May 13, 2026 – Capital Improvement Planning Committee – Video & Transcript
May 13, 2026 - Capital Improvement Planning Committee
recording in progress 6 30 p.m on may 13th and i'm calling to order the meeting of the capital
improvement planning committee um this meeting will be in person and remote access so hybrid
we are the in-person meeting is in the wayland commons room at the town building which is the
former council on aging room right so this meeting may be recorded and if recorded will be made available
for public on white cam as soon as possible after the meeting pursuant to chapter 2 of the acts of 2025
this meeting will be conducted in person and via remote access in accordance with applicable law
you may join us in person at the town building or at the link on the town's website remotely on zoom
when required by law or allowed by the chair persons wishing to provide public comment or otherwise participate in the meeting may do so at the meeting location or on zoom public comment should be limited to two minutes per person all right so members attending in person are john brian brad and myself kelly and then we have liz on zoom so we are in hybrid mode um and that means we will need to do we'll call vote if we vote on anything all right so agenda 630 is call to order review agenda for public and announcements 635 is public comment and members response 640 discuss the comparison of the five-year plan the annual time meeting warrant versus cipc's fiscal 27 to fiscal 31 report amended april 29th including related questions and debrief on the capital motions at annual town meeting including but not limited to items 8 9 and 10 brian will will fill us in on that seven o'clock discuss next steps to advance future cipc report process including but not limited to those outlined in the report um potential revisions to the draft cip submission form and the cipc project plan for the remainder of 26. uh 8 10 is discussed succession planning finance and school committee designees to the extent there's any updates there 8 20 review and a vote vote to approve the minutes of april 29th 8 25 set the time of next meeting and 8 30 adjourn um i will just note there was a change to the agenda uh sorry yeah the agenda template um and as a part of those changes one of them was the change i think the link and the other because of the new website and then the other change i just want to call out is we used to have a an item on the agenda that was um topics not anticipated 48 hours in advance uh town clerk has said she was at a conference and that that attorney general so that's not um the way that we should be doing in general that that shouldn't be the case if you have a change to your agenda not anticipated 48 hours in advance you should be revising your agenda which you can do once you've submitted 40 hours in advance you can revise the agenda so i've removed that if you're curious if you notice or curious why um and do we have any public comment okay there's a question about that so if on my way to the meeting i decide that there's something that i didn't tell you about that i think is important to bring up does that mean we can't talk about it since there's no mention of that i i think we can't talk about it but i think you could in my opinion you could mention that you want it on a future agenda in announcements but at least for this committee we're simply gonna it's not on the agenda we're not going to talk about it other than correct asking for a placeholder on the next agenda that's that's my plan okay just from a conservative standpoint i don't okay thank you i think we should do it i don't think we should risk that so is attendees us or is that someone else do we know robbie is there anybody
there's nobody else other than me on zoom just lonely out here in zoom land
got your space background on now yeah yeah um okay um any other announcements comments since we're on that house from others okay so let's start with um first item since there's no public comment um i think there i got some questions brian from you um other questions came in in the last day or so so i hadn't had a chance to consolidate them i can do that and get them to the town manager and the town and the finance director they were not available to be at our meeting today and we are still working out when they can i've asked them if instead of the 27th if they could do next week so i did just talk to town manager on that before the meeting started he was here so i asked him to please get back to me with their availability so i will consolidate our questions and send them over brad i didn't see any from you and that's i completely dropped the ball on that's okay yeah if you send them to me like in the next day and consolidate them and send them over the wall um is there anybody in the questions you guys have was there anything you wanted to talk about before i send them over or anything you were like puzzled by that you that you didn't want me to include before we talked about well i mean most of them were i think obvious like just why did i move or what was the priority or where did it come from it was one or two that weren't there before i mean i would guess the answer will be a submitted way but just more then how do we resolve that going forward
