerical ranking one or whatever and i think we'd only really be using the numerical because inevitably this this uh calculated rank should be different for every project that we think and it it's possible something come out with the same rank but yeah this was trying to get at we you may remember last year the committee tried to do high medium low the sort of a primitive right how do we think of it um but this was trying to break it up into a little bit more quantitative or qualitative care uh characteristics of the project and what why is it a priority right not just say i think it is but what makes it is it is it something that's required or mandated we have to do it right um is it aligned with a plan right that the town's been on a path to do right does it provide some sort of value to residents right is it repairing something that you know it doesn't get repaired it's going to be an issue for residents getting down a little bit more detail um and the thought was that that if i pick on roads where you've got five years of it your answers are not necessarily going to be different right for your one of roads versus your five of roads so you could answer that um that ranking but agree with what brian said we were anticipating if if you know someone all of their projects for a given department ranked at the same point like what's the tiebreaker and the tiebreaker for year one projects is based on the department managers priority ranking of their own projects so yeah i like what you're doing first of all i love this is unbelievable number one um but number two i understand what you're trying to do that but you let me say dale's advocate here and what happens when you get some department comes in and said i have 10 projects and four of them are number one and then the next one can be five and six they can't they have to they have okay specifically that first question is put them in order right one to ten right you got some problems i think this could be some so the general reason why right it might be one of the ones that has this issue because has a number of projects serves as several several i could throw out three three projects that are one priority for life safety reasons right they no longer support the hardware for the fire fire system so those to me would be all one priority yeah and and that's what the the more detailed questions are trying to get at but still at the end of the day you got to go one two and three and you want to if you want to add we can add another where you say hey my one two and three are all ones must have right i think that's good color to add but because i think that ultimately comes down to michael and brian when we get to there's so many resources okay well i've got to give facilities one two and three and i'm going to have to take that from somewhere else but it still needs to you need to try and put them in order um because what if what if one you know what if one is you know ten million dollars and two and three are a million dollars right games that match right and i get that and it's just unfortunately you know things don't break and i think that's where i think that's where you know there's there's plenty of boxes on here and go together and be like just put your color in right why why can't this wait right and i think we tried really hard last year if it was health safety that went first the problem is you run out of money quickly right when you get done with with health safety yeah well and i think for your budget for one two three four five aren't really the risk it's unless they're really big it's the seven eight nine ten where you're starting to have that debate right yeah yeah or you start to have the hey can we break up any part of this to the between health safety and other and we have the discussion about well you can but it's going to cost you a premium to break the project apart right and then kelly said we we did high medium low this is an attempt to be an attempt to be a little bit more sophisticated by that but what as kelly said a little more color to better understand what the what the requirements are and needs are a little more sophisticated but we didn't go as sophisticated as some of the other towns we looked at that were ranking project components with decimals so it was like 1.25 plus yeah we didn't we didn't go that detailed but we feel that easy and i think there's no doubt that there will be um confusion in the initial run through some people might just put fives across the board other people give it meaning and underrate their projects well they do so at their own risk because if they then come and meet with us and we look at their submissions and everything's right highest priority five we're going to say okay then you're leaving it up to us right yeah which ultimately we then recommend to you and then that's giving it up to you you know there are always people that it's five but i think so the first year is going to be a learning process and there will be dialogue both while i assume there can be dialogue well folks are filling these up and then after and then we're going to have the same i presume meetings with department managers to go through their requests and you know hopefully gathering this information in advance of those meetings will make those meetings more productive yeah more efficient um we can drill right in on things that just don't make sense to us i mean it's meant to drive conversation right so it's not and then we're all having the same conversation regardless if we're in this room we're saying to you guys you know until the review at another stage you'll see this is why they say said that and asked these questions and if something changes then we change the ranking right i mean it's meant to have some sort of control mechanism so we can communicate better and also i think just even going in when the department manager are thinking about what their needs are for years one through five i think some of these questions uh will prompt that consideration for when they fell forward yeah i don't think any of us were comfortable at least with the amount of information we ranked things on last year we feel like right that wasn't necessarily fair to the department managers who have a much deeper knowledge right of their projects we're doing with what we could with the time we had um but we'd like we'd like the committee the town manager the finance director and the department managers to be on the same page about why they are placing something where it is and the one the one item michael and brian need to really have a meeting of the minds on is i'm not sure how brian this when you've been the keeper of the receiver of the cfp requests in the past and you've at times had to make your own judgments as to where things fit in the five-year plan that ultimately got proposed to the finance committee um i'm not sure you necessarily went through this level of detail you've inevitably had conversations with department managers um but at some point you had to make your own judgment based on financing resources etc and i think historically you've you've been somewhat reluctant to move things that are in in this case 2028 through 2032 because they're in a five-year plan now and your expectation is we're pretty much going to see what was in 2028 to 2032 with new requests for 2033. that's at least what i've heard you state in the past doesn't mean you haven't accommodated you know a new request here there as you did last year there were multiple new requests that you brought in and inevitably it forced you to have to pick a few that were otherwise in fiscal 27 and you had to move them out and so you know we just want to make sure we don't go through this whole process about collecting the information from department managers evaluating at this committee writing up a report with recommendations that are all based on a prioritization scheme that the two of you are going to basically say well we're not interested in that we want everything to be what was in the five-year plan in 2020 2032 subject to some numerical adjustments we don't want to be reprioritizing which is what we did last year we we looked at every single project and at the end of the day what went to the fincom was not that and so i'm all game for doing my part but i don't want to needlessly have the department heads do all this work we do all the work and you all it's a totally different view we don't need to solve that tonight but we do need to solve that um well i think this is the part that's probably most important to get i agree i don't want to make them do it if it's not the criteria that ultimately
town manager and finance director want to use to to decide we should we should make sure whatever criteria we're asking for is what is and it's not be all end all we all know that sometimes you just yeah that's nice but we can't do it but i think we want to be on the same page on what what we're asking for is the information that they're using to make those decisions well we've been doing this seven eight years for the right point so my take on it is is that after seven or eight years many of these departments should basically have their program in place what we're seeing for the most but i don't pick on the school the school every single year walks in you can take a look at that believe it's ryan getting it up there it's the chart um 28 they get they get 10 projects i guarantee you they're going to say i want them 10 and 10 more yeah they have not evolved to understanding what define you capital i will give you a real-time example uh i think it's in fiscal 29 of the schools the million dollars for the msba has got it there yeah 29 or 30 30 30. i couldn't get them as their liaison or their designee i couldn't get them to focus and tell me what year they thought that was going to really be needed that's where it appeared in the prior five-year plan that's where you chose to leave it and what went to fincom that's where it appears but i know i've listened to their long-term building planning meetings at the school committee and my understanding is come next spring they're looking to get geared up to get their application into the msba and once they do that they they may need access to that million dollars probably in the fiscal 28 yeah um so that that's an example of that's going to be coming i expect but my whole point was once the department works in and says i mean i'm doing this for seven years i get i had a truck in the third year and i won it in the first year my pushback is you should have known that last year yeah if it's reoccurring every single year we have these musical chairs of project going back and forth but what the departments don't get is that you keep they may want to move a truck in the third year that's funded by debt bonds and moving into the first year where i already have too many bonds out i may have to use free cash so it's impacting other projects and what they don't understand also is when it isn't funded by debt i have to go to the bank get the debt service build it into our operating budget try to project an override if i'm constantly changing the debt service then we don't get a feel on the override now but that's why for the most part i push back hard on these people and i said well you should have known that last year i understand something goes south in the building you know you need a boy let me and everybody gets that but in the case of the school and i'll pick on them and i've been open about it they walk in every single year and it's christmas shopping as if they're going into their next fiscal year deciding what they want to buy and they don't they don't go second third fourth fifth year out they just don't yeah and anybody who's been doing this for a while is carol you've been around you've seen it and i've kind of read this i guess yeah so you get 10 projects out there i guarantee you when you get to that next year they're going to want those 10 and 10 more or they want to want those 10 move out of here bringing 10 more yeah if they they have not evolved so it's causing a lot of issues excuse me one second at one point i saw kristine up there i don't know if she's still here kristine miss bavison was there i saw her up at the when we were looking we're starting to look at the uh just like the um the uh the software when omar easy asked the math curriculum we said this is an operating expense and i told him you know we're not in the capital budget unless you come up with close-outs so he came up with close-outs with the understanding that this isn't going to happen again more than we all last year school walks in with more curriculum i think with the history that was illiteracy that was literacy literacy and again they should have known that the year before that was the source and so we're going to come up with next year curriculum on something else we're funding it that's why they're doing it yeah but the superintendents groups have been pushing this in their meetings as i start now in timothy far in winchester all these curriculums moving off the operating budget and all the capital i started the winchester time meeting they all got up and said why is this operating expense so it was pushed through the superintendent some of the meetings this is how you get these things in the budget because i started in other municipalities we started way last year yeah i i don't disagree with you brian and i i'm well versed in all the schools um ask for capital and you can um i can make you a gift of our meeting with them last year where i told them in our meeting that they can't you know exactly that we can't do that anymore if you come back here next year and you change your whole first year plan right it's just going to be no i'll be disappointed they're going to watch it yeah i know but the answer is going to have to like that's i'm still here the answer has to be no because we can't we can't keep doing that and so i think there's a mix i there's a there's a balance between taking into consideration change circumstances right the boiler fail it wasn't in the plan we have to do that okay versus literacy curriculum i just realized i'm going to need a literacy curriculum just now it wasn't in the plan last year right that i can't i can't explain that right um and i don't understand how we can keep doing that in capital so i think there's there's a balance but the question still for the projects as they're submitted i think it's still good to understand the criteria it's still good to understand some of the characteristics of why you might consider one has to go in that wasn't planned for but i think the justification has to be good right there has to be good reason why it has to move and i'll pick um on michael right the elevators in the town building not meeting code right they we didn't know that we don't really have a choice that has to get that has to get done um but that's a health safety criteria that changes the view from the prior plan so this committee had a chance to rank you guys had a chance to put together a budget i think collectively we all have to be very stern on okay if it's changing from what we had last year you gotta like there needs to be a whole lot of reasons why that's got to move otherwise it's not moving and for going into override seasons it becomes only that much more critical to the extent it's going to affect the operating budget right i think nice one i don't need to start a problem here but brian what are you talking about we still heard i think brian um where's the msb i can't read in this family the ms 2030
now i want to talk to mr kevin didn't we fund i think i'm still in the final school and i think louise was here we funded some money for them to apply msba for building i think it never had a range yes it was an initial amount and then there was another amount yeah but they they were walking back
but we have funded some i'm positive somebody what i like well i think i think some of the funding is what they're using to pay the architects now to do the long-term planning but but there's get into the mba msba process there's a bunch of feasibility work that then has to happen uh which will cost money them and that really sucks maybe the wrong numbers well that's the other thing it was a million dollars
it's not a million dollars i'm worried so one of the fun i have just suggestion is perhaps when the letter goes out to the department heads i assume it goes into the schools as well that right in there the capital letter says no matching grant no curriculum and no operating expenses please don't submit those projects well maybe we maybe we do it that way i don't know yeah i don't i don't know what the words are but i i would also be careful with the swaps because that's another thing we've had issues with right so you want curriculum so you take out floors and push it out two years well the floors still have to get done right that didn't really right that didn't really change yeah an ask didn't go away and ask got moved and was that really the right priority flip um so i i just want to be careful because there have been a few of those where the ask didn't go away and it didn't even you know didn't right didn't even delay you know a year or two yeah so we're still talking about an over either one year or three years so the next plan particularly for uh you know 28 and 29 years for dental service needs to be pretty much stable because we know the debt services for 28 this will generate debt service for 29 so at least for the next couple of years in this next plan can't have things materially moving away and then the last session was intended for to the extent their support there won't always be but to the extent their support for the request in the form of an estimate an engineering report site plans any anything that's far enough along right that those can be attached um if available to avoid sort of follow-up requests if they're if they're already available yeah so here an example would be it's not that we didn't ask for it but at least they've been putting in the form it'll prompt people to do it but the baseball field that was proposed to be moved up which ultimately you're recommended capital budget michael um you know we asked at least three times along the way from the very start can you show us a site plan that shows how the two projects might overlap and what impact it might be and we didn't ultimately get anything to that until after we had completed our report uh and in fact then when we got it the physical site plan showed that there was no that we were wondering is the septic project going to dig up half the required digging up half the field or leeching field we had no clue and the plan that i finally found was dated in october of 2025 so i'm not quite sure why that couldn't have brought forward because that might have you know allowed us to at least explore it more deeply but we ended up having to leave it in 2029 because we just didn't have the information on which to feel comfortable recommending that um and that's when i told the school committee chair as their designee that it wasn't that we were necessarily opposed but we we don't want to badger people and so maybe you know i know the fire chief did a good job working in the ambulance we said what backup do you have for the six hundred and twenty thousand dollars whatever it was for the ambulance you pulled out a piece of paper and you had you know here's here's the cost i got quoted yeah three years of inflation because it's going to take that long for us to actually get the thing um and so those are the kind of things that hopefully um you know this will prompt tom holder is usually good he likes to give us uh photos of you know trucks that are rusting through and things of that nature and that that's helpful i mean it's not like we don't believe people but it's it's helpful to have that discussed in an open meeting um just before i lose the point of thought um just as a placeholder i was looking at a um what was a set of minutes or an agenda for the library trustees and there was a laundry list of at least six to eight capital related projects to the library building that all looked somewhat substantial and i was scratching my head because we've we've spent a fair amount of money and appropriate a fair amount of money for repairs and other things um so i i hope you're in the loop on that you might look at their last agenda and look at the projects whether they're projects that are i don't think you've spent all the library money yet and so maybe they're projects that are in that list but i want to make sure that you're aware that there might not be new needs and uh just curious i saw the uh sidewalk ripped up again where it looked like the sewer line that's national great that's not nice national that budget is basically all the new hvac it's going in this year starting in september they're getting all brand new units this is all under the money that they already got appropriate yeah the only thing if you look at that list is the wish list on the bottom like the glass wall uh things like that that none of that's been appropriated for that's all wish money yeah and that's their money what i have in the capital projects in the outiers has to do with their parking lots um we have we can get a free generator from the water department we gotta figure out where to put that um so they'll get a free generator we don't have to buy that so we can take that out of the capital plan because that's out 29 or 30. so the stuff that's in there has nothing to do with what we're doing now this is all this was planned as a four-phase we did the exterior we tied them into the um town store so they're no longer in septic the second phase was the interiors we brought up some ada improvements the third phase was um there's something about a roof that leaked and cause damage and then correct but we're putting all the units on the roof we're getting them out of the building up above that decorative ceiling in the middle of the open area well that's what we well it's leaking constantly the units leak because they're in the attic so we're putting them on the roof before we put new units on a roof we've got a 30-year roof we put a new roof down so but that's all money that's within their their existing budget that's none of that's new money head off so we're not head off no no make sure you're in the loop yes i'm very much so in the loop i think head off is a good phrase one thing i want to say about the ball field is from my perspective it wasn't really the school so much as dpw and engineering were looking at or advocating for that for economies of scale and efficiency while they were doing the other thing and so they probably couldn't answer a lot of those questions that you really needed you needed additional support i think that's i mean i raised that willing that last of making sure there's clear understanding of who owns projects um and and it may be different depending like that right who's gonna who's gonna run the project versus who the stakeholder of the project is can be different but i think we got conflicting right information so knowing that up front the board of public works basically said we don't order public works on dpw or of course we didn't know the chair anyway then chair said we don't that's not our project you know get it out of our capital ask list which is where it was school committee didn't find out in me about the project