anything else yeah i i would just say i mean i saw the takes and puts so things split in moved out and wasn't so concerned about those because they were accounted for somewhere but i did notice there were a number of items that just didn't seem to be in the town manager's budget at all so it does beg the question of and maybe they were relabeled to something but where did they go it's like 3.4 million dollars which isn't you know it's just shy of 10 over the entire span of the five years but it's it should did they go away is it moving out five years is it do you have a purgatory yes well that's what i was thinking well i knew about our purgatory but i was like what about what about their purgatory yeah so but i gave you the list of ones that i was like hey these are just things that didn't i couldn't find somewhere else so um yeah so i'll try to group i did see that i'll try to group the questions sort of like you know hey these were time shifts these were disappeared these were new that we didn't know about right and kind of break them into categories i know then we had a couple that were we thought these were canceled but those were in big groups yeah and on your 27 questions john i know you had a bunch of 27 those are kind of my lowest priority because it is what it is but i i think they're good from a let me understand how you were thinking that was really yeah i think they but they don't they don't help us discreetly but they do indirectly from uh yeah what was your thinking maybe you could put a a general question related to understanding you know their decision process for fiscal 27 yeah i mean there's also a decision process for the other four years but yeah there are other fiscal 27 potential issues that we need to talk about here shortly yes so that's going to be next the agenda yeah assuming my questions and liz and john's questions all you know circle around the same things you should be able to they do i'm just yeah i'm just going to consult some of them are the same um or they're getting at the same thing and i'll consolidate them um but together they were i think they were pretty no surprises i don't think so data is the data yeah i don't think we there was let's put this right there was no rocket science in terms of like what we were asking like why is that earlier why is that later where did that come from um yeah so i won't belabor that any further um i do want brian could i just ask liz one follow-up question was you you referenced um
maybe you're just pulling a number off the top of your head three million of aggregate over the five years that you said were in our recommendation that didn't seem to be anywhere in the five-year plan from the town management yes and and i i mean there were some instances where things moved i'll point to like adding sand to the the lake you know that was under a different bucket so there was like some mismatches that washed themselves out but there was a number of instances where did you identify any was there any one that that doesn't sound right to me but did you did you identify any one you know significant item that seemed to appeal for a big slug of that just as an example when we say big item i mean there are you know a couple hundred k on average well i'll take a look and just make sure i'm not going to send anything until i i can i see the same question so i'll make sure that we are aligned i won't ask the question if we're not aligned with the data
i did try to spot check and go back to see like and that's how i found like the town sand because it was just because i went through everything right well well yeah i mean now now that you so i think there's i know kelly asked at the last meeting when she looked at the aggregate total dollars she noted that the levy debt our levy debt recommendation for five years was a couple million dollars more than the town manager's recommendation and uh that largely is due to the the town roof where we we included the request for each of the four out of the five years the total a little less than two million whereas uh the the finance director town manager uh pulled all the town building costs out uh other than the fiscal 27 over the gymnasium roof a lot of it is town building tb yeah yeah and he put those quote below the line so that that accounts for you know probably about two-thirds of what you're seeing that appears to be missing in the five-year plan yeah so that is about half of it yep yeah so i just i just want to make sure that i wasn't missing something but yeah there may be a couple other items that um okay i will i will verify so you consolidate you send along and then the question is how long before we think you know so we'll get answers back um i don't know because i don't have an answer on when we can meet so i wish i could answer that but i'm pushing for so first question i guess i can ask it now is can we can any of you meet right can we meet next week if the answer to that is no then it's the following week however i know brian said he could join us on the 27th but the town manager does not think he can he's he's had something another commitment for the town so first question is are there dates times next week that we can meet yeah i'm available and i i would say is if we could get a quorum we should do it proceed assuming that unless you think we should meet without necessarily having gotten responses to the questions that you're going to send along yeah and i'm okay meeting without the without the answers as long as we can have it just like they'll have them and we can discuss them and if they have to follow up and bring us back questions i think that's okay um but i would like to have that face-to-face discussion right particularly around and for me it comes down to priorities right we made an attempt to prioritize we did so on criteria that we laid out in the report i've asked the question multiple times it seems like their prioritization was based on whatever was prioritized last year and then pull some in and put some out and i just want to make sure going forward we're on a mutual understanding of priorities like i want to hear if you pulled something forward that we didn't i want to hear about why that is so i can understand it better and maybe that adjusts the way we think maybe it doesn't but i'd like to know that that's a fundamental like that's a difference in what we think is a committee versus what the town thinks yeah um so i think we can do that without having the answer to every single question yeah i would say that and the other piece is like if project shifts i mean not a small project but if project shift like he gets someone gets new information after that so how like how can we get we can just so that this isn't like an unknown right i'd say that's another because i'm sure that's happened like someone so reached out i need a different truck yeah you know then just loop us in versus making it an action you know an extra step yeah not that i want a lot more work for us