until right around the time the fincom was reviewing they apparently inquired the school committee uh we just need to be sure you're supportive of this baseball field kind of so they had a five-minute conversation in the school committee meeting so it you can always point it kind of you know i know tom holder was that's that's the position that he stated when he first brought it to our attention under his submission um you were kind of on the periphery of it and cursing was aware of it but it was kind of this big project that you know we we didn't know who to ask or who could actually supply the information so how can you make a decision yeah someone has to right even if there's there's always going to be multiple and especially michael here's there's multiple parties involved but somebody's got to own it from uh who's asking who's who's the leader of asking for it and you know if it's if that's defined it makes it a little bit easier sure and i would i would i talked to the chair of the school committee on something else the other day and i uh suggested to her that um hopefully through you and kirsten if she's still on um i really think it's important that um school committee be presented not only with the current fiscal year requests but the full five-year set of requests and assuming the town manager you agree with putting out these uh workflow templates and we then are gathering more detail on all requests ideally that schools most of which are facilities through projects schools can provide that to the staff can provide that to the school committee in whatever form they want to but it'd be sure helpful but to know that the school committee had been apprised of what their requests are they were they got fiscal 27 only they they've got a five-year plan my first year here i said i gave it some of my memories first time susan was still here uh that i wasn't asked last year i'm saying last year and again it may have just been with the transition um susan departing and kirsten coming in but i i think that any any board that has its ultimate authority like i know tom older you know he does all the work does a great job and eventually he gets to the board of public works and says here's here's our submission but usually it occurs after those forms have been submitted in a perfect world seems to me that if the department reports to a border committee they should get their stuff done and then give it to that border committee have them say yeah that's fine put it in because they ultimately are going to have to help advocate if if there's to brian's point if there's some good reason to make change or some new ask i would like to think that the board or committee um is going to have to step up and say yeah we really support michael though if you remember when we met with school committee they wouldn't talk about anything beyond FY27 excluding facilities requests they they had no requests beyond FY27 that's what i'm saying at least last year but it's not just that's a that's a school committee right or school school representative issue it's not just facilities projects it's everything the schools are looking for outside of the first so it sounds to me like you're saying we have a different plan because in the past there is conversation between facilities and schools what projects need to be done so it's been a consistent issue that brian alluded to earlier that beyond year one right is so that's that's what i'm trying to nicely say rather than say it to mr fan yeah please provide with a five yeah i don't think that's i think there's two parties involved and i think that the interest is there the request should be made for having a conversation yeah yep yep agreed okay of course would i pass that along to bookman chair so i want to try to wrap wrap up here if there's any other comments questions on forum requests so we're not using the other form at always that's our hope is that we can use this and we have a version of it that brian has pre-populated um that we can share um the committee is good with it um how about the learning curve or you know i think for the most part it is intuitive you give the numbers give the five to the ranking but um there are any additional instructions you think we do in company i mean there's there's a general budget capital budget statement that we brian and i realized that we send we did but in terms of instructions on this new forms we want to try it out i yeah i tried as much and that's where i'm looking for your feedback to include the instructions right next to the item if we think there's more instructions that need to go in i think i was trying to because i know the old one had like a separate sheet with numbers on it that you had to go look at and so it's trying to get it right in front um so that as you're filling it out you see you don't have to go reference another set of instructions and what we could do and brad you or i are probably the logical persons that people might want to uh department managers might want to reach out but to offer one of us up uh as an immediate resource as to you know mechanical questions in the form um as people get into it and i was going to say well once you tell them what at least we thought it was intended to do right um and i'm hopeful everybody's first enough in excel that they can cut you know copy your template and multiply how many new projects they have but maybe not um for brian's point if uh if you need more space than the row seems to be giving you and it's not automatically expanding you know what you have to do um um or to the ranking questions yeah so i'm i'm happy absolutely absolutely yeah i agree if you want to offer brad or my name up and just drop us an email and either one of us could you know call somebody so the pre-populated versions did you map the five-year the capital plan from last year and the five-year plan that we were looking at into that that's five yeah basically i linked each when you look at the form i actually have a link to the last tab in the workbook that's the five years worth four years worth of projects in the five-year plan so the department could double check saying okay that number is coming from where okay this tab there's my list of six projects that got into the five-year plan and then from there they have to say okay am i still good with that number that's not there's the new number type it in am i still good with that year okay i got to move it so i'm going to take it out that box and put it here and i'm going to write an explanation that that's kind of thing um so my only other question to brian i didn't want to get too much today is mobiler as you accumulate these individual departments but you'd be sharing your updated file with brian so he gets to see it and how i know you have a lot of spreadsheets that link to one another are your spreadsheets as your capital separate that you manually copy in some of your uh debt service and your funding it like if we we try this if we try this model itself populates the five-year plan how much of learning curve for change and what you're doing let me ask by this when you got the cip forms from last year my recollection is you either manually take the numbers off those forms and stick them in one of your spreadsheets your capital workbook spreadsheet or you might link it to that yeah yeah i don't have a separate file each year yeah i don't actually copy off the cip form they fill up the cip form but they also fill out a five-year right by year by project by my mom so we're going to make it we're going to make it create that five-year summary and to the extent i'm willing right to the extent there's a follow-on spreadsheet that you need that to link into i'm happy to help link those things in but the goal is that not that the department managers don't need to separately fill out a five-year grid because they're going to fill out the project detail and we're going to automate the the production of the grid right of the columns your file when you're done sure just automates to michael you know and very little adjustments go straight to the finance committee we don't i don't want to get to the point where you have a totally separate file i rebuild mine it should be to the point where a file comes in michael may not change something whatever but then that file transitions to the finance committee but i was just wondering some of your files rely on data from other files you is the capital five-year capital plan you've been using independent of any of the operating budget how do you you know when you're funding these and you have debt service and bonds and things you take any of those numbers out of your yeah well yeah i think the five year plan i send it to the hilltop they send me back a debt a debt schedule i use that debt schedule into the operating five year five year okay it doesn't stay with the capital five years so when i used to do in one of my other communities i had links to other spreadsheets so that they would bring data in you're not doing that you have to there's an intermediate step hilltop to get the end data numbers which you plug back into your operating budget okay i just wanted to make sure for anybody listening at home that this could work without blowing up too much yeah i mean we one of the other big discussions about that brian is we left our own devices on on what funding sources should be debt free cash whatever um we went at it um based on the fincom thresholds and tried to ensure that we didn't max you know go over the maximum amount of levy debt or whatever free cash um i'm sure you do the same thing in your capital workbook and i think the biggest issue occurred because the way we prioritize things um we hit limits at different points than ultimately you did because you had you know you had projects in different years mostly in the years they appeared in the prior five-year capital plan so you know this is simply collecting the requests we still then have to make sure we agree what year the committee thinks they belong in and then we have to come up with proposed funding source and one of the suggestions i made at i think the last meeting is it seems to me could be better if this committee in putting help helping get put together its final recommendation including funding sources before that went to you versus we take a stab at funding sources then brian agrees or disagrees and then gives you something that's potentially different what we had that that created the number of the funding variances at the end of the day i don't think it's any more or less work for brian it's just the question of do you plug him in uh at the front end of the process as opposed to an intermediary and i think that may be even more critical ellie's going off and i'm going off and um absent getting someone else that's been through this process of my understanding from brad anyway is that it'd be sure helpful to have brian's involvement you know at that level on the front end yeah absolutely um but we're going to start with at least like the starting point is going to be the funding sources right we're not going to start from scratch they're going to start there and then adjust but we need to sense maybe i think the delta was the surplus funds these are like an ongoing no there's another one they come they keep brian keeps working on closing on things so do you think you have an idea when we might know how much the surface comes with no but i mean with the you know in the events of 26 and we had a big snow and ice issue but we you know we're not going at the level of turnbacks you know well that's turn by sometimes i'm talking about close-out capitals yeah yeah pre-cash level may be the same or not grow i think the the next the 20 28 budget may lean more heavily on those closeouts in order to maintain our fund balance level but we may have to restrict a little bit the use of pre-cash and the offset of that is just you know put pressure on these folks to turn back the products and do you have an idea when you know when that number is no i mean we're going to have to reign them in i would think in the next couple months yeah so maybe by october first we would know what the surplus funds will yeah i mean they're they're they're my code it's in october 15th we need that number yeah we need two numbers you need right three numbers you need you know where are you trying to get from a debt standpoint right right that load that you can fit you think you can fit in the next year and i know that's next year's debt but we need how much free cash or can you safely put in plan right maybe and we did this last year right hey there's this much you think we can do if there's more if there's happens to be more capital closeouts or free cash availability then these are the next three projects that should should roll in so that you can sort of get that tentative schedule and know what the add-ins are if you have more but you start with the conservative this is how much free cash we think we have and this is how much capital closeout we think we have um but you anything beyond that is sort of in waiting so obviously with the law the committee has and knowing of the available bonds the more likely the plans the recommendations will yeah match a line thank you so i think that's really the key we want to look at next okay we don't want to open up this capital budget in general right so we don't want to do that department come in and said you only will the miss five things one of the um again we're talking about both the form but other things we wanted to talk about um so when i looked or we looked at the capital closeouts there was at least one maybe two items that jumped out of me um us it was a uh unexpended amount of money for district-wide windows or flooring or walls i forget what it was that and most of the money hadn't been used yet and brian that ended up being closed out and that capital was used for funding this 27 budget and my question was in the five-year plan itself there are at least one if not multiple district-wide flooring district-wide walls district-wide windows and it just didn't make logical sense to me that once you get something appropriated for district-wide whatever it is you're going to use it all because you got stressed out over a bunch of years you got all these other plan district-wide i didn't understand why other than you needed money why did the schools if that's who agreed close out that particular item why did that make sense to you if you're just going to have to come back and so ask for more money now because michael you know that's that's a project that a set of projects that can't get done now so i assume one of the things you're going to have to do with the schools is look at okay which what schools have we intended to use that money going now we can't we got to build that now into the next step so i'm just curious this process wise yeah it's one thing to need the money it's another thing to go after to close out project i think the other one was um may have been an i.t related project was a similar situation where we had this big discussion at town meeting about firewall protection everything else and then it was this large i.t project that i think got closed out um and it just didn't it didn't make sense to me it was in our list of i think in the case of the um the district-wide flooring superintendent and christine wanted the um software is a literacy so i told them i'm not putting a budget unless you go close our projects and they went back and found those projects and that was one of them that you know it's it you know in my opinion it should have been in the budget capital budget all along it's it's a it's a you know spur of the moment project it was substantial and i told them that you know we can't put a net on funding unless you go back and find closeouts which they did so it's same sort of thing with i.t right if you notice the year before he did under mike mccann it wasn't a lot and nick barney comes in and there was a lot and i said that i don't have money to fund this i understand you want to have it is there anything you can close out and that's where that came but that's yeah so i i guess i would just raise and this goes back to the who owns the project that hamstring michael from continuing on right is that that may be what schools decided was the priority but ultimately we sacrificed a facility a facility in order to fund and brick curriculum i think we got to have a uh the departments all have to be on board with that together if we're doing that in the future because we're just going to end up you're going to have to you're going to have to put more money in district-wide flooring in another year right and i i don't understand how we explain to residents right you agreed this was a priority you voted for it and we didn't do it but we're going to close it out because we want to do this other thing and we'll come back and ask you for that money later unless we're going to tell residents that that's what we're doing when we use the closeout yeah and the way the way we addressed it and again i appreciate it it's your capital budget at the end of the day the way we addressed it in those situations were uh did not assume we were going to close out something that we really needed money for um but rather we we prioritized everything that was in the capital budget and those things that had low priority that were otherwise in the five-year plan in fiscal 27 we just pushed them out and i know when you did your budget a number of the items we had pushed out make room for the curriculum etc because half of was being funded by grant funding but you wouldn't get grant funding if they didn't have the other half funding we didn't we didn't place a particularly high priority on spending 200 grant on sidewalk improvements versus educating kids you made a different decision you said close this out and then i'll let you put that in so those are the kind of there weren't a lot of them but those are the kind of things that we need to in the next two months be prepared hopefully to have back and forth discussion um so that we don't end up with these you know variances um and that it seems to put our committee at odds even though we're advisory now manager finance committee somehow things you know they're looking to us as well i mean they can read our report we're not we don't report to the finance committee um and i think we would collectively like to avoid that scenario so both any work that could be done on real closeouts in the next month or two understanding there could be more work needed for the new year that would be helpful to find that out and having brian work with us during the month of august early september to try to pull together in the funding aspects of what we're doing i think would be helpful i just think we'll end up with a better better end product doesn't mean that we'll agree at the end of the day on everything but that's fine yeah i would just hope that closeouts in the future are projects done we've got money left over projects not needed anymore and we've got money that we can give back right or projects not going to get done in a near-term time frame right and we're going to have to and the costs are going to change like we're going to have to come back later and ask for it again um right but it's not just well i just moved this project ahead of this thing we already asked for because it gets really confusing to a resident like i thought we already you know we already approved that project why are we asking for it again but to me this is some of the value that this committee is providing you know you're able to take a much longer term and a longer view of how our capital budgets have been functioning and you've identified a couple things and you certainly have come up with some terrific ways to track this and i think that the department has i'm going to speak for you now you're ready they're going to really like this form because it's going to provide them you know with a file that they can do one place look at everything once they get initially set up i seem like it too much this year but maybe next year although i'm really liking it um because i think in the end it's very helpful oh and i think it's a learning curve for all of us you know and how this committee now fits in to the process even though we all want it still we have to figure out how to look at ourselves and smooth on our edges as we go so that's what just say one more thing for the department heads if they listen to us later and you can like if we honestly want feedback right if you see something as you're filling it out you're like this doesn't make any sense we shouldn't do it like this like we want to hear that back this is not a be all end all we're just trying to move move the ball forward to there's something that's a little bit more informative yeah brad where did brad came up with the substance that's in here kelly formatted it in excel um generally a substance of this came from one or more other communities that you yeah the state has certain uh certain forms certain formats uh pulled it from various different communities um and actually i did an ai check as well and i just uh put them all together and you know you helped a lot in kelly format the whole thing but uh i tried to try to take pieces and parts from different um different towns and uh that would fit our situation like the ranking for example like you said we saw some comp would have silly ranking systems very very complex three decimal places yeah and and some have extensive you know you don't get your project discussed if you don't have all the backup photos and plans in the house and they had huge extensive files all of which you can find on their website so and some forms were half a page we i think we view this as kind of slightly a step up from what we've been gathering and and the biggest component to me is getting the information on years two through five at the same level of detail that we've generally been getting it for the first year but that's really the substantive change and then the ranking um so hopefully what we could encourage and i again i i don't know if kirsten is able to be on for she did get on for that long uh publicly through this meeting and i'll send an email to her and i'll um as well encourage them if they have time to watch this meeting and you know certainly we could make time maybe on the next agenda to if either both of them were available and wanted to um stop in virtually and i think our our interest though is in getting the you know assuming you improve my company getting the form out as sooner than later so that we get the process started because i think it probably will be take up some maybe some questions i'm not sure brian and i have some meetings we have some other stuff to tackle in the morning but i'm sure we'll have some conversations unless we have any major feedback we'll start tailoring our updated budget memo that goes with this and send it out explain what we're doing all right so we're we'll discuss if there's anything brian the template that you put together that has everything but then i'm going to break that up by department and give you the give the templates for each department yeah it is there is there is a template for each department okay so the zip file has
right right yeah sorry so you would simply find the workbooks that go to the right you know tom over gets water or waste water and pressure station and bpw and michael probably would get copied on the schools as well right yeah anything that has to do is to the school facilities out there we'll end up the mic yeah review anything that's they have a separate workbook just because there's some with non-facility related items right right right well certainly okay we'll finalize that and get that off yeah we knew that all the workbooks you created yep yep i forgot about it i looked at it when they first came over it's not too daunting i would probably just send them a zip file and then everybody can unpack a zip file and let them let them pick their own yeah yeah yeah take your something secret in the other ones you have to have a dozen crisscrossing no no don't let tom do you guys have a shared no no we can't share a drive but do you guys have a shared drive that you work on so that you don't have some shared drives that we could probably put that on that's right but then in order to get it emailed who gets who gets the ultimate feedback from the department well the department head would want to and we'll put that in the instructions they would email it to this committee they would see who it needs yeah does the committee have a general email address for each one there's a there's the ipc yeah committee email address yep let's deal with that everybody should go to me too should we're fine yeah i get them anyways but oh you get them anyways the exit yeah general numbers are on all right why not so they could just do the committee when they're done they also meet with me and michael so at the same time you're working on it we're looking at what they want to do right but if they use that general cipc committee email address it includes both of you on that email address for general one and it also goes to all of us so that's the best email address please and uh just as a heads up um at one of the finance committee meetings uh that i watched uh at the end of their process last year there someone one of the members suggested that they might want to meet with department heads and um release the capital i just hopefully discourage that and i'll be sitting on the finance committee now uh i will at least personally discourage that just because part of the reason that this committee is set up was to avoid making the department managers you know taking extra time so and you discuss that with whoever the chair of the finance committee is at some point you could discourage on as well since again we have we report advice to you from this committee i appreciate that we did this on monday nights for these folks to create the defense team already has the capital budget for the next four years they have they have they should be looking at it now and pre-planning for what for becoming in a perfect world there wouldn't be many um adjustments in the first four years we really want to bring in 50 years yeah so there's nothing preventing them we did that he's getting we did that two years ago we went through your suggestion we went through the capital plan for the prior year typically because we had three new members in like october and uh it was helpful and i'm not sure why they didn't um get out last year last year i think they waited to february yeah i'm not sure why but i mean with the budget all the articles getting the capital yeah yeah i will be encouraging that what you just described is in fact done
one thing could be considered if there were particular income members that wanted to be they certainly could have a joint meeting and when you're meeting with the department head when cipc is meeting with committee and they welcome to come but you know urge right it's not fair to ask them to come to come to two separate meetings and it and it breeds some of what happened last year where we've got we met early in the process and others met late in the process information changed along that naturally but we're coming at it from different um that's a good idea different viewpoints because we have different information at the different points in time we could vote to send this package out because there's no changes we just needed to i need to we need to get if if you had time to look at it if there's any yeah we can get a discussion about that and dismiss these but i don't want to everybody else for no i appreciate everybody coming in i know it's uh monday night so it's uh it's very helpful to us and uh again if you have any questions comments um you just just send them along um but but appreciate the time you've uh gave us tonight that's very helpful to us that we'll we can move on to the uh our next uh agenda item so i don't want to sit in thank you thank you thank you very much thank you thank you thank you thank you yeah i appreciate it it actually didn't take down longer than i don't believe longer than that i don't believe but it was less than two hours really i managed to figure out a way how to at least replicate the tabs very quickly okay and then i just said i just had the list of i sorted it in a way that i was able to just pull it across yeah point to the formula and auto populate then i put a couple check figures in that yeah i checked i looked at the checks just to make sure to make sure yeah adding up to the right numbers yeah thank you um and as i said the check i put on kelly was only intended to in a very quick way when they send something back any change in the year or the number and what's in the five-year plan it'll immediately pop out and then you aggregate them we'll just have to go back and figure out what changed as opposed to what you're talking about is side by side pulling the data into a five-year format all right well um yeah i don't think we need a vote as long as we know kelly you're going to send the zip i'll send the zip to the town manager i am going to make i am going to make the one change to project readiness let's say that that is for one first year only is there a way that you can do that on the first tab so you avoid having to replicate it on each tab um i can where you can collectively make i i can collect it i can select all the tabs and do it all at the same time i mean i have to do it for each file but i don't know how to do that you should know accidentally how you do that yeah you you've accidentally done that and then you find out after that you've added something to all the tabs but yes you can do it you should have to be very careful when you're doing it that you um unselect when you're done with what you want to do i've done that too right forgot i was selected on everything but yeah i can do that and send it out okay so i would just copy brian and then send it with the memo to the department yeah i was yeah i will do that appreciate that um and i'm going to send it to them and copy all of you find copy thank you okay so our next item is the uh discuss the use of transcription tools to produce future meeting minutes i know we started that yeah so i can we put it up just yeah pull it up um are we just going to talk about it last week because it wasn't on the agenda right john had done a test so just wanted to try to get it on the agenda so people wanted to react to it i'm sure it could use some question how much how much intervention did it require um i gave it the agenda just so it had it as a reference um i gave it your format and then i typed in the six names that were you know that it popped up and said these are or you may maybe give me 15 but i went through and said use the names so that's it but did you have to how did you did you have to train it on because you did it from the transcription how did it know who was talking so it gives me a summary and says here's the speakers and i will just when i clicked on that one change put a name in and then it populated it through for where it based on voice recognition like okay if you said ryan was the one speaking here then he's also the one speaking in these other yeah there's a there's a few one-liner who i didn't bother yeah you know just someone saying well i think and then it moved on and so but yeah i mean it was six primary like categorization names and that was it so it was really fast so when it when it was done it it produced this did you then have no it gave me a transcript and then i took that dropped it into chat gbt and said okay now take these rules this is how i want to format it take make sure you use the same type of information but don't copy anything from your format and then generate what you think is substance based on a town medium blah blah blah which is essentially now set and said now remember to do this next time so and then ultimately did you review the finished product and make any further edits yourself no i mean i reviewed it i scrolled through but left it as it was there's some formatting opportunities i mean there always is but i mean it's definitely longer winded but in general i mean i'm not saying we shouldn't necessarily have to get longer winded than my minutes maybe the suckboard minutes are longer winded than mine yours are pretty sure pretty short like that i'd like to say this was a this it was slightly more detail which is it's fine i mean you know and i you know a lot of discussion once you get one more than one of us speaking um defaulting to members discussed takes care of the issue of uh have you correctly identified a particular person so there's a fair amount of members i thought it was pretty good yeah and i think it's a valid shortcut as long as somebody's giving it a read oh great well all the members have to read it and the one thing i've found with my minutes uh don't know this to be true that um on various committees on after a while i get the sense that people just assume i'm so detailed at it that yeah that's fine with us and the way i just don't get caught up in um like is that what i recall happening i don't get caught up in necessarily was that exactly you know go look up and make sure that that was the vote like i trust that you got that correct but that count right um and usually ours are pretty pretty much anonymous so it's not an issue but i do read it to make sure it represents how i remember the meaning going um i'm not going to nitpick your comments usually but clearly the vote votes are the most critical and probably if they're roll call votes or that's critical was this this that wasn't a roll call meeting was it um it was not no it was just the three of us so it wasn't a roll call it might be helpful to test it out on one of the meetings i'm doing this one as well right now we didn't have to do roll call votes tonight but if you're able to go back yep either wait until the next meeting we have somebody in first or just go back to one of the ones that you'd like to do roll call votes are any other committees uh using it for a meeting minute some are using it differently i think april method for pin comm is using the transcript from um the zoom meeting and i'm not sure you know what other ai or software she was using and then she would make any edits and the only i would say is as compared to when i was keeping the minutes for pin count which i may end up doing now that i'm back on there um i would get not too many edits at the meetings whereas they were probably spending like 10 minutes on minute edits based on at least what she was using to develop the minutes it's not critical of april it's just yeah and and folks are pretty detailed you know looking at that so that would be the only thing here where you know we might spend a minute or two on reviewing and approving minutes um if it gets to the point you're spending five or ten minutes because there's enough things that don't seem accurate right then you may need to just modify you know whatever parameters you've set or the alternative is billy said is you still should have someone designated as the minute taker and ideally they'd be reviewing it and making their own edits yeah before that goes off i think you should have someone designated for for the important reason someone should be writing down if you're not going to go back and look at the tape right somebody should be writing down the vote counts and if it's roll call right that because that's the critical checkpoint yeah um so i still think it's good to have yeah and the tape every once in a while
now as long as we have a hybrid meeting are you you're doing it off the zoom there's no good just here yeah yeah so um but yeah i mean last but i just did for the weekend yeah but wake cam does sometimes not tape yeah or there's a technical difficulty and you can't hear or so it's it's good to have a backup on the critical votes um that they're those are recorded separately and in fact in the pennies i've served on in addition to whoever the minute taker is typically i've seen the chair yeah i always record the vote yeah just to say the chair the chair could be the backup on that yeah as a chair i always recorded the votes and then when i review the minutes i do a quick look um look through my notes but it's just a good idea to have backup but anyway i thought it yeah i knocked me out of a job so back in the segment did you back on the pink i'm off to yeah
yeah i think like anything else with ai right it's a valuable tool but it needs supervision it needs supervision um if you don't already have in your prompt just telling it you know not to hallucinate which apparently is good to just tell it it can't not to hallucinate and only use you never told me that i don't know if you'd listen um but it i didn't know that you had to do that and you apparently can tell it not to hallucinate um just as a preemptive tool yeah i can tweak it and that's awesome to see there may be something that was strained the way it looked pretty good yeah no i thought it was good again you might i'll run again i'll run today's again just to see yeah the other thing is that you have to track um and make sure it's as accurate as you can make it is i've done it through an exhibit that contains documents distributed and or discussed at the meeting um and the way i track that is obviously take the minutes of meetings so i hear if we talk about a document or if someone said they will be distributing a document um and or if we receive emails that have documents attached i'll just start those in my email and then when i do the minutes i go back when i look at any documents i receive in between meetings and that those go onto the list and that that list of documents is is equally important to the open meeting law as the minutes themselves so ai won't know necessarily what those documents are so again the minute taker is going to have to come up with an approach to um try to keep track of what goes on that list um the only other the only other open meeting law uh reminder which i don't think we've ever had to talk about is minutes have to be approved by the committee no later than 30 days after the meeting or the third meeting after the meeting even though it might be after 30 days whatever makes whatever's longer yeah whatever's longer yeah so we don't meet and that's okay you just can't go more than three meetings by the third meeting and you may say no big deal but i've again seen situations where committees went beyond that third meeting and that becomes an open meeting law violation yeah i highly recommend the cadence that we have established since our assessment which is we try to do between we approve the meetings of the prior minute of the next at the next meeting right i did in an ideal world but again i was able to stay out of the minutes because i don't work but well and again with ai it may not be a big deal you may may say i got the minutes done at the end of the meeting no that will not be happening but i appreciate you doing that and um if you're if you're doing this meeting i'll do another set of minutes but if if you want to no no yeah for now i'm just we'll just try it i'll do another couple of them yes and that around again as a test yeah i think can you test the t30 glitches i think that's a good idea awesome so in terms of are you clear and like even for today we discussed the minutes we discussed his workbook we have to post those right where he has to post those you usually post the names of the documents yes okay the exhibit in the minutes would reference an excel workbook version blip from brian or chelly lapham but you don't but they don't post i don't actually some have asked us to post them on the town website we generally haven't okay i don't know if we had to start you don't have to um i've asked town clerk her view her view is it'd be great if you could yeah the slackboard for example creates a meeting packet not every single document appears in that packet um but slackboard has but at least you have to have enough of a description so that if someone wants to make a public document request yeah to the town clerk they need to be able to refer to you know be a early excel workbook version and that's from our email they're like we're not submitting that are we submitting them no but if you put that but if you put the name of the file right or what it is in the minutes then it can be right they can ultimately pull it if there was a request um but from our emails we're not storing i just want to make sure we're not storing it from our email um well the documents that have come to you attached to me those are those are saved on the town's server yeah i mean we're not going to save it as more special it's really just not sure we're clear okay okay great and in terms of um again just administratively again i'll keep doing this so like off the bidding uh once the committee approves them then you have to send a copy along to the town clerk town clerk's office there's a separate email address for the town clerk's office so once liz is back and we decide who might be the minute taker down the road i'll just copy that person a couple times when i'm posting the minutes just so they can see where it goes and then they post it on our webpage yeah and that's that is the absolute like voting on it is one but it's got to actually make it to the town clerk to be posted without that haven't fulfilled the job uh next item is uh discuss succession planning cfpc chair and vice chair roles finance and school committee designees so i left it on the agenda in case there were any updates uh the only update is i did get appointed to the pincon and i've sworn in and i'm now officially on two committees um and uh i've left carl barnes who currently is the vice chair we're without a chair at the moment uh that um gave him the dates i forgot to put in the set of minutes so i'll put them in the next minutes for tonight's meeting i gave him the dates of our wednesday meetings through october because that's about when i think i'll put us to be dropping off uh and alerted him that it's possible that we we might meet on a monday in the next two or three months but i'll have to coordinate that with him uh anyway the appointing board of which carol martin is a member appointed myself to the committee for one year and um i had a discussion with the chair of the school committee they said uh two days ago to let her know that i've been appointed to the finance committee uh told her that i had offered up doing my best to continue at least through the end of september roughly assuming we get the report completed of 27 of 20. yeah and uh that it would be uh if that if that will have to talk to me but if that made sense to her i told her i didn't at the moment foresee any similar conflicts that i was wrestling with um in the last cycle projects they might have on their list given all the discussion we had tonight there could be 10 of them um and um and i did have a brief discussion with her about what we had talked about the conflict between my concerns of perhaps their expectations that i would generally be voting in favor of any school committee request it's on their designee versus the bylaw which prohibits members from other committees that might have projects in front of this board from serving on this board that it didn't quite make sense that their designee would automatically have to default to whatever their position is she she agreed that that seemed in conflict um but seemed appreciative that i was willing to keep serving and that she was doubtful they'd be able to find somebody throughout the summer which i understand so i said i will do your best to begin to identify somebody i told her ideally if you could find somebody that's had previous service on a on the school committee particularly in the financial you know school budgeting area it might be helpful or possibly somebody that's coming off their long-range planning advisory committee might be another possibility um and she you know said she would take that under advisement so at the moment i think i'm okay and she seemed okay and i'll do double duty uh i'm not expecting a heavy lift on the fincom until could be early as september starting up if there is an override potentially as early as november um but as i said i'll have if i get a conflict i'll have to figure out which of the committee meetings might need me to create a forum well no i appreciate it we all appreciate you continuing about it so thank you and so the finance committee is supposed to have another designee yeah so they're going to have to one of the things i suggested to carl um a few weeks back is um they re-alerted him that kelly wasn't re-upping and that the finance committee is going to have to uh help i work with suck or try to identify a fincom designee which ultimately the fincom will have to vote to pass along to the select board for appointment i don't know when he's planning to schedule a meeting and what will be on the agenda but hopefully that will be and hope and my understanding from last meeting was there conceivably could be a candidate floating out there if there is still or who it might be it could be and i just don't know which it could be for either yeah so um but uh yeah so we'll have to work on that and the other good news is to brian keveney's point at least for this cycle having me sitting on the finance committee having sat through probably the upcoming two and a half months of putting together our report allow me to help the rest of the finance committee get their arms around their capital five-year plan much easier than they were able to do last year so i don't think they're going to run into the same problems they had on that budget we're going to have more than enough to do on the operating budget so that's my update i'll have an update we still don't want coming back but i'll stick around i meant to say that my recommendation with fincom since kelly's fincon that doesn't need us ever we should drag our feet until september sorry i think that might be a collective strategy we appreciate the efforts you've made we appreciate the contributions you've both made very sorry to see you go so i can't see anybody being in a big hurry to show either of you the door so if you plan if you're willing to stay i have a funny feeling especially if i get to vote in anything you'll be i guess carol two more months to come at you good luck i wanted to stay through that discussion if you wouldn't mind excuse me for a minute michael wanted to speak to you thank you thank you very much i'll come back when i finish we may not be here we may be done okay uh review and go to approve the minutes of jim 24 any comments changes edits i don't i don't have any um it's not it's not an edit but just for backing up to the discussion right before i had never included um the boilerplate open meeting law disclosure in minutes that i had done and the fincom um the only reason i started here putting it in was because and i don't think it's an issue because i'm not even sure the open meeting law requires uh is to necessarily be read i think it's good practice um is a lot of chairs will actually read it i think tonight you pretty much read it yeah kelly you were more comfortable just sort of summarizing salient points i don't necessarily think you read it so i thought uh i read it but i would just um i would condense like where it says if this meeting will be conducted in person or via remote i would change it to whatever we were so this meeting will be connected so i would just modify according to how the meeting was going to be run so what i historically had done would be to simply you know call the order and then i would write the chair um read the statement contained at the top of the agenda which is where it appears yeah uh i think for this upcoming set of minutes i'm going to revert to that approach that's okay with everybody oh it's fine yeah it's our agenda's posted so yeah yeah i don't i don't think it needs to be in there okay but um but i'll unless people want it out for this set of minutes i i'll leave it here but for this meeting minutes i'll revert to just referring to what's printed in the agenda yeah the only thing i wanted to point out and it's minutes are fine but i couldn't remember brian was the format of the minutes request a particular format requested from the town clerk um just so that john knows like if we have to train it to a particular no i think the top the top of the uh the top section is a format is a template yeah format so that that has to appear so what yeah copy paste yeah what you're what you produce would have to be everything below where it says minutes you can kind of have whatever format you want okay and and at the top of each extra page it's got a uh template header and the same page number so i can load the template in for it yeah good point killing but anyway i had no my own edits all right we have a motion to approve the uh minutes of june 24th so moved second all in favor aye aye can you start to it so you can't yeah so it would be the second right uh next input i guess uh setting time for the next meetings um so i have