but if if that were the case i was like hey these are these adjustments i'm not out of the gate opposed to like okay i'll amend for that so that we're aligned right if it's but i'm not going to do that 16 times like i'm going to do that once right i'm not it's just an amended more just so we understand okay if it's new information that comes between when we issue our report and when we go to town meeting yeah right it's like there's a final update you could do that says okay i understand those tweaks we're aligned we don't need those to be differences but i'm i'm not committing to that i just think that there's a world that that could work yeah i mean i have there's a related issue that occurred at town meeting that might influence what you just said as to our the requirement that we it'll definitely influence what i do in fact update part of part of the reason i said it yes um all right so first i'm available you're available only at the 20th it can't be monday because select boards meeting yeah oh any day next week i'm looking up so tuesday i can't do okay wednesday can do tuesday or thursday i cannot yeah wednesday i'm fine to tuesday and wednesday i'm fine it's and thursday tuesday no thursday may not be fine i think he said that they want for tomorrow oh not for national yeah no i i wednesday he was the one day he said they maybe couldn't um so that kind of tuesday or thursday you think for tuesday or thursday who's available i'm available thursday probably i could probably be available thursday if i know by the end of the week right i could do thursday even monday is properly doable yeah i can't do monday because it's a slack board um tuesday if we could get me brian and brad i might put a comment maybe any chance we could um for the benefit of the town employees that are meeting with us do it earlier than 6 30. like it for those of you at work no it's really hard for me to do that okay yeah i mean if you can't you can't maybe brian kevin i'm sure will join by zoom the town manager would probably stay here so you're going to check with them on tuesday or thursday at 6 30. and with that the in addition to the tentative meeting we have on the 27th 27th yeah we could we meet with them we could figure out what we're going to talk about on the 27th okay so you'll let us know yeah okay all right um actually another matter that fits under this agenda item um as it deals with funding sources uh so one of the differences in our recommendations versus the final five-year plan um is that the finance director was able to determine which projects uh might be available to generate surplus capital um there's actually two related questions or issues um i think kelly you asked a meeting or two ago uh where did the surplus capital come from where the projects actually fully completed you know or if not you know why not and and uh so um i haven't i didn't circulate to everybody but um there was approximately a dozen uh specific uh prior projects that the finance director had identified and then spoken with the department managers about those projects um and uh he listed out the uh excess surplus capital related to those items and two questions that i'll have for them and you can either put it in your questions i don't think i wrote this down uh so there was uh two school items one was fiscal 23 district-wide flooring which he said uh had a hundred thousand dollars round number of surplus capital um and uh there was a 20 fiscal 25 district-wide roof replacement repairs that had surplus capital of 146,444 i just want to focus on those two items two different reasons and and those are the two items that funded part of the elementary installation of hvacker conditions correct um so as to why those would be surplus capital i guess i'm questioning because both was funding for district-wide flooring and district-wide roof replacement and repairs the whole reason for doing which suggests to me is that that gives them a lot of latitude to figure out what needs to be done when it needs to be done yeah i just don't understand how you could determine that project would have kind of come to a closeout point it would seem to me they'd always spent all that money because it was you know i'm sure they have more than enough projects to to do and in fact i didn't go back but i expect if we look at our five-year and their five-year plan there's probably a request in there for district-wide flooring and district-wide roof replacement repairs so i'd kind of like to know why and how he could determine and how the schools agreed to let him determine because they wanted another item and he told i understand yeah and i know he told us that right or he told finance committee that that you know they the other one of the items that they added that they had to find a way to fund it and so but that's um yeah now i'm not saying you can't you can't do this uh but if you choose to do this um well so that that's one question um i mean i know why he was looking for money and and why he picked on schools and he did apply it to another school project but it just doesn't make sense to me when they're asking for more money for the same things in subsequent year budgets that you would pick on those two items it's yeah it's not actually it's not surplus capital like it would be if like hey i had money to buy a truck the truck costs twenty thousand dollars less that's surplus capital in those where those were intended to be able to like so i can use what's left over on the next phase of district-wide flooring or the next phase of roofing that's just taking repurposing but it means that we've got the next project that that's going to have to appropriate money for stuff that you thought you already appropriate that that's really my question it's not really surplus why did that make sense right so the for an example but they're not didn't go out to bid for a they do school-wide they don't go out to bid first they don't go out to bid for the whole district what they do and this started probably five or six years ago was when it's a project that is something like flooring where basically you're continuously updating