i don't carry a smartphone i have a real calendar
so i've highlighted july 20 i'm going to put this in the minutes i highlighted july 22nd august 5th august 19th september 2nd yeah 16th 30th october 14th 28th or 4th correct and 18th correct and reverting back to december 9th and 23rd soon that one's not going to happen but yeah a picture of santa on here so i'm going to just list those in the um minutes this section of the agenda discussion yeah and we revert to 6 30 p.m and you have hybrid rooms reserved for all those dates yeah it's booked for all those dates um i did send an email i think right i copied you guys on an email to the town clerk letting her know yes yeah right but it had changed so that she knows when she sends so she'll occasionally send out reminders of hey it's a holiday you got to do your agenda early or um when she changes if she changes the format of an agenda or minutes she'll send out notices um for that stuff and you may it's always possible that if there's which is what happened with november right the town clerk like oh you know we're closed or we're having these we're having an event we can't give up any space we're going to move you um type stuff but otherwise you're booked for those dates yeah i am actually going to be i'm on vacation the week of august 5th so i will not be available for that meeting so you can do one of two things you can have your your vice chair run the meeting or you can move the meeting
well yes yeah and you don't have to make that decision right now you can make that decision got a perfect role if michael does what he said he's going to do we will have by the end of july cip forms back and presumably wanting to meet with department managers in august so maybe the kelly's point maybe maybe we pre-reserve maybe one of those mondays in august maybe like the 10th or something yeah or were you just getting back from vacation uh i get back the ninth this we're going too late in august to have those meetings with the department i mean it is what it is it's not sure we're going to get them all to show up one time anyway i'm okay at the time and well uh we can figure that out yeah we want to just uh maybe decide on the 22nd at the next meeting just to see where we are into the forms yeah that makes them discuss that on the 22nd and side whether they move that meeting and with that uh i think we're done can i have a motion to adjourn uh motion to adjourn at 7 42 pm second move all in favor aye recording stopped
This meeting is being recorded. And if it's recorded, it will be made available to the public on WACAM as soon as possible after the meeting. The public will be excluded from any executive sessions. Pursuant to Chapter 2 of the Act of 2025, this meeting will be conducted in person and or via remote access in accordance with the law. If this meeting only has remote access, no in-person attendance by members or the public will be permitted. If this meeting has remote access, one may watch or participate remotely with the meeting that can be found on site on the site. 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 in person or remote as applicable. Public comment should be limited to 2 minutes per person, and I know Ms. Martin, if you'd like to sit closer at the table, you're welcome to do so. Thank you. Thank you. Well, your chair. I want to let Brian into all the answering of the questions. Oh, it's nice to show up. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So, review the agenda. 530 was called to order. 535, public comment and members' response. 540, we'll discuss capital planning process and the timeline with ex officio CIPC members, including the town manager, finance director, and department managers as available. Discussions will include, but not be limited to, a comparison of the five-year plan and the annual town meeting warrant versus the CIPC's fiscal 2027 through fiscal 2031 report as amended to April 29, 2026 and related questions, feedback on the draft capital improvement plan, submission form, and outstanding capital project status. At 650, we'll discuss the use of transcription tools to produce future meeting minutes. 7.05, discuss succession planning, CIPC chair, vice chair roles, finance, and school committee designees. 7.20, review and vote to approve minutes of June 24, 2026. 7.25, setting time of the next meeting. 7.30, adjourn. 8 o'clock, World Cup game. 7.30, adjourn. 8 hitty. 4.30, adjourn. 7.30, adjourn. 8 o'clock,now YEAH. 8 o'clock, COVID-19. 8 o'clock, Monday, half of the week. 8 o'clock, March into October of 29. 8.65, Friday, last year. 8 o'clock. 8 o'clock, Kubernetes. 9.30, faucet, Monday night. 9 o'clock, échanges Oracle, heure'clock, Monday night. 9Coup Pegas, Monday. 9 o'clock, Monday, Thursday,8 o'clock, Friday of the week, to 10. 5. ontядes. 9 o'clock, Monday night. 9 o'clock, Sunday night. 10 o'clock, Sunday night. 10 o'clock, Sunday night. oh no he's right now analysis us us too and then the and he is his way cam and carol right one thing even though there's no member remote you may as well just mention which part committee members are here present yes in person uh in person um myself uh john klein uh brian excuse me early and kelly lapin are here in person so the next item on the agenda is uh to discuss the capital planning process and timeline uh with ex officio cipc members uh and actually kelly i would like some assistance here just in terms of uh carrying on the conversation and uh some of the some of the substantive aspects of it yeah there's there's a few and a few items in here and we can go in whatever order you guys want to go in i think there is still some follow-up michael from the last time you joined us on questions on differences between cipc's report and the ultimate recommendation that went to town meeting and we we tended to we tried not to fixate on every difference but on differences where we had gotten a different indication of either that project wasn't needed any more or was needed in a different time um so i'll start there is there any update on those questions that we discussed there was some follow-up when we left the last meeting i don't have an update this evening part of the biggest problem is those of us overlapping not being in the office at the same time um and we've had a couple of issues that have come up capital and otherwise in it but i think facilities that we've had to attend to so it really has provided itself to it but i can um work to get those back to you do you have a expectation of when i think that's critical to starting the process so i i one of the things that brian and i in the limited time we did have we're working on some of the issues really that are operating budget related due to override uh collective bargaining but we did talk a little bit about timeline about sending out to the department heads the capital requests so one of the things we want to do is do that this week and we wanted to have this conversation about formed okay um in terms of i know michael worked on some of his projects we have some people here i'm working with uh dick lombardi upstairs on some of his needs so we'll we have enough to i think to keep it busy discussing this okay all right so if you could just i'm no longer chair brad's acting chair at the moment if you can get back to him and let him know the expectation moment we'll see that because i do think that's a critical right because you're a step to have your recommendation in october so the idea would be is where in the first full week of july have people getting back their requests by the end of the month so that you have august september exactly yeah and to the extent when they send those requests back right some of those discrepancies are resolved fine but i think that if they're not right those are open questions that need to be resolved before the before we move forward yeah depending on what gets sent out i populated it your collective request at the last meeting individual cip excel workbooks for each department manager and i populated with the amounts that appeared in the five-year capital plan that appeared in the warrant and so to the extent that a number of our questions centered around um geez we were told this item wasn't needed i will assume that when department heads get their assuming to send out the excel workbooks and they see a tab for an item that they told us last year that's no longer needed despite the fact that it's in the five-year plan that the department manager will say this this item is no longer needed yeah that's that's one one one way it's one way to dispose of a good yeah number of the questions um so i think it would be i agree with you brian i think it would be helpful for the department managers if you have a list of questions by by side when you're doing it to be able to be like oh yeah that's i remember this so just to to bring up the at this point in time we said it was this and then later it changed or vice versa just so that they're they can be refreshed on on the fact there was a discrepancy but i agree with you when they get the the final what went into town meeting they'll be starting from that point they'll be able to address whether they still need something or not all right so why don't we move on then based on that to the capital improvement um cip submission form and i sent it to brian and michael mccall i don't know that you sent it did you send it on to any of the department managers no just brian and i we're trying to discuss is there any way to i have i can i have some copies too i sent to you june 29th yeah probably thanks i have some copies it's great it might be helpful for the public yeah i'll put it up on screen but you have it on screen and i apologize the second page i ellie did you do anything with the pre-populated i didn't send that version because we hadn't you had asked us to review it and when i was sending it it wasn't no um no so let me get this up on screen but you can bring up one of those if you have it easy enough because it has the template in it but yeah you just people could see what the tabs look like maybe it's going to take me a minute i got to get on first sorry it's not working but yeah can you share the um the one that brian said that's not all the tabs in it okay
this is a zip file and then it's a zip file the open one for facilities since michael pay is here yeah so while while john's doing that i'll kind of walk through what our thought process was so there's really two tabs in the in the file to start with one of them is sort of a general question it's not meant to have a tab for every project it's meant to be more for uh two things quality control on how many projects do you have in each year in the five-year plan to make sure that we've got everything because we've definitely had problems in the past where we've gotten some submissions at all of them so that's a good check the other is from a long range so beyond the five years um this was intended not to be every single project needed beyond the five years but michael especially in your case like hey we got five years but in year 10 there's a looming project and i want to make mention of it right so that there's awareness of that beyond the five-year period and start towards a longer range plan than five years but we know we're not going to have like listing out years five to ten it's more for the what one of the things that we should be thinking about and have on the horizon um that we're thinking so that's just one tab that's the first page of what i passed out yeah yeah it's the first tab you were just talking about yeah and then after that the the next tab is getting similar to the old cip form but we tried to take out some of the things that never got filled out that really weren't necessarily something the department manager would know right um and so they weren't going to fill it out um and focus on the things that we tended to end up asking each of the department managers in our meetings so that you know perhaps that could that could get reported out at the beginning and not have to be you know the subject of a lengthy meeting um and the goal so that's to the next two pages i do apologize that i printed this and um it's a lot smaller than i intended it to be so it can be made bigger if it's printed um brian has started brian early he started to go through process of taking everything that was in the request the town meeting and creating a tab for each of those projects so that the existing five-year plan will be available to the department managers as a full workbook and then i'm working on making it so that that whatever you populate summarizes back to your summary of all your projects and spend by year so that it creates that end product um file that that we've used in the past and so i think the goal tonight was to walk through the questions and talk about what's you know is that feasible not feasible hey that question doesn't really work for these things we shouldn't have it on here right the goal is not to have a form that doesn't apply or isn't going to get filled out the goal is to make sure we're getting asking for information that we can get right and avoid the back and forth and lengthy meetings on stuff that you know could be could be completed outside of of evening meetings so with that i think we can just probably stop start from the top and walk down and pause feel free to jump in and pause where we have issues yep one more yeah so idea being first first is project name department name and department manager name would pull in from that first tab because it'll it'll automatically populate in every thing that you open so you don't have to keep filling it out um and then to the extent project manager is someone different than the department manager that would be filled out boards and committees to approve isn't going to apply in every situation but some people have that um some don't and then included in the prior capital plan so when we populate this it'll be yes for everything that's pre-populated and anything new you want to add you would just copy that template tab and create a new project but it should be no for anything new right that wasn't already in the five-year plan so that'll effectively be pre-ordained right um in the original file and then project category is something that finance committee always tried to separate the projects by and my experience over the years is that they weren't necessarily like a guest and sometimes it was right sometimes it wasn't um so that's probably the first place i'd pause and say is that something that's valuable helpful easy to to ascertain um and i'm particularly interested in you know carol as select board member if you think that's it because that's ultimately information we'd ended up putting in the warrant of like what kind of project is this so if you think it's valuable to be in the warrant that's why it's here if it's not right that's worth it um so the the the cell actually has a drop down and you can just pick from the numbers so in the comments where there's one two three four so one is building repair two as equipment no i think i'll jump ahead of the um project description and uh justification is that can be copied into the warrant what goes in that cell it it should be it might need to be edited but the goal would be that whatever is going there is that the base for what goes into the warrant is is that expandable yeah you can just drag the you can drag the row down to make it bigger yeah it can be made as big you just and i know can't see it right now but if you double click on the bottom of any row if it's not big enough and you just double click it'll make it as big as whatever you wrote in there i notice although i think it's helpful information to collect and the project category and it's historically been included in the warrant i don't see that it was included this year okay so yeah historically it was i mean off chance that the finance committee wants to include it going forward i would suggest that we collect that information and it shouldn't be too difficult to pick from one of six categories and like another you're probably going to get it right yeah okay okay any questions comments so far now can i just ask real high level just the the layout that brian used is similar to the one that i used in other community based only off of the dor's form this reads more vertically the other one has more horizontal just generally your layout did you pick a different format or are you just trying to get as much information i'm just why it's vertical versus in horizontal because when you go to automate how it spits back out into other reports it's a lot easier to automate things that run vertically than like hey pick a cell over here and pick a cell over here and one over here it's much easier to automate excel to create the summary report so i know historically we've done this all manually right it's all been manually typed into cells but it doesn't have to be that way it's it's easier in excel to automate when things run vertically i'm sure you can still get that data and i was just curious because i'm used to seeing see how the various the impact on the budgets i'm used to seeing the budgets go the headings being on the top and you know you know i'm saying yeah so it's just it's a different layout so no no i agree but the historically the cip form in wayland at least was only for year one well there are some columns for the different years two different things right there was a summary tab summary file where projects were listed and amounts were listed in the columns to the right but the actual cip form that had a project description and had more information in it was only filled out for the first year and that's the that that tab or that workbook was what was generally used historically to start what was put in the warrant over the years my experience was less and less of that form was getting filled out and more of it had to be filled in at the end stages of warrant production by the finance committee which is probably not the place it should be done just because it tends to get as we saw this past year things got mixed up ended up in the wrong place um they weren't accurate descriptions of of the project that was listed so my point michael is if you filled this out and you filled it out for a given project we can automate the production of the more typical here's the list of projects here's all the amounts and here's the years and if you change anything you can automate the like push the button and create the updated report but what we're missing from that summary which we found last year was okay after year one i don't know enough about these projects unless we sit down and talk about what they are right yeah so said add to that this cycle will be a bit more work because each department is going to be asked when you agree to complete one of these for any year in which a request is likely to be made when you get the next year obviously they'll have that all populated from this cycle we're coming up on and that can all be kind of brought forward amended um so i think it'll be a little bit more work but some of the descriptions are going to you might describe you know high school windows one year and then you have it three years later just required windows so you're going to have basically the same description cut and paste yeah so the hope here too was for projects that are multi-phase that we're seeing each phase so you know the fiscal year listed is the year that you're going to town meeting asking for the money but it's actually part of you know a three-part five-part project uh town building roof so we're seeing the whole right the whole project from soup to nuts hopefully um and understanding that all in one place rather than i've got some some piece of it over here some piece over here and some piece you know out five years from now so that was part of the goal of doing it this way and that for example use roads tom doesn't need to fill out five forms for roads it's the same project right being requested in five fiscal years he can fill it out once and then that also helps make sure you've got consistent um description across right across the years is there and i can't see at the bottom is there a tab that says um project and then the word multiple or yeah there's any of them yep this next one they click that one this should be an example where whatever the description of the project is who's requesting money the facilities budget in two different years that's so it's vehicles for michael's department yes we'll go back up i need to keep going i'm sorry so rather than having a complete two forms you just you're going to have same amounts and the description will just indicate that it's for a similar project or vehicle whatever it is over multiple years make it a bit more efficient since we're asking for more information it's a little later on but you want to hit it now kelly in terms of the uh when you have a multiple you have multiple requests over fiscal years for a similar project what happens when you have to rank the project oh well i'll wait to get to yeah we can wait to get there you can still use this form for the rest of your discussion and brian from a early from a prior year appropriation were we able to populate that or no um i didn't go back and check okay um i don't think we had very many yeah i think last year we might have had like one it had an ongoing project that they needed more money for an example of that would be station two so first year would have had a cip had to go back to town meeting ask for more money had to go back third time ask for more money so the second time if you were filling one of these forms out you might populate the fact that there was money asked in prior years correct yeah because ultimately that is something we report we tried to report out at some meeting this isn't a new request it was a subsequent request and the reason it was a subsequent request was because things that got found changes go right along the way my guess is most only zeros yeah
how do you if you're now going to pre-populate the five-year plan not the joker value but if somebody already has something they want to move the year it's already in the plan so you'd have to say can just change they can just move it change the form so if it was the 5.4 in 2028 in the free populated they can move it down will they change it in your five year at the same time in theory yeah you'll re you'll reproduce the summary so we have a starting summary of what the right from the warrant of what it looked like we know what it looked like to start with we send these out they change it the ending summary which i'm working on we'll move it right that'll be um it'll spit out in the year that they moved it through and you'll be able to compare the year over year totals is there a master five year that these you're going to be if each department it goes in edits it's just like a you know google docs when you share a sheet everybody can come in so we're not we don't you guys don't you go you don't no i don't yeah you don't use google docs so we we can't do that right we have to give the way i envision it is we have to break it up and give each department their their tabs of their projects and they can only edit their projects and then when they bring them back very last right we can summarize the total for the town um by pulling them all back into the same file so what i did is there's two tabs in each workbook it's two identical tabs with one exception first the second last tab is the five-year plan detail that appeared in the warrant there's the warrant excerpt um and then below it is all the detailed projects sorted by department sorted by fiscal year right and i tried to group them uh in a way that um you know then i resorted that looking to try to again get to multiple similar projects over multiple years for able to prove us being the most logical one so this allowed me then to say okay that'll be one form for those first four projects if you look down at facilities on each separate workbook i have a return formula that is tied back to the individual form so the numbers and the forms come from this five-year detail any number that's changed in the cip forms in their workbook is going to come back and create a variance on this nothing to do with what you're talking about this is just an internal check so that when we get this back we'll immediately know where they go through all the tabs what's changed dollar-wise year-wise um and then any new tabs will be yeah the tabs are separate and then um surprise that and again what kelly's talking about is that once we get what we think are the submissions it's grabbing that data and creating the five-year of our talks with plan okay i'll ask one question yep brian this is a very simple answer but so on the road work that's an annual request they've already got the four in how do you add the fifth one in without reinventing the wheel did they just break there's a row for it can you do this um exactly the template or the first time the first project time just in the next year yeah any multiple tab there should be a uh fiscal 33 you can there's 32 is already on there and found free and after to the extent there's some of michael's projects extend beyond the ones so next year i could for example tom will take the same file yeah click on the same tab that same file will be in there and it just adds the next year yeah well because right now the way it's set up it's set up to populate the year based on um the general tab so if you flip to the general tab yep we haven't gotten to next year yet but we'll make it so it rolls yeah everything's for it a little everything that'll be a question that gets asked yeah i know just change that just show i don't have an enable disorder okay so if that does that change to 20 29 and the general tab it'll shift to you but we haven't gotten to rolling next year forward we're trying to do this next year um so if it's the tab that says uh 23 and after are you looking for a total like if i have yeah we had tom building in mind for that one right if you've got five depending on how we divide up that project i we envisioned right if we looked at last year we had like five years of individual requests and then there we hadn't gotten to the ultimate rest of the work that had to be done i'm envisioning that being like however many things that you have in your site right so if it was we're going to work on roots for five years and in the six year plus we've still got to do xyz and that's a million dollars you put the 10 million dollars in there it's just trying to keep the site of how much like we talked about last year how much are we spending right on this building and the more informed we are about the total spends right to work sure more informed decision the town can make about what whether to proceed with that or do something else absolutely yep at some point we get to the 10 year we start actually planning 10 years and it will be 10 years here right for now yeah i just wanted to make sure it was you were looking for a total number because if you break it out 23 to 30 you know what i mean yeah no just a total okay i don't think it's necessarily like for like roads where it's a repeat i think this is really oh yeah it's meant for a big project it's not everybody's going to need to do that right it's going to be for the big projects that are on the horizon um another example you have you know design money for a large capital project that happens to hit in in the fifth year and then the project is coming in the sixth year typically we wouldn't see that anywhere necessarily right that's more what i think we're after here but the bigger long-term projects probably be picked up partly by the description on the general tab right where you're going to identify things that are yeah probably 10 or 15 years yeah yeah this was more meant for for things that are continuation of spend that's in the first five years versus completely new projects so like the school if the schools were to proceed with you know building all new schools that's that's going to go on the first tab at this point right that's not ready for i don't think um yeah sort of general description not not detailed out yet any more questions on so far
so then operating budget impact um i'm going to use an example here kelly want to use the community center as an example of the kinds of things that would appear here hopefully yeah i think there's other examples but the the community center is a good one right where building a new community center meant there needed to be i think janitorial staff right that we didn't have before so detailing out what that cost is what staffing impact right if there's an additional maintenance cost at the home building right is there a cost that that's not factored in it's going to go on the operating budget it's just trying to identify that as a for awareness as a part of the capital project i think we've gotten somewhat better at that over the years but when the town voting on a project they should understand um in both directions operating budget impact in other cases there's been projects that were being done manually or with contracted right equipment we were renting and so the decision to buy a piece of equipment reduce the operating cost of um equipment rental right so it's it could go either way um but i think this has often been one of the sections in the old form that was not completed um and it won't apply to every project but there are some projects where it should be considered um and completed right for so that the town is fully informed yeah i'm sorry did you just indicate that there will when we have it there there there could be scenarios where there's decrease in operating costs so the high school septic system so there's going to be a decrease in the annual pumping so that would be the kind of thing that would show up here so you know net decrease
the useful life was you know again things like radios where we should be budgeting it for every four year cycle or whatever we want to do like this is so we don't appreciate it right this is where it would go at least we could see hey this should be repeating a 10-year plan was like that yeah and i think there's a lot of requests like that where we we don't agree yeah we don't adequately understand how often it's going to happen um and then we get a lot of well it's the end of useful life but we knew it was going to be end of useful life right sometimes we don't know sometimes it's software companies that say we're not supporting it anymore but often we know that it's going to have an end of useful life but we don't have it in the plan for the for the end of useful life so that's trying to help us get to you know does this does this need a repeat we didn't think to put it into a separate land but in the other category i would find it helpful for example if you knew that there's a warranty so if you have a roof done and they give you a 20-year warranty on it that'd be helpful to just put a note in you know 20-year warranty so again people can anticipate if something goes wrong
and i'm still hoping for the ones that have revenue we don't get that many of those this is probably so cool wishful thinking the minutiae when i got here i was told we don't buy our cruisers in the capital that is correct and i've always thought since we're doing these types of changes and we're doing useful life i think typically most cruisers in most meetings get two maybe three years i mean is it worth writing that wrong well isn't isn't our doesn't our capital policy say it should have a useful life of at least five years i mean and i thought that was uh was that moody who who raised that i don't know but louise was the one that implemented to run nothing implementable when we know what cruisers is removing them from capital budget oh no they've been in the operating budget for america right but it was believes no it was before louise so i was before we back to front yeah but it was since you came i'm not saying we do that but i'm saying since you arrived here and i as we arrived at the same time he was always in the middle it was capital to begin with and we moved in party we don't unless it was 2013 we've been putting the cruises on the police budget for our but the issue is i as i recall is it's it's the useful life isn't yeah it just doesn't seem right but i i think it okay i mean typically view it as a capital asset i think we've been told is that there's such wear and tear and mileage put on them that it it really i mean it really doesn't feel like the typical capitalized now from an operating budget standpoint it'd be great i don't know how many cars are in there for a year but it's great so it'd be great to get that out of the operating budget this year but it'll just come back at some point if you're borrowing i'd also be curious as auto shut off has become more prevalent as we buy new cars if that's still true that they have a useful life of if it's purely mileage i mean i i thought part of it was also the amount of run time like how often they were on because you're generally running 24 yeah but is that true with with auto shut off if you're we're still not you're sitting in the stadium's parking lot parking lot is the engine on the whole time or is it does it turn off it's cold wow i think we would have to find out because they they don't get standard say for explorers they're called police interceptor eagles right yeah i only have ever seen anything in the capital budget west three three years ever well the capital policy says useful life in five years so i i think if you're going to make an exception since we're here talking about it yeah one of the items that item i was for operating budget discussion okay yeah no i think it's worth the discussion i think you would want to amend your policy if that was something you changed but well it's it's tough it might be in your life makes it seem like an operating expense because you're really not getting a whole lot out of it before it's done okay any questions on the operating budget section project readiness and schedule um i think this is trying to get at a couple of things one for projects that are you know multi-step again michael probably falls in your arena more than most um but maybe some of tom's too you know where is this project in terms of its readiness at the point you're submitting it um right it's ready to go designs um happening your conceptual planning stages i'm most interested i don't know if these categories are i'd be interested in your feedback right on what the categories should be um i think there's a lot of projects that wouldn't have this right it's you're buying a piece of equipment it's a little bit simpler than that um but particularly the bigger projects that are over a longer span what we're trying to get at with both the readiness and then the dates is an understanding at the point when we're asking the town to approve the money how long is this going to take before it should be spent so that then when we're doing project status going forward we have an understanding of like okay we're behind you know we've got outstanding capital because we're behind the schedule that we thought we were going to be on or we're ahead and having a better um understanding that's something i don't know i don't think historically whalens have a real good um handle on collectively individual department managers might but um this is trying to get at do we have too many projects in one place going on right they're not getting done we need to if we're going to allocate resources we should allocate those resources to projects that that can get done um but that's really hard as a committee to to assess if you don't know what the expectation was and i think for those of us who don't live in this world right i don't know should the project take a year two years four years right depends on what the project is it's not the project itself it's where it's happening right anything that happens in the school i can't start till i want a good following the year because we approve it this year i have the plan for it i can't do it during the school year from july one of next year is when i can actually start the project so the monies that we approved i'm just starting projects and we hit the ground running but but so that's where it gets a little tricky um the money seems like it's sitting but it's really not it's waiting right but if if if you were to lay that out where you're doing flooring and you say yeah approve july 1 of 26 i'm going to be doing design right it will be complete sometime in that next year construction will start at least if we lay it out ahead of time we've got an objective to measure against if we never lay it out we don't know what we're measuring against so this data just stayed with the project because it doesn't show in your the two different five-year plans so it's just for project vetting when you're sitting with the yeah yeah yeah and this may be another area brian we didn't talk about this where we have to this should be specific to the year one ask versus the out year asks right you can't i i can't see where you can do this for a project three years yeah it would just be for if whatever you're requesting for this year yeah the year you're asking for would be that that would make closer yeah then would you need a mechanism as the fiscal years go as something slides down you have to do an inquiry numbers so if he put something in in 32 right now yeah but he doesn't have any of that information as it slides over well in the roll forward of conceivably in the roll forward for the next year when this whole file gets rolled forward at some point 32 will be the first year and he would update recording okay he would update the dates when it falls into the first year it's a good tracking mechanism actually it'll help with so the department's going to see all the project tabs so they would go back in yeah yeah for my department yeah for your department yeah you're not going to first yeah for your department you don't want to share mine is cool you don't want to peer review everybody else good thank you yeah we'll be looking for the same tags and multiple department files i mean some of this information could be and those those are five categories those are those will work they're general enough where it's makes sense okay all right so now prioritization of the funding request so this was one area we did talk about so overall project rank was meant to be for the first fiscal year only so for facilities projects only you're going to request let's make it up 10 projects order those 10 projects for the first year one to 10 in terms of you know your which which is most critical to be done down the line and and that was to help as you guys all saw last year right there's a limited amount of resources you can't decide right what's going to get done from one department to the next but if it was you know there was a limited amount of money and you had to go in order which what's the order you would go in for projects within your own department just to inform the allocation of resources so that's the first one and then the ones below that and i didn't actually say you probably could have reversed this i think we initially had what kelly's just about to go through which sums to a priority ranking total and not that this would happen but we were concerned that if the department manager could all ones in for every project they'd all look to have the same priority so we said okay if that happened by default we're going to also ask for a numerical ranking one or whatever and i think we'd only really be using the numerical because inevitably this this uh calculated rank should be different for every project that we think and it it's possible something come out with the same rank but yeah this was trying to get at we you may remember last year the committee tried to do high medium low the sort of a primitive right how do we think of it um but this was trying to break it up into a little bit more quantitative or qualitative care uh characteristics of the project and what why is it a priority right not just say i think it is but what makes it is it is it something that's required or mandated we have to do it right um is it aligned with a plan right that the town's been on a path to do right does it provide some sort of value to residents right is it repairing something that you know it doesn't get repaired it's going to be an issue for residents getting down a little bit more detail um and the thought was that that if i pick on roads where you've got five years of it your answers are not necessarily going to be different right for your one of roads versus your five of roads so you could answer that um that ranking but agree with what brian said we were anticipating if if you know someone all of their projects for a given department ranked at the same point like what's the tiebreaker and the tiebreaker for year one projects is based on the department managers priority ranking of their own projects so yeah i like what you're doing first of all i love this is unbelievable number one um but number two i understand what you're trying to do that but you let me say dale's advocate here and what happens when you get some department comes in and said i have 10 projects and four of them are number one and then the next one can be five and six they can't they have to they have okay specifically that first question is put them in order right one to ten right you got some problems i think this could be some so the general reason why right it might be one of the ones that has this issue because has a number of projects serves as several several i could throw out three three projects that are one priority for life safety reasons right they no longer support the hardware for the fire fire system so those to me would be all one priority yeah and and that's what the the more detailed questions are trying to get at but still at the end of the day you got to go one two and three and you want to if you want to add we can add another where you say hey my one two and three are all ones must have right i think that's good color to add but because i think that ultimately comes down to michael and brian when we get to there's so many resources okay well i've got to give facilities one two and three and i'm going to have to take that from somewhere else but it still needs to you need to try and put them in order um because what if what if one you know what if one is you know ten million dollars and two and three are a million dollars right games that match right and i get that and it's just unfortunately you know things don't break and i think that's where i think that's where you know there's there's plenty of boxes on here and go together and be like just put your color in right why why can't this wait right and i think we tried really hard last year if it was health safety that went first the problem is you run out of money quickly right when you get done with with health safety yeah well and i think for your budget for one two three four five aren't really the risk it's unless they're really big it's the seven eight nine ten where you're starting to have that debate right yeah yeah or you start to have the hey can we break up any part of this to the between health safety and other and we have the discussion about well you can but it's going to cost you a premium to break the project apart right and then kelly said we we did high medium low this is an attempt to be an attempt to be a little bit more sophisticated by that but what as kelly said a little more color to better understand what the what the requirements are and needs are a little more sophisticated but we didn't go as sophisticated as some of the other towns we looked at that were ranking project components with decimals so it was like 1.25 plus yeah we didn't we didn't go that detailed but we feel that easy and i think there's no doubt that there will be um confusion in the initial run through some people might just put fives across the board other people give it meaning and underrate their projects well they do so at their own risk because if they then come and meet with us and we look at their submissions and everything's right highest priority five we're going to say okay then you're leaving it up to us right yeah which ultimately we then recommend to you and then that's giving it up to you you know there are always