flooring right you work your way through the buildings by the time you're finished you have to go back and start again right um they do it as a district-wide project for approval so that if there's money left over from the last you know the ones you did last summer at the middle school you can go ahead and get started on the ones at happy hollow right with the money that's there and then you have subsequent funding but it was intended so that you wouldn't be in a situation where you're short ten thousand dollars to finish the project and you've got to go back and ask for more it's because the nature of the project is that it continuously right is being done is it is it done by town employees or is it no they don't identify a roof on a school and say or a floor in a school and say okay this we estimate it's going to cost 50 grand we have 200 grand in this appropriation for district-wide flooring probably go out to bid to figure out what that discrete project will cost use that money away they go finish that project they still have a bunch of money left if they have other flooring and other school buildings which they will so it'd be to me it's kind of like saying to the dpw you have this this highway funds that you've been appropriated but i want to repurpose now i'm not i'm not saying you can't do it as long as town meeting authorizes you doing it and the project proponents or department managers say okay you can do it because they thought they had the money for projects needed to spend it but um i just want to understand why it makes sense if you then just have to come back in you know in your five-year plan in the near term and reappropriate money so maybe it bought you you you know a little bit of of capital that you didn't need to borrow but it's just coming back at you so i just want to understand that the thought process because i haven't seen that before most of the times what i've seen is the projects are done or and there's money or they're not going to do it they're not going to do it yeah right the project the need is no longer there something has changed um the other thing i'll say brad about doing like using floors as an example in particular with the school buildings you know we appropriated atm right in the spring and sometimes what happens is okay well where we decided to hold summer school change like you've they've got a slot which floors they're going to do based on when they've got availability to get into the buildings and that may change so that was another reason to do those projects as district-wide rather than a specific building because it gave them the flexibility to you know flex if the needs and open dates right where they could get into different buildings differed so i'm with you brian that's not traditionally how i think that has worked and it it doesn't in my mind especially when we're doing the report right we talked about if there's surplus capital like these are the additional projects at that time i would have surplus capital is not because you took it from another project that we're just going to keep doing it's because you actually finished and have money left over well it's interesting with the floor and we they had a request in 27 we pushed the 28 probably because they had money left over so foreign was in the budget we would have seen it in the open capital i mean there are other two other big items i picked on these two for a specific other reason which i'll mention but there was also 202 000 and change again taken from the schools for a fiscal 20 appropriation for district-wide core network cyber security no district-wide core network related costs at cyber security so that's the school computer network and then there was district-wide classroom cabinetry replacement 128 000 and change so they were big amounts they're sort of this district-wide it you know whatever so i just want to be able to talk through kind of brian's thought process i know why he was looking for money and i'm not concerned about that it's just it's just what what you know maybe his philosophy is you know when we appropriate that money the intent is you're you're supposed to use that in a one-year cycle and if you can't as kelly said for something maybe it's beyond your control uh then that should be part of your sort of uh plan going forward i'm i i don't want to guess what his yeah we've talked before with i've talked before with brian and he does have an opinion not a one-year but he does have an opinion if project was appropriated and the money sits there and sits there and sits there right year after year and doesn't get that then it should be rescinded and and given back you know fiscal 20 for district-wide core network yeah and i know that the board you know our board of selection liaison feels the same that there should be a time limit yeah and when we talk to department managers about it they express concerns which were understandable around there are some projects that just they're going to take right we know at the outset they're going to take three years to do and that's part of why in the cip form right i want to get to if you can lay out start and end dates then there's something to measure against at least before you take it away of yeah you got that money four years ago you were supposed to be done in a year and you haven't used it there's that's a reason so we'll ask him i'll add that to the question yeah if you just put that on a question um so so and and that's relevant to us only if which we'll also talk about process-wise uh at the in within the window we need to know what it is he can provide the committee with his estimate of surplus capital prior to completing our recommendation because otherwise you know doesn't affect anything we do because if he's going to continue to deal with it you know in december january other than if we decide to go back and issue an addendum the real relevance and why i brought up those first two items uh is when when i looked at um again his workbook um there's something described as surplus capital which is what we just were talking about and uh then there's something called surplus bond