people that it's five but i think so the first year is going to be a learning process and there will be dialogue both while i assume there can be dialogue well folks are filling these up and then after and then we're going to have the same i presume meetings with department managers to go through their requests and you know hopefully gathering this information in advance of those meetings will make those meetings more productive yeah more efficient um we can drill right in on things that just don't make sense to us i mean it's meant to drive conversation right so it's not and then we're all having the same conversation regardless if we're in this room we're saying to you guys you know until the review at another stage you'll see this is why they say said that and asked these questions and if something changes then we change the ranking right i mean it's meant to have some sort of control mechanism so we can communicate better and also i think just even going in when the department manager are thinking about what their needs are for years one through five i think some of these questions uh will prompt that consideration for when they fell forward yeah i don't think any of us were comfortable at least with the amount of information we ranked things on last year we feel like right that wasn't necessarily fair to the department managers who have a much deeper knowledge right of their projects we're doing with what we could with the time we had um but we'd like we'd like the committee the town manager the finance director and the department managers to be on the same page about why they are placing something where it is and the one the one item michael and brian need to really have a meeting of the minds on is i'm not sure how brian this when you've been the keeper of the receiver of the cfp requests in the past and you've at times had to make your own judgments as to where things fit in the five-year plan that ultimately got proposed to the finance committee um i'm not sure you necessarily went through this level of detail you've inevitably had conversations with department managers um but at some point you had to make your own judgment based on financing resources etc and i think historically you've you've been somewhat reluctant to move things that are in in this case 2028 through 2032 because they're in a five-year plan now and your expectation is we're pretty much going to see what was in 2028 to 2032 with new requests for 2033. that's at least what i've heard you state in the past doesn't mean you haven't accommodated you know a new request here there as you did last year there were multiple new requests that you brought in and inevitably it forced you to have to pick a few that were otherwise in fiscal 27 and you had to move them out and so you know we just want to make sure we don't go through this whole process about collecting the information from department managers evaluating at this committee writing up a report with recommendations that are all based on a prioritization scheme that the two of you are going to basically say well we're not interested in that we want everything to be what was in the five-year plan in 2020 2032 subject to some numerical adjustments we don't want to be reprioritizing which is what we did last year we we looked at every single project and at the end of the day what went to the fincom was not that and so i'm all game for doing my part but i don't want to needlessly have the department heads do all this work we do all the work and you all it's a totally different view we don't need to solve that tonight but we do need to solve that um well i think this is the part that's probably most important to get i agree i don't want to make them do it if it's not the criteria that ultimately
town manager and finance director want to use to to decide we should we should make sure whatever criteria we're asking for is what is and it's not be all end all we all know that sometimes you just yeah that's nice but we can't do it but i think we want to be on the same page on what what we're asking for is the information that they're using to make those decisions well we've been doing this seven eight years for the right point so my take on it is is that after seven or eight years many of these departments should basically have their program in place what we're seeing for the most but i don't pick on the school the school every single year walks in you can take a look at that believe it's ryan getting it up there it's the chart um 28 they get they get 10 projects i guarantee you they're going to say i want them 10 and 10 more yeah they have not evolved to understanding what define you capital i will give you a real-time example uh i think it's in fiscal 29 of the schools the million dollars for the msba has got it there yeah 29 or 30 30 30. i couldn't get them as their liaison or their designee i couldn't get them to focus and tell me what year they thought that was going to really be needed that's where it appeared in the prior five-year plan that's where you chose to leave it and what went to fincom that's where it appears but i know i've listened to their long-term building planning meetings at the school committee and my understanding is come next spring they're looking to get geared up to get their application into the msba and once they do that they they may need access to that million dollars probably in the fiscal 28 yeah um so that that's an example of that's going to be coming i expect but my whole point was once the department works in and says i mean i'm doing this for seven years i get i had a truck in the third year and i won it in the first year my pushback is you should have known that last year yeah if it's reoccurring every single year we have these musical chairs of project going back and forth but what the departments don't get is that you keep they may want to move a truck in the third year that's funded by debt bonds and moving into the first year where i already have too many bonds out i may have to use free cash so it's impacting other projects and what they don't understand also is when it isn't funded by debt i have to go to the bank get the debt service build it into our operating budget try to project an override if i'm constantly changing the debt service then we don't get a feel on the override now but that's why for the most part i push back hard on these people and i said well you should have known that last year i understand something goes south in the building you know you need a boy let me and everybody gets that but in the case of the school and i'll pick on them and i've been open about it they walk in every single year and it's christmas shopping as if they're going into their next fiscal year deciding what they want to buy and they don't they don't go second third fourth fifth year out they just don't yeah and anybody who's been doing this for a while is carol you've been around you've seen it and i've kind of read this i guess yeah so you get 10 projects out there i guarantee you when you get to that next year they're going to want those 10 and 10 more or they want to want those 10 move out of here bringing 10 more yeah if they they have not evolved so it's causing a lot of issues excuse me one second at one point i saw kristine up there i don't know if she's still here kristine miss bavison was there i saw her up at the when we were looking we're starting to look at the uh just like the um the uh the software when omar easy asked the math curriculum we said this is an operating expense and i told him you know we're not in the capital budget unless you come up with close-outs so he came up with close-outs with the understanding that this isn't going to happen again more than we all last year school walks in with more curriculum i think with the history that was illiteracy that was literacy literacy and again they should have known that the year before that was the source and so we're going to come up with next year curriculum on something else we're funding it that's why they're doing it yeah but the superintendents groups have been pushing this in their meetings as i start now in timothy far in winchester all these curriculums moving off the operating budget and all the capital i started the winchester time meeting they all got up and said why is this operating expense so it was pushed through the superintendent some of the meetings this is how you get these things in the budget because i started in other municipalities we started way last year yeah i i don't disagree with you brian and i i'm well versed in all the schools um ask for capital and you can um i can make you a gift of our meeting with them last year where i told them in our meeting that they can't you know exactly that we can't do that anymore if you come back here next year and you change your whole first year plan right it's just going to be no i'll be disappointed they're going to watch it yeah i know but the answer is going to have to like that's i'm still here the answer has to be no because we can't we can't keep doing that and so i think there's a mix i there's a there's a balance between taking into consideration change circumstances right the boiler fail it wasn't in the plan we have to do that okay versus literacy curriculum i just realized i'm going to need a literacy curriculum just now it wasn't in the plan last year right that i can't i can't explain that right um and i don't understand how we can keep doing that in capital so i think there's there's a balance but the question still for the projects as they're submitted i think it's still good to understand the criteria it's still good to understand some of the characteristics of why you might consider one has to go in that wasn't planned for but i think the justification has to be good right there has to be good reason why it has to move and i'll pick um on michael right the elevators in the town building not meeting code right they we didn't know that we don't really have a choice that has to get that has to get done um but that's a health safety criteria that changes the view from the prior plan so this committee had a chance to rank you guys had a chance to put together a budget i think collectively we all have to be very stern on okay if it's changing from what we had last year you gotta like there needs to be a whole lot of reasons why that's got to move otherwise it's not moving and for going into override seasons it becomes only that much more critical to the extent it's going to affect the operating budget right i think nice one i don't need to start a problem here but brian what are you talking about we still heard i think brian um where's the msb i can't read in this family the ms 2030
now i want to talk to mr kevin didn't we fund i think i'm still in the final school and i think louise was here we funded some money for them to apply msba for building i think it never had a range yes it was an initial amount and then there was another amount yeah but they they were walking back
but we have funded some i'm positive somebody what i like well i think i think some of the funding is what they're using to pay the architects now to do the long-term planning but but there's get into the mba msba process there's a bunch of feasibility work that then has to happen uh which will cost money them and that really sucks maybe the wrong numbers well that's the other thing it was a million dollars
it's not a million dollars i'm worried so one of the fun i have just suggestion is perhaps when the letter goes out to the department heads i assume it goes into the schools as well that right in there the capital letter says no matching grant no curriculum and no operating expenses please don't submit those projects well maybe we maybe we do it that way i don't know yeah i don't i don't know what the words are but i i would also be careful with the swaps because that's another thing we've had issues with right so you want curriculum so you take out floors and push it out two years well the floors still have to get done right that didn't really right that didn't really change yeah an ask didn't go away and ask got moved and was that really the right priority flip um so i i just want to be careful because there have been a few of those where the ask didn't go away and it didn't even you know didn't right didn't even delay you know a year or two yeah so we're still talking about an over either one year or three years so the next plan particularly for uh you know 28 and 29 years for dental service needs to be pretty much stable because we know the debt services for 28 this will generate debt service for 29 so at least for the next couple of years in this next plan can't have things materially moving away and then the last session was intended for to the extent their support there won't always be but to the extent their support for the request in the form of an estimate an engineering report site plans any anything that's far enough along right that those can be attached um if available to avoid sort of follow-up requests if they're if they're already available yeah so here an example would be it's not that we didn't ask for it but at least they've been putting in the form it'll prompt people to do it but the baseball field that was proposed to be moved up which ultimately you're recommended capital budget michael um you know we asked at least three times along the way from the very start can you show us a site plan that shows how the two projects might overlap and what impact it might be and we didn't ultimately get anything to that until after we had completed our report uh and in fact then when we got it the physical site plan showed that there was no that we were wondering is the septic project going to dig up half the required digging up half the field or leeching field we had no clue and the plan that i finally found was dated in october of 2025 so i'm not quite sure why that couldn't have brought forward because that might have you know allowed us to at least explore it more deeply but we ended up having to leave it in 2029 because we just didn't have the information on which to feel comfortable recommending that um and that's when i told the school committee chair as their designee that it wasn't that we were necessarily opposed but we we don't want to badger people and so maybe you know i know the fire chief did a good job working in the ambulance we said what backup do you have for the six hundred and twenty thousand dollars whatever it was for the ambulance you pulled out a piece of paper and you had you know here's here's the cost i got quoted yeah three years of inflation because it's going to take that long for us to actually get the thing um and so those are the kind of things that hopefully um you know this will prompt tom holder is usually good he likes to give us uh photos of you know trucks that are rusting through and things of that nature and that that's helpful i mean it's not like we don't believe people but it's it's helpful to have that discussed in an open meeting um just before i lose the point of thought um just as a placeholder i was looking at a um what was a set of minutes or an agenda for the library trustees and there was a laundry list of at least six to eight capital related projects to the library building that all looked somewhat substantial and i was scratching my head because we've we've spent a fair amount of money and appropriate a fair amount of money for repairs and other things um so i i hope you're in the loop on that you might look at their last agenda and look at the projects whether they're projects that are i don't think you've spent all the library money yet and so maybe they're projects that are in that list but i want to make sure that you're aware that there might not be new needs and uh just curious i saw the uh sidewalk ripped up again where it looked like the sewer line that's national great that's not nice national that budget is basically all the new hvac it's going in this year starting in september they're getting all brand new units this is all under the money that they already got appropriate yeah the only thing if you look at that list is the wish list on the bottom like the glass wall uh things like that that none of that's been appropriated for that's all wish money yeah and that's their money what i have in the capital projects in the outiers has to do with their parking lots um we have we can get a free generator from the water department we gotta figure out where to put that um so they'll get a free generator we don't have to buy that so we can take that out of the capital plan because that's out 29 or 30. so the stuff that's in there has nothing to do with what we're doing now this is all this was planned as a four-phase we did the exterior we tied them into the um town store so they're no longer in septic the second phase was the interiors we brought up some ada improvements the third phase was um there's something about a roof that leaked and cause damage and then correct but we're putting all the units on the roof we're getting them out of the building up above that decorative ceiling in the middle of the open area well that's what we well it's leaking constantly the units leak because they're in the attic so we're putting them on the roof before we put new units on a roof we've got a 30-year roof we put a new roof down so but that's all money that's within their their existing budget that's none of that's new money head off so we're not head off no no make sure you're in the loop yes i'm very much so in the loop i think head off is a good phrase one thing i want to say about the ball field is from my perspective it wasn't really the school so much as dpw and engineering were looking at or advocating for that for economies of scale and efficiency while they were doing the other thing and so they probably couldn't answer a lot of those questions that you really needed you needed additional support i think that's i mean i raised that willing that last of making sure there's clear understanding of who owns projects um and and it may be different depending like that right who's gonna who's gonna run the project versus who the stakeholder of the project is can be different but i think we got conflicting right information so knowing that up front the board of public works basically said we don't order public works on dpw or of course we didn't know the chair anyway then chair said we don't that's not our project you know get it out of our capital ask list which is where it was school committee didn't find out in me about the project until right around the time the fincom was reviewing they apparently inquired the school committee uh we just need to be sure you're supportive of this baseball field kind of so they had a five-minute conversation in the school committee meeting so it you can always point it kind of you know i know tom holder was that's that's the position that he stated when he first brought it to our attention under his submission um you were kind of on the periphery of it and cursing was aware of it but it was kind of this big project that you know we we didn't know who to ask or who could actually supply the information so how can you make a decision yeah someone has to right even if there's there's always going to be multiple and especially michael here's there's multiple parties involved but somebody's got to own it from uh who's asking who's who's the leader of asking for it and you know if it's if that's defined it makes it a little bit easier sure and i would i would i talked to the chair of the school committee on something else the other day and i uh suggested to her that um hopefully through you and kirsten if she's still on um i really think it's important that um school committee be presented not only with the current fiscal year requests but the full five-year set of requests and assuming the town manager you agree with putting out these uh workflow templates and we then are gathering more detail on all requests ideally that schools most of which are facilities through projects schools can provide that to the staff can provide that to the school committee in whatever form they want to but it'd be sure helpful but to know that the school committee had been apprised of what their requests are they were they got fiscal 27 only they they've got a five-year plan my first year here i said i gave it some of my memories first time susan was still here uh that i wasn't asked last year i'm saying last year and again it may have just been with the transition um susan departing and kirsten coming in but i i think that any any board that has its ultimate authority like i know tom older you know he does all the work does a great job and eventually he gets to the board of public works and says here's here's our submission but usually it occurs after those forms have been submitted in a perfect world seems to me that if the department reports to a border committee they should get their stuff done and then give it to that border committee have them say yeah that's fine put it in because they ultimately are going to have to help advocate if if there's to brian's point if there's some good reason to make change or some new ask i would like to think that the board or committee um is going to have to step up and say yeah we really support michael though if you remember when we met with school committee they wouldn't talk about anything beyond FY27 excluding facilities requests they they had no requests beyond FY27 that's what i'm saying at least last year but it's not just that's a that's a school committee right or school school representative issue it's not just facilities projects it's everything the schools are looking for outside of the first so it sounds to me like you're saying we have a different plan because in the past there is conversation between facilities and schools what projects need to be done so it's been a consistent issue that brian alluded to earlier that beyond year one right is so that's that's what i'm trying to nicely say rather than say it to mr fan yeah please provide with a five yeah i don't think that's i think there's two parties involved and i think that the interest is there the request should be made for having a conversation yeah yep yep agreed okay of course would i pass that along to bookman chair so i want to try to wrap wrap up here if there's any other comments questions on forum requests so we're not using the other form at always that's our hope is that we can use this and we have a version of it that brian has pre-populated um that we can share um the committee is good with it um how about the learning curve or you know i think for the most part it is intuitive you give the numbers give the five to the ranking but um there are any additional instructions you think we do in company i mean there's there's a general budget capital budget statement that we brian and i realized that we send we did but in terms of instructions on this new forms we want to try it out i yeah i tried as much and that's where i'm looking for your feedback to include the instructions right next to the item if we think there's more instructions that need to go in i think i was trying to because i know the old one had like a separate sheet with numbers on it that you had to go look at and so it's trying to get it right in front um so that as you're filling it out you see you don't have to go reference another set of instructions and what we could do and brad you or i are probably the logical persons that people might want to uh department managers might want to reach out but to offer one of us up uh as an immediate resource as to you know mechanical questions in the form um as people get into it and i was going to say well once you tell them what at least we thought it was intended to do right um and i'm hopeful everybody's first enough in excel that they can cut you know copy your template and multiply how many new projects they have but maybe not um for brian's point if uh if you need more space than the row seems to be giving you and it's not automatically expanding you know what you have to do um um or to the ranking questions yeah so i'm i'm happy absolutely absolutely yeah i agree if you want to offer brad or my name up and just drop us an email and either one of us could you know call somebody so the pre-populated versions did you map the five-year the capital plan from last year and the five-year plan that we were looking at into that that's five yeah basically i linked each when you look at the form i actually have a link to the last tab in the workbook that's the five years worth four years worth of projects in the five-year plan so the department could double check saying okay that number is coming from where okay this tab there's my list of six projects that got into the five-year plan and then from there they have to say okay am i still good with that number that's not there's the new number type it in am i still good with that year okay i got to move it so i'm going to take it out that box and put it here and i'm going to write an explanation that that's kind of thing um so my only other question to brian i didn't want to get too much today is mobiler as you accumulate these individual departments but you'd be sharing your updated file with brian so he gets to see it and how i know you have a lot of spreadsheets that link to one another are your spreadsheets as your capital separate that you manually copy in some of your uh debt service and your funding it like if we we try this if we try this model itself populates the five-year plan how much of learning curve for change and what you're doing let me ask by this when you got the cip forms from last year my recollection is you either manually take the numbers off those forms and stick them in one of your spreadsheets your capital workbook spreadsheet or you might link it to that yeah yeah i don't have a separate file each year yeah i don't actually copy off the cip form they fill up the cip form but they also fill out a five-year right by year by project by my mom so we're going to make it we're going to make it create that five-year summary and to the extent i'm willing right to the extent there's a follow-on spreadsheet that you need that to link into i'm happy to help link those things in but the goal is that not that the department managers don't need to separately fill out a five-year grid because they're going to fill out the project detail and we're going to automate the the production of the grid right of the columns your file when you're done sure just automates to michael you know and very little adjustments go straight to the finance committee we don't i don't want to get to the point where you have a totally separate file i rebuild mine it should be to the point where a file comes in michael may not change something whatever but then that file transitions to the finance committee but i was just wondering some of your files rely on data from other files you is the capital five-year capital plan you've been using independent of any of the operating budget how do you you know when you're funding these and you have debt service and bonds and things you take any of those numbers out of your yeah well yeah i think the five year plan i send it to the hilltop they send me back a debt a debt schedule i use that debt schedule into the operating five year five year okay it doesn't stay with the capital five years so when i used to do in one of my other communities i had links to other spreadsheets so that they would bring data in you're not doing that you have to there's an intermediate step hilltop to get the end data numbers which you plug back into your operating budget okay i just wanted to make sure for anybody listening at home that this could work without blowing up too much yeah i mean we one of the other big discussions about that brian is we left our own devices on on what funding sources should be debt free cash whatever um we went at it um based on the fincom thresholds and tried to ensure that we didn't max you know go over the maximum amount of levy debt or whatever free cash um i'm sure you do the same thing in your capital workbook and i think the biggest issue occurred because the way we prioritize things um we hit limits at different points than ultimately you did because you had you know you had projects in different years mostly in the years they appeared in the prior five-year capital plan so you know this is simply collecting the requests we still then have to make sure we agree what year the committee thinks they belong in and then we have to come up with proposed funding source and one of the suggestions i made at i think the last meeting is it seems to me could be better if this committee in putting help helping get put together its final recommendation including funding sources before that went to you versus we take a stab at funding sources then brian agrees or disagrees and then gives you something that's potentially different what we had that that created the number of the funding variances at the end of the day i don't think it's any more or less work for brian it's just the question of do you plug him in uh at the front end of the process as opposed to an intermediary and i think that may be even more critical ellie's going off and i'm going off and um absent getting someone else that's been through this process of my understanding from brad anyway is that it'd be sure helpful to have brian's involvement you know at that level on the front end yeah absolutely um but we're going to start with at least like the starting point is going to be the funding sources right we're not going to start from scratch they're going to start there and then adjust but we need to sense maybe i think the delta was the surplus funds these are like an ongoing no there's another one they come they keep brian keeps working on closing on things so do you think you have an idea when we might know how much the surface comes with no but i mean with the you know in the events of 26 and we had a big snow and ice issue but we you know we're not going at the level of turnbacks you know well that's turn by sometimes i'm talking about close-out capitals yeah yeah pre-cash level may be the same or not grow i think the the next the 20 28 budget may lean more heavily on those closeouts in order to maintain our fund balance level but we may have to restrict a little bit the use of pre-cash and the offset of that is just you know put pressure on these folks to turn back the products and do you have an idea when you know when that number is no i mean we're going to have to reign them in i would think in the next couple months yeah so maybe by october first we would know what the surplus funds will yeah i mean they're they're they're my code it's in october 15th we need that number yeah we need two numbers you need right three numbers you need you know where are you trying to get from a debt standpoint right right that load that you can fit you think you can fit in the next year and i know that's next year's debt but we need how much free cash or can you safely put in plan right maybe and we did this last year right hey there's this much you think we can do if there's more if there's happens to be more capital closeouts or free cash availability then these are the next three projects that should should roll in so that you can sort of get that tentative schedule and know what the add-ins are if you have more but you start with the conservative this is how much free cash we think we have and this is how much capital closeout we think we have um but you anything beyond that is sort of in waiting so obviously with the law the committee has and knowing of the available bonds the more likely the plans the recommendations will yeah match a line thank you so i think that's really the key we want to look at next okay we don't want to open up this capital budget in general right so we don't want to do that department come in and said you only will the miss five things one of the um again we're talking about both the form but other things we wanted to talk about um so when i looked or we looked at the capital closeouts there was at least one maybe two items that jumped out of me um us it was a uh unexpended amount of money for district-wide windows or flooring or walls i forget what it was that and most of the money hadn't been used yet and brian that ended up being closed out and that capital was used for funding this 27 budget and my question was in the five-year plan itself there are at least one if not multiple district-wide flooring district-wide walls district-wide windows and it just didn't make logical sense to me that once you get something appropriated for district-wide whatever it is you're going to use it all because you got stressed out over a bunch of years you got all these other plan district-wide i didn't understand why other than you needed money why did the schools if that's who agreed close out that particular item why did that make sense to you if you're just going to have to come back and so ask for more money now because michael you know that's that's a project that a set of projects that can't get done now so i assume one of the things you're going to have to do with the schools is look at okay which what schools have we intended to use that money going now we can't we got to build that now into the next step so i'm just curious this process wise yeah it's one thing to need the money it's another thing to go after to close out project i think the other one was um may have been an i.t related project was a similar situation where we had this big discussion at town meeting about firewall protection everything else and then it was this large i.t project that i think got closed out um and it just didn't it didn't make sense to me it was in our list of i think in the case of the um the district-wide flooring superintendent and christine wanted the um software is a literacy so i told them i'm not putting a budget unless you go close our projects and they went back and found those projects and that was one of them that you know it's it you know in my opinion it should have been in the budget capital budget all along it's it's a it's a you know spur of the moment project it was substantial and i told them that you know we can't put a net on funding unless you go back and find closeouts which they did so it's same sort of thing with i.t right if you notice the year before he did under mike mccann it wasn't a lot and nick barney comes in and there was a lot and i said that i don't have money to fund this i understand you want to have it is there anything you can close out and that's where that came but that's yeah so i i guess i would just raise and this goes back to the who owns the project that hamstring michael from continuing on right is that that may be what schools decided was the priority but ultimately we sacrificed a facility a facility in order to fund and brick curriculum i think we got to have a uh the departments all have to be on board with that together if we're doing that in the future because we're just going to end up you're going to have to you're going to have to put more money in district-wide flooring in another year right and i i don't understand how we explain to residents right you agreed this was a priority you voted for it and we didn't do it but we're going to close it out because we want to do this other thing and we'll come back and ask you for that money later unless we're going to tell residents that that's what we're doing when we use the closeout yeah and the way the way we addressed it and again i appreciate it it's your capital budget at the end of the day the way we addressed it in those situations were uh did not assume we were going to close out something that we really needed money for um but rather we we prioritized everything that was in the capital budget and those things that had low priority that were otherwise in the five-year plan in fiscal 27 we just pushed them out and i know when you did your budget a number of the items we had pushed out make room for the curriculum etc because half of was being funded by grant funding but you wouldn't get grant funding if they didn't have the other half funding we didn't we didn't place a particularly high priority on spending 200 grant on sidewalk improvements versus educating kids you made a different decision you said close this out and then i'll let you put that in so those are the kind of there weren't a lot of them but those are the kind of things that we need to in the next two months be prepared hopefully to have back and forth discussion um so that we don't end up with these you know variances um and that it seems to put our committee at odds even though we're advisory now manager finance committee somehow things you know they're looking to us as well i mean they can read our report we're not we don't report to the finance committee um and i think we would collectively like to avoid that scenario so both any work that could be done on real closeouts in the next month or two understanding there could be more work needed for the new year that would be helpful to find that out and having brian work with us during the month of august early september to try to pull together in the funding aspects of what we're doing i think would be helpful i just think we'll end up with a better better end product doesn't mean that we'll agree at the end of the day on everything but that's fine yeah i would just hope that closeouts in the future are projects done we've got money left over projects not needed anymore and we've got money that we can give back right or projects not going to get done in a near-term time frame right and we're going to have to and the costs are going to change like we're going to have to come back later and ask for it again um right but it's not just well i just moved this project ahead of this thing we already asked for because it gets really confusing to a resident like i thought we already you know we already approved that project why are we asking for it again but to me this is some of the value that this committee is providing you know you're able to take a much longer term and a longer view of how our capital budgets have been functioning and you've identified a couple things and you certainly have come up with some terrific ways to track this and i think that the department has i'm going to speak for you now you're ready they're going to really like this form because it's going to provide them you know with a file that they can do one place look at everything once they get initially set up i seem like it too much this year but maybe next year although i'm really liking it um because i think in the end it's very helpful oh and i think it's a learning curve for all of us you know and how this committee now fits in to the process even though we all want it still we have to figure out how to look at ourselves and smooth on our edges as we go so that's what just say one more thing for the department heads if they listen to us later and you can like if we honestly want feedback right if you see something as you're filling it out you're like this doesn't make any sense we shouldn't do it like this like we want to hear that back this is not a be all end all we're just trying to move move the ball forward to there's something that's a little bit more informative yeah brad where did brad came up with the substance that's in here kelly formatted it in excel um generally a substance of this came from one or more other communities that you yeah the state has certain uh certain forms certain formats uh pulled it from various different communities um and actually i did an ai check as well and i just uh put them all together and you know you helped a lot in kelly format the whole thing but uh i tried to try to take pieces and parts from different um different towns and uh that would fit our situation like the ranking for example like you said we saw some comp would have silly ranking systems very very complex three decimal places yeah and and some have extensive you know you don't get your project discussed if you don't have all the backup photos and plans in the house and they had huge extensive files all of which you can find on their website so and some forms were half a page we i think we view this as kind of slightly a step up from what we've been gathering and and the biggest component to me is getting the information on years two through five at the same level of detail that we've generally been getting it for the first year but that's really the substantive change and then the ranking um so hopefully what we could encourage and i again i i don't know if kirsten is able to be on for she did get on for that long uh publicly through this meeting and i'll send an email to her and i'll um as well encourage them if they have time to watch this meeting and you know certainly we could make time maybe on the next agenda to if either both of them were available and wanted to um stop in virtually and i think our our interest though is in getting the you know assuming you improve my company getting the form out as sooner than later so that we get the process started because i think it probably will be take up some maybe some questions i'm not sure brian and i have some meetings we have some other stuff to tackle in the morning but i'm sure we'll have some conversations unless we have any major feedback we'll start tailoring our updated budget memo that goes with this and send it out explain what we're doing all right so we're we'll discuss if there's anything brian the template that you put together that has everything but then i'm going to break that up by department and give you the give the templates for each department yeah it is there is there is a template for each department okay so the zip file has
right right yeah sorry so you would simply find the workbooks that go to the right you know tom over gets water or waste water and pressure station and bpw and michael probably would get copied on the schools as well right yeah anything that has to do is to the school facilities out there we'll end up the mic yeah review anything that's they have a separate workbook just because there's some with non-facility related items right right right well certainly okay we'll finalize that and get that off yeah we knew that all the workbooks you created yep yep i forgot about it i looked at it when they first came over it's not too daunting i would probably just send them a zip file and then everybody can unpack a zip file and let them let them pick their own yeah yeah yeah take your something secret in the other ones you have to have a dozen crisscrossing no no don't let tom do you guys have a shared no no we can't share a drive but do you guys have a shared drive that you work on so that you don't have some shared drives that we could probably put that on that's right but then in order to get it emailed who gets who gets the ultimate feedback from the department well the department head would want to and we'll put that in the instructions they would email it to this committee they would see who it needs yeah does the committee have a general email address for each one there's a there's the ipc yeah committee email address yep let's deal with that everybody should go to me too should we're fine yeah i get them anyways but oh you get them anyways the exit yeah general numbers are on all right why not so they could just do the committee when they're done they also meet with me and michael so at the same time you're working on it we're looking at what they want to do right but if they use that general cipc committee email address it includes both of you on that email address for general one and it also goes to all of us so that's the best email address please and uh just as a heads up um at one of the finance committee meetings uh that i watched uh at the end of their process last year there someone one of the members suggested that they might want to meet with department heads and um release the capital i just hopefully discourage that and i'll be sitting on the finance committee now uh i will at least personally discourage that just because part of the reason that this committee is set up was to avoid making the department managers you know taking extra time so and you discuss that with whoever the chair of the finance committee is at some point you could discourage on as well since again we have we report advice to you from this committee i appreciate that we did this on monday nights for these folks to create the defense team already has the capital budget for the next four years they have they have they should be looking at it now and pre-planning for what for becoming in a perfect world there wouldn't be many um adjustments in the first four years we really want to bring in 50 years yeah so there's nothing preventing them we did that he's getting we did that two years ago we went through your suggestion we went through the capital plan for the prior year typically because we had three new members in like october and uh it was helpful and i'm not sure why they didn't um get out last year last year i think they waited to february yeah i'm not sure why but i mean with the budget all the articles getting the capital yeah yeah i will be encouraging that what you just described is in fact done