proceeds and those are those are prior appropriations for projects that uh the town meeting approved use of borrowing and they have gone out and borrowed and the funds are sitting you know in a special account waiting to be spent and similar to surplus capital it kind of is affect both it's both surplus capital and in this case surplus bond proceeds because if the project is let's say done or it's decided that he wants to someone wants to repurpose the use of those uh bond proceeds you can do that but under mass law uh you've got to go get town meetings approval to do that and uh last year if you go back and look at the i'm sure there's been the case in prior years you go back and look at the motion that was made at town meeting for the capital budget it specifically calls out surplus bond proceeds with very specific language it was provided by town council and outside bond council identifying which appropriation and project it came from and that it was to be used in the course of state law on a project that has a estimated useful life equivalent or longer and for whatever reason i went to town meeting and motion was read and i didn't hear any reference to surplus bond proceeds and i'll be honest i didn't look at this schedule that i pulled from brian's spreadsheet until after town meeting because something wasn't sitting right and so i've asked the question of him and i haven't gotten response um should they have asked in that motion and because they didn't and it's required by state law that town meeting approved for the use of those proceeds
is the funding of the line item that that was used for it's 246 000 and change was used to fund about half of the elementary installation of hvac if it's not if it wasn't legally appropriated because the motion didn't contain the right special words um is that line item for that project now short funded and that's what's relevant to us because that could then need to be funded in fiscal or fiscal 28 when we get to it so that's the reason i'm bringing that up it's nice perhaps educationally for everybody to hear that it's maybe important that the motion have these special words in it and what line did you see that in because obviously there's no bond surplus in the debt yeah okay yeah if you look in the detail in the warrant and if you have your warrant available on page 51 everything in the warrant which is not different from what it was last year everything in the warrant was well it may not necessarily be correct everything in the detail on the warrant on page 51 where it's your source of funds it simply references surplus capital okay 246 000 which is about half of the cost of that item so it would appear in capital closeouts on the spreadsheet is that where it would have gone that's it was on his capital closeout spreadsheet but he had two columns one for both surplus capital and then he had three three uh surplus bonds the other was he used to list that here separately as surplus um not if you look at last year's war we we we took the shortcut and we included everything in the source table as surplus capital okay but the moment you're saying the motion needs both needs the extra piece in it then yeah but i think in the in the motion printed in last year's warrant we've referenced surplus bond proceeds so you'd have to add the numbers in the motion printed in the warrant and what was read on timing floor to surplus capital to get the total surplus capital that's shown uh in the table and then on the description i think again we just referenced surplus capital the short you know short change it so um anyway my guess is that brian's going to have to ask town council whether or not that's a problem i'm not a lawyer but i think it's a problem because state law requires the vote and um uh so that's one issue that came up at town meeting um the second issue which again which relevant for us is um there were uh three it items listed in the warrant on stage 46 and 47. uh one titled cyber security remediation modernization second title public safety regional emergency system third title cyber security firewall replacement um all three of those title line items were included in our recommendation at the requested amounts and we included a fourth in our recommendation which is a an item for phase two of video monitoring which we brought up in the fiscal 27 because we thought it appeared important for security and that was 160 000 uh the town manager's uh recommended budget and the finance committee's budget did not include 160 000 item so that's one of the reconciling items so we went to town meeting and they get to item eight on page 46 and all of a sudden an hour later there's been debate on video monitoring and i'm sitting there listening to this going brad you want to read i don't i don't quite get it but um read the title and the description of item i i didn't crack open my warrant at town meeting and i just assumed that because the town manager dropped 160 item or 60 000 item maybe they combine that with the the cyber security remediation modernization but i got home that night monday night i realized that the description on page 46 for item 8 was a description taken from the 160 000 video monitoring item which isn't in the budget that presented in the warrant so said another way the title of the item title and amount of the item do not match with the description description is from a different is from the security camera project so i raised the point before it started coming on the second night with both the finance director and the town manager the manager didn't have time to look at my issue the finance director basically said well if it's wrong we'll have to fix it maybe in a special town meeting in the fall that was the answer then the town manager caught me at town meeting and said i really haven't had time to look at your email but i think the language is broad enough that we can do what we want and i said maybe you haven't read it it talks about video monitoring not doing all this other cyber security remediation modernization and um anyway because i was pondering reopening the budget which you can do if you