one thing could be considered if there were particular income members that wanted to be they certainly could have a joint meeting and when you're meeting with the department head when cipc is meeting with committee and they welcome to come but you know urge right it's not fair to ask them to come to come to two separate meetings and it and it breeds some of what happened last year where we've got we met early in the process and others met late in the process information changed along that naturally but we're coming at it from different um that's a good idea different viewpoints because we have different information at the different points in time we could vote to send this package out because there's no changes we just needed to i need to we need to get if if you had time to look at it if there's any yeah we can get a discussion about that and dismiss these but i don't want to everybody else for no i appreciate everybody coming in i know it's uh monday night so it's uh it's very helpful to us and uh again if you have any questions comments um you just just send them along um but but appreciate the time you've uh gave us tonight that's very helpful to us that we'll we can move on to the uh our next uh agenda item so i don't want to sit in thank you thank you thank you very much thank you thank you thank you thank you yeah i appreciate it it actually didn't take down longer than i don't believe longer than that i don't believe but it was less than two hours really i managed to figure out a way how to at least replicate the tabs very quickly okay and then i just said i just had the list of i sorted it in a way that i was able to just pull it across yeah point to the formula and auto populate then i put a couple check figures in that yeah i checked i looked at the checks just to make sure to make sure yeah adding up to the right numbers yeah thank you um and as i said the check i put on kelly was only intended to in a very quick way when they send something back any change in the year or the number and what's in the five-year plan it'll immediately pop out and then you aggregate them we'll just have to go back and figure out what changed as opposed to what you're talking about is side by side pulling the data into a five-year format all right well um yeah i don't think we need a vote as long as we know kelly you're going to send the zip i'll send the zip to the town manager i am going to make i am going to make the one change to project readiness let's say that that is for one first year only is there a way that you can do that on the first tab so you avoid having to replicate it on each tab um i can where you can collectively make i i can collect it i can select all the tabs and do it all at the same time i mean i have to do it for each file but i don't know how to do that you should know accidentally how you do that yeah you you've accidentally done that and then you find out after that you've added something to all the tabs but yes you can do it you should have to be very careful when you're doing it that you um unselect when you're done with what you want to do i've done that too right forgot i was selected on everything but yeah i can do that and send it out okay so i would just copy brian and then send it with the memo to the department yeah i was yeah i will do that appreciate that um and i'm going to send it to them and copy all of you find copy thank you okay so our next item is the uh discuss the use of transcription tools to produce future meeting minutes i know we started that yeah so i can we put it up just yeah pull it up um are we just going to talk about it last week because it wasn't on the agenda right john had done a test so just wanted to try to get it on the agenda so people wanted to react to it i'm sure it could use some question how much how much intervention did it require um i gave it the agenda just so it had it as a reference um i gave it your format and then i typed in the six names that were you know that it popped up and said these are or you may maybe give me 15 but i went through and said use the names so that's it but did you have to how did you did you have to train it on because you did it from the transcription how did it know who was talking so it gives me a summary and says here's the speakers and i will just when i clicked on that one change put a name in and then it populated it through for where it based on voice recognition like okay if you said ryan was the one speaking here then he's also the one speaking in these other yeah there's a there's a few one-liner who i didn't bother yeah you know just someone saying well i think and then it moved on and so but yeah i mean it was six primary like categorization names and that was it so it was really fast so when it when it was done it it produced this did you then have no it gave me a transcript and then i took that dropped it into chat gbt and said okay now take these rules this is how i want to format it take make sure you use the same type of information but don't copy anything from your format and then generate what you think is substance based on a town medium blah blah blah which is essentially now set and said now remember to do this next time so and then ultimately did you review the finished product and make any further edits yourself no i mean i reviewed it i scrolled through but left it as it was there's some formatting opportunities i mean there always is but i mean it's definitely longer winded but in general i mean i'm not saying we shouldn't necessarily have to get longer winded than my minutes maybe the suckboard minutes are longer winded than mine yours are pretty sure pretty short like that i'd like to say this was a this it was slightly more detail which is it's fine i mean you know and i you know a lot of discussion once you get one more than one of us speaking um defaulting to members discussed takes care of the issue of uh have you correctly identified a particular person so there's a fair amount of members i thought it was pretty good yeah and i think it's a valid shortcut as long as somebody's giving it a read oh great well all the members have to read it and the one thing i've found with my minutes uh don't know this to be true that um on various committees on after a while i get the sense that people just assume i'm so detailed at it that yeah that's fine with us and the way i just don't get caught up in um like is that what i recall happening i don't get caught up in necessarily was that exactly you know go look up and make sure that that was the vote like i trust that you got that correct but that count right um and usually ours are pretty pretty much anonymous so it's not an issue but i do read it to make sure it represents how i remember the meaning going um i'm not going to nitpick your comments usually but clearly the vote votes are the most critical and probably if they're roll call votes or that's critical was this this that wasn't a roll call meeting was it um it was not no it was just the three of us so it wasn't a roll call it might be helpful to test it out on one of the meetings i'm doing this one as well right now we didn't have to do roll call votes tonight but if you're able to go back yep either wait until the next meeting we have somebody in first or just go back to one of the ones that you'd like to do roll call votes are any other committees uh using it for a meeting minute some are using it differently i think april method for pin comm is using the transcript from um the zoom meeting and i'm not sure you know what other ai or software she was using and then she would make any edits and the only i would say is as compared to when i was keeping the minutes for pin count which i may end up doing now that i'm back on there um i would get not too many edits at the meetings whereas they were probably spending like 10 minutes on minute edits based on at least what she was using to develop the minutes it's not critical of april it's just yeah and and folks are pretty detailed you know looking at that so that would be the only thing here where you know we might spend a minute or two on reviewing and approving minutes um if it gets to the point you're spending five or ten minutes because there's enough things that don't seem accurate right then you may need to just modify you know whatever parameters you've set or the alternative is billy said is you still should have someone designated as the minute taker and ideally they'd be reviewing it and making their own edits yeah before that goes off i think you should have someone designated for for the important reason someone should be writing down if you're not going to go back and look at the tape right somebody should be writing down the vote counts and if it's roll call right that because that's the critical checkpoint yeah um so i still think it's good to have yeah and the tape every once in a while
now as long as we have a hybrid meeting are you you're doing it off the zoom there's no good just here yeah yeah so um but yeah i mean last but i just did for the weekend yeah but wake cam does sometimes not tape yeah or there's a technical difficulty and you can't hear or so it's it's good to have a backup on the critical votes um that they're those are recorded separately and in fact in the pennies i've served on in addition to whoever the minute taker is typically i've seen the chair yeah i always record the vote yeah just to say the chair the chair could be the backup on that yeah as a chair i always recorded the votes and then when i review the minutes i do a quick look um look through my notes but it's just a good idea to have backup but anyway i thought it yeah i knocked me out of a job so back in the segment did you back on the pink i'm off to yeah
yeah i think like anything else with ai right it's a valuable tool but it needs supervision it needs supervision um if you don't already have in your prompt just telling it you know not to hallucinate which apparently is good to just tell it it can't not to hallucinate and only use you never told me that i don't know if you'd listen um but it i didn't know that you had to do that and you apparently can tell it not to hallucinate um just as a preemptive tool yeah i can tweak it and that's awesome to see there may be something that was strained the way it looked pretty good yeah no i thought it was good again you might i'll run again i'll run today's again just to see yeah the other thing is that you have to track um and make sure it's as accurate as you can make it is i've done it through an exhibit that contains documents distributed and or discussed at the meeting um and the way i track that is obviously take the minutes of meetings so i hear if we talk about a document or if someone said they will be distributing a document um and or if we receive emails that have documents attached i'll just start those in my email and then when i do the minutes i go back when i look at any documents i receive in between meetings and that those go onto the list and that that list of documents is is equally important to the open meeting law as the minutes themselves so ai won't know necessarily what those documents are so again the minute taker is going to have to come up with an approach to um try to keep track of what goes on that list um the only other the only other open meeting law uh reminder which i don't think we've ever had to talk about is minutes have to be approved by the committee no later than 30 days after the meeting or the third meeting after the meeting even though it might be after 30 days whatever makes whatever's longer yeah whatever's longer yeah so we don't meet and that's okay you just can't go more than three meetings by the third meeting and you may say no big deal but i've again seen situations where committees went beyond that third meeting and that becomes an open meeting law violation yeah i highly recommend the cadence that we have established since our assessment which is we try to do between we approve the meetings of the prior minute of the next at the next meeting right i did in an ideal world but again i was able to stay out of the minutes because i don't work but well and again with ai it may not be a big deal you may may say i got the minutes done at the end of the meeting no that will not be happening but i appreciate you doing that and um if you're if you're doing this meeting i'll do another set of minutes but if if you want to no no yeah for now i'm just we'll just try it i'll do another couple of them yes and that around again as a test yeah i think can you test the t30 glitches i think that's a good idea awesome so in terms of are you clear and like even for today we discussed the minutes we discussed his workbook we have to post those right where he has to post those you usually post the names of the documents yes okay the exhibit in the minutes would reference an excel workbook version blip from brian or chelly lapham but you don't but they don't post i don't actually some have asked us to post them on the town website we generally haven't okay i don't know if we had to start you don't have to um i've asked town clerk her view her view is it'd be great if you could yeah the slackboard for example creates a meeting packet not every single document appears in that packet um but slackboard has but at least you have to have enough of a description so that if someone wants to make a public document request yeah to the town clerk they need to be able to refer to you know be a early excel workbook version and that's from our email they're like we're not submitting that are we submitting them no but if you put that but if you put the name of the file right or what it is in the minutes then it can be right they can ultimately pull it if there was a request um but from our emails we're not storing i just want to make sure we're not storing it from our email um well the documents that have come to you attached to me those are those are saved on the town's server yeah i mean we're not going to save it as more special it's really just not sure we're clear okay okay great and in terms of um again just administratively again i'll keep doing this so like off the bidding uh once the committee approves them then you have to send a copy along to the town clerk town clerk's office there's a separate email address for the town clerk's office so once liz is back and we decide who might be the minute taker down the road i'll just copy that person a couple times when i'm posting the minutes just so they can see where it goes and then they post it on our webpage yeah and that's that is the absolute like voting on it is one but it's got to actually make it to the town clerk to be posted without that haven't fulfilled the job uh next item is uh discuss succession planning cfpc chair and vice chair roles finance and school committee designees so i left it on the agenda in case there were any updates uh the only update is i did get appointed to the pincon and i've sworn in and i'm now officially on two committees um and uh i've left carl barnes who currently is the vice chair we're without a chair at the moment uh that um gave him the dates i forgot to put in the set of minutes so i'll put them in the next minutes for tonight's meeting i gave him the dates of our wednesday meetings through october because that's about when i think i'll put us to be dropping off uh and alerted him that it's possible that we we might meet on a monday in the next two or three months but i'll have to coordinate that with him uh anyway the appointing board of which carol martin is a member appointed myself to the committee for one year and um i had a discussion with the chair of the school committee they said uh two days ago to let her know that i've been appointed to the finance committee uh told her that i had offered up doing my best to continue at least through the end of september roughly assuming we get the report completed of 27 of 20. yeah and uh that it would be uh if that if that will have to talk to me but if that made sense to her i told her i didn't at the moment foresee any similar conflicts that i was wrestling with um in the last cycle projects they might have on their list given all the discussion we had tonight there could be 10 of them um and um and i did have a brief discussion with her about what we had talked about the conflict between my concerns of perhaps their expectations that i would generally be voting in favor of any school committee request it's on their designee versus the bylaw which prohibits members from other committees that might have projects in front of this board from serving on this board that it didn't quite make sense that their designee would automatically have to default to whatever their position is she she agreed that that seemed in conflict um but seemed appreciative that i was willing to keep serving and that she was doubtful they'd be able to find somebody throughout the summer which i understand so i said i will do your best to begin to identify somebody i told her ideally if you could find somebody that's had previous service on a on the school committee particularly in the financial you know school budgeting area it might be helpful or possibly somebody that's coming off their long-range planning advisory committee might be another possibility um and she you know said she would take that under advisement so at the moment i think i'm okay and she seemed okay and i'll do double duty uh i'm not expecting a heavy lift on the fincom until could be early as september starting up if there is an override potentially as early as november um but as i said i'll have if i get a conflict i'll have to figure out which of the committee meetings might need me to create a forum well no i appreciate it we all appreciate you continuing about it so thank you and so the finance committee is supposed to have another designee yeah so they're going to have to one of the things i suggested to carl um a few weeks back is um they re-alerted him that kelly wasn't re-upping and that the finance committee is going to have to uh help i work with suck or try to identify a fincom designee which ultimately the fincom will have to vote to pass along to the select board for appointment i don't know when he's planning to schedule a meeting and what will be on the agenda but hopefully that will be and hope and my understanding from last meeting was there conceivably could be a candidate floating out there if there is still or who it might be it could be and i just don't know which it could be for either yeah so um but uh yeah so we'll have to work on that and the other good news is to brian keveney's point at least for this cycle having me sitting on the finance committee having sat through probably the upcoming two and a half months of putting together our report allow me to help the rest of the finance committee get their arms around their capital five-year plan much easier than they were able to do last year so i don't think they're going to run into the same problems they had on that budget we're going to have more than enough to do on the operating budget so that's my update i'll have an update we still don't want coming back but i'll stick around i meant to say that my recommendation with fincom since kelly's fincon that doesn't need us ever we should drag our feet until september sorry i think that might be a collective strategy we appreciate the efforts you've made we appreciate the contributions you've both made very sorry to see you go so i can't see anybody being in a big hurry to show either of you the door so if you plan if you're willing to stay i have a funny feeling especially if i get to vote in anything you'll be i guess carol two more months to come at you good luck i wanted to stay through that discussion if you wouldn't mind excuse me for a minute michael wanted to speak to you thank you thank you very much i'll come back when i finish we may not be here we may be done okay uh review and go to approve the minutes of jim 24 any comments changes edits i don't i don't have any um it's not it's not an edit but just for backing up to the discussion right before i had never included um the boilerplate open meeting law disclosure in minutes that i had done and the fincom um the only reason i started here putting it in was because and i don't think it's an issue because i'm not even sure the open meeting law requires uh is to necessarily be read i think it's good practice um is a lot of chairs will actually read it i think tonight you pretty much read it yeah kelly you were more comfortable just sort of summarizing salient points i don't necessarily think you read it so i thought uh i read it but i would just um i would condense like where it says if this meeting will be conducted in person or via remote i would change it to whatever we were so this meeting will be connected so i would just modify according to how the meeting was going to be run so what i historically had done would be to simply you know call the order and then i would write the chair um read the statement contained at the top of the agenda which is where it appears yeah uh i think for this upcoming set of minutes i'm going to revert to that approach that's okay with everybody oh it's fine yeah it's our agenda's posted so yeah yeah i don't i don't think it needs to be in there okay but um but i'll unless people want it out for this set of minutes i i'll leave it here but for this meeting minutes i'll revert to just referring to what's printed in the agenda yeah the only thing i wanted to point out and it's minutes are fine but i couldn't remember brian was the format of the minutes request a particular format requested from the town clerk um just so that john knows like if we have to train it to a particular no i think the top the top of the uh the top section is a format is a template yeah format so that that has to appear so what yeah copy paste yeah what you're what you produce would have to be everything below where it says minutes you can kind of have whatever format you want okay and and at the top of each extra page it's got a uh template header and the same page number so i can load the template in for it yeah good point killing but anyway i had no my own edits all right we have a motion to approve the uh minutes of june 24th so moved second all in favor aye aye can you start to it so you can't yeah so it would be the second right uh next input i guess uh setting time for the next meetings um so i have
i don't carry a smartphone i have a real calendar
so i've highlighted july 20 i'm going to put this in the minutes i highlighted july 22nd august 5th august 19th september 2nd yeah 16th 30th october 14th 28th or 4th correct and 18th correct and reverting back to december 9th and 23rd soon that one's not going to happen but yeah a picture of santa on here so i'm going to just list those in the um minutes this section of the agenda discussion yeah and we revert to 6 30 p.m and you have hybrid rooms reserved for all those dates yeah it's booked for all those dates um i did send an email i think right i copied you guys on an email to the town clerk letting her know yes yeah right but it had changed so that she knows when she sends so she'll occasionally send out reminders of hey it's a holiday you got to do your agenda early or um when she changes if she changes the format of an agenda or minutes she'll send out notices um for that stuff and you may it's always possible that if there's which is what happened with november right the town clerk like oh you know we're closed or we're having these we're having an event we can't give up any space we're going to move you um type stuff but otherwise you're booked for those dates yeah i am actually going to be i'm on vacation the week of august 5th so i will not be available for that meeting so you can do one of two things you can have your your vice chair run the meeting or you can move the meeting
well yes yeah and you don't have to make that decision right now you can make that decision got a perfect role if michael does what he said he's going to do we will have by the end of july cip forms back and presumably wanting to meet with department managers in august so maybe the kelly's point maybe maybe we pre-reserve maybe one of those mondays in august maybe like the 10th or something yeah or were you just getting back from vacation uh i get back the ninth this we're going too late in august to have those meetings with the department i mean it is what it is it's not sure we're going to get them all to show up one time anyway i'm okay at the time and well uh we can figure that out yeah we want to just uh maybe decide on the 22nd at the next meeting just to see where we are into the forms yeah that makes them discuss that on the 22nd and side whether they move that meeting and with that uh i think we're done can i have a motion to adjourn uh motion to adjourn at 7 42 pm second move all in favor aye recording stopped