have new information the new information was the hours worth of debate was on something that we weren't wasn't being requested and the it director spoke to answering all the video monitoring questions but also said in the same points he was making uh he also planned to spend some of that money on cyber security remediation etc which you can't do if that's not described so anyway i didn't choose to reopen that article i go home pick up i said i better read all 31 of these items just to see if there's any other issue and lo and lo and behold the description for item nine is the description that should have appeared in item eight because that is the description for the 250 000 that was requested except for a sentence that was tossed in at the very end that talked about funding will support video monitoring and management systems for the library which we have to ask the town manager and the finance director my personal view is they may have gotten rid of 160 000 that we had recommended for video monitoring and may have tacked on a sentence to the other 250 000 item the fincoms the one that produced these schedules that are in the warrant now my issue is the motion read for the capital budget basically asks for authorization to appropriate the money shown in the table on page 43 as well as all the descriptions that appear on page 44 through 51 and so the question which again i think they're going to have to ask town council is given that and that's what town meeting approved uh given the descriptions for item eight appears to me to be limited to video monitoring can the town's it department spend that 250 000 on anything but video monitoring it's it's i'm not aware but it's pretty hard to i don't believe so it's pretty hard to justify for several reasons one town meeting floor spent an hour debating video monitoring system so there's good indication that that's what they believed they were voting on based on their hour of debate to the description of the work that is to be done under the cyber security remediation and modernization project is in the next item so it's hard to say that the description under the title of cyber security is when you've got the actual description down here so i won't let the lawyer decide but and the last the last piece of that is the the actual description for item nine the public safety regional emergency system is not there it was a relatively short description in the cip form so uh i guess again not being a lawyer it seems to be item nine at least even though the title doesn't match up with the description i suppose there you might have a fighting chance to argue that the description governs and the it director at least could spend 150 000 on on that work but that's 100 000 short of what he requested um and he has nothing to spend on the public safety regional emergency system because that's not described anywhere so that needs to be resolved and again the relevance to us is that however that's resolved will potentially impact what we may need to do for fiscal 28 absent um there perhaps being a special town meeting for some other reason in the fall and the town manager and finance director and the select board decide to you know go back and fix this so that they have the money they need for those items so we'll have to stay tuned on that stay tuned on town council's input um the other issue that came up um the trifecta um the it director um uh uh in responding to questions particularly as to what he needed to do and the issues that he sees in the town's security posture which he described in more detail than i would have expected um uh he was asked the question um how much more money do you think you need to spend to get all the problems fixed as soon as possible and of course his response was a million dollars and um i think what he meant was i need i you know i've got money in the plan over a couple three years i think it's not a million dollars but you know you ask him how much he needs um so a town resident i think it was dave bernstein um got up and was basically asking because he then proceeded to um uh proposed to amend uh line item nine on page 46 to increase it by two hundred thousand dollars from 150 to 350. now again this is before i realized that the description of that light on him really belonged on the prior line so that would have at least been 250 so maybe you've only asked for another 50. so there was some back and forth about how much he was going to propose to amend so i was sitting there listening to that and i said i really don't want to get up but i finally said i got to get up and i made a point of order and kelly i just want to get your input on this you know we may need to talk about it again the point of order i made was under the art committee's bylaw it required i think we've talked about this report it requires that any capital appropriation intending to be dealt with a town meeting needs to first come through this committee unless it's determined to be an emergency by the town manager so i made a point of order that increasing by two hundred thousand dollars that line item uh was not before didn't come before this committee and therefore uh i was asking for ruling by the moderator it was out of order she deferred to town council who in turn said i agree here's inconsistent with your bylaw it seems like that has to come first it's not necessarily a new project per se but the amount has now gone up and then the town council threw in an extra and by the way that's a pretty big increase from 150 000. um you know i think that probably shouldn't be allowed either because the town's not on notice that it was going to be that big a number and that ruling um the mod the town moderator didn't necessarily rely on which is a good thing because under her rules you can amend the omnibus budget both operating and capital uh without regard up or down without regard to how much you're asking to change it and i've confirmed that with her so he you know he was thinking maybe about another town but uh anyway the relevance here is that that amendment uh therefore wasn't allowed to be brought to you know to vote and as i was thinking about this after town meeting because a resident got up uh perhaps being an attorney questioned the moderator's ruling that my point of order was appropriate and i don't think he had looked at the bylaw right and then after i made that motion student weinstein got up and said uh mr town manager would you view what we heard from the i.t director about our security posture as constantly an emergency now understand this was his budget so of course now he's got to get up and say well i heard what the i.t director said i had already met with him what you see in front of you is what i posed no i don't think this would constitute an emergency from my perspective so we didn't no additional money was put in that line item okay uh someone else made an amendment to eliminate it completely the 250 of the item above it and that was voted down so once we got all that done what was in the warrant got approved but my question for you specifically kelly is when this bylaw and you're on the working group and that section of the bylaw uh came before the fincom i raised an issue that was focused on petitioner articles that if a petitioner article came forward like for the loker site was a petitioner article years ago to buy the land capital project uh i didn't think it was not a lawyer but i didn't think it was legal that the town have something in the bylaw that would prevent that petitioner's article from being considered at a town meeting and ultimately after several asks they asked town council and should know state law requires the select board to put petitioner articles on the warrant and so i documented that in the minutes because they weren't willing to change the bylaw language to exclude that i never contemplated the potential for an amendment on town meeting floor and part of me says the language in the warrant article says if it's not if it hasn't been before this committee and it's not a petitioner's article which isn't in the bylaw but i would get up and tell everybody what town council said um on its face i think it was appropriate to make that point of order but part of me says why can't a resident at town meeting get up and make an amendment even though the cipc hasn't looked at that request i i think i know what the bylaw says but in the spirit of everybody here is working in support of resident like representing residents if the residents ultimately get up and make an amendment that's their call to make i i i didn't at least when i was in the working group see the bylaw as restricting residents in any way i saw it as for just creating boards committees and town staff right to follow a process and so i view getting up on town meeting floor to amend the same as a petitioner's article and that that's your your right as a as a resident to do um that's one two i don't i don't know that i ever viewed a change in an amount of a project meaning that it had to come back because the way we envisioned the process was we review the projects we make a recommendation to the town manager the town manager makes his recommendation to fincom and fincom makes a recommendation to town meeting that their town meeting then votes on it's absolutely possible even likely that amounts are going to change between our october 15th report and town meeting right and i always viewed the bylaw as like no we've considered this project if the amounts change well that that happens i differentiated a little bit it's like hey if the scope of the project was this when we reviewed it and by the time you got to town meeting the scope of the project was this then i think i feel i think i feel a little differently it should come back around but if it's i'll take an example was the uh the um construction of the pipes on whatever the road was i think it was a 1.1 million request and then he said he needed another 170 000 something we were aware we were aware of it yeah and i deferred him to the to the town manager because that's where it was in the process but we were aware of it and i i think i view it brian i want to be aware of it and if we feel strongly that it changes our opinion we would amend the report yeah so that's where i i differ slightly and the others should weigh in here i i feel slightly different that for for for what we might determine as of insignificant or insubstantial or immaterial changes which could be 170 000 particularly if we're aware of it um but you know a lot of what we were doing was trying to fit projects into particular years based on funding sources and relative to other projects priorities and so i for one view at least a material change in a request a dollar amount to be akin to a new request yeah um and would would want to see it back but um i don't really need to debate this all tonight but i guess what i'm suggesting is maybe on um another agenda we can uh talk about what if any uh changes to the bylaw uh our committee might think might be appropriate one of which i happen to think is the petitioner article issue because it's just not it's not in the bylaw two would be amendments on town meeting floor by other than not other than boards and committees for town staff i.e residents and and it could be a board or committee member who's doing it as a resident so uh and three would be this question about you know if dollar amounts change after we've you know reviewed a project you know do we want to create a um some sort of threshold uh because otherwise you know i i really felt badly of doing it on the one hand um because i was the one that raised the issue about petitioner articles saying that i was troubled by the language in the bylaw as providing a hard gate and i i know from the input that we got at the time that it wasn't the intention to be applicable to other than boards and committees within the town but i kept saying but that's not what the bylaw says so anybody could get up and use the plain words and do what i did right and the ruling of the moderators ruling the moderate so i just wanted to raise that vote to let you know i had done that and that we might want to consider um proposing edits or not i i wrote it down i think we can talk about it at a future meeting um you had some other and so did i had some other edits to the bylaw i think we can add them to the pile right if we feel strongly about it we can add them to the pile and submit them back to the select board of like these are the things we've done this now for a year um we think there's some edits necessary and it may be like okay great let's wait another year or two like let's really get sort of up and running fully on this and then we make edits but i i hear you brian i think there's there's room for improvement to the bylaw i think some of it we could tactically address in the short term before bylaw change by similar to what we talked about half an hour ago doing another vote or amendment right at the end right which is encompassing all the new information to the extent there there's changes in scope changes in price expected and sort of true up our recommendation for them right before the town meeting yeah so i i think that's the way we can address it in the near term in the process that that item is a process matter yeah yeah yeah i just left it left me with a bad taste in my mouth uh to um i mean i wasn't necessarily going to vote for the increase just based on everything else being screwed up but um but nonetheless i always felt town residents should have yeah i don't i feel strongly that our bylaw should not restrict the ability of town meeting floor to change what they want to vote for within all the other rules i did that seems really wrong but do you agree that the language as it exists now would suggest that that is the outcome it does because yeah it does i just don't think that it wasn't the intention i think it was intentional yeah i think if you would ask that question when it was being written people would have said of course you can amend on the town meeting floor otherwise why do we have town meeting if you can't you can't do that okay right well again it was intended to prevent right the surprise projects get thrown in at the last minute and jump in the line in front of other things right okay so uh it's relevance again to us is that uh the budget didn't get increased by 200 000 for that reason and it's spawning a uh another issue that we need to focus on at a later date and uh also allowed us to have a public discussion so i feel i've unburdened myself from feeling badly feeling badly for what i had done even though i would have voted against the amendment you should feel badly because i think they're valid valid items for discussion so i don't think you should feel badly about it um you know other than the fact that you know it would have increased that project to enough you know over what was asked for for the actual projects inadvertently um but you know i have all these written down i know you've sent them to the town manager and the finance director um at least the the issues at town meeting um we need answers back from town council i know the chair of the board of selectmen's aware and we need answers back from town council on what they're going to do there as you said to inform what we have to consider in fly 28 the good news i think is if we have to consider additional funding for any of these projects as long as they don't spend money that wasn't intended so for example there's 250 000 potentially appropriated for cameras which was 160 ask originally as long as they don't spend 250 you could return that surplus right like your net in that you're going to end up in the same place just at a different time so it's not not the end of the world but it's messy and needs to be cleaned up um the last i know you want to move on but the last item and i don't think it's our job to do it while i was on the fincom i would have proofread those pages that had the errors before when just submitted for the warrant wasn't on fincom so i didn't proofread it and actually didn't see it until the warrant was posted on the town and i missed it because i didn't read every one of those descriptions i'm assuming we don't have responsibility nothing we did i guess my question is did anything we do and most specifically i'm referring to your your workbook to the extent it was utilized by the fincom member to produce those tables and for whatever reason it was it's too well it's so it's two different workbooks the big workbook that has all the projects is not what was used as a separate workbook that does this was it my spreadsheet originally yes did i give it to them this year so it didn't come from this committee okay no and it's linked to the cip so as i said to you earlier i think it's the linking to the cips was off okay um but no it was nothing that we produced and while i now wish i had read proofread at all i did not then nor do i now view it as my responsibility to the committee's responsibility to proof the recommendation right all right yeah so we make an advisory we make an advisory report we did that um i mean if i had been asked to i might have but i wasn't asked to so okay well i apologize for taking that extra time in this agenda item but um no it's good it was in most of that stuff that's helpful and most of that stuff may end up we're going to need to know it because otherwise without that we're going to be really confused as to why you're putting things in that we already wait a year later what is this
you get to draft the section reconciling that next year's report brian or we may have a special town meeting that again we'll need to comply with our bylaw and if they're proposing that's another question if they actually if there is a special town meeting say to move union money for settled contracts as they did a couple years ago and they decide they need to fix these do these need to come back you know good question contemplate it in this committee what would be they stick to what we originally approved okay thank you yeah i'll get that down in one paragraph i don't think it has to come back here that'll be our report the best person he has to know 15 minutes of what he just said all right so next on the agenda we want to talk about the cip forum which i did i'm sorry i just sent out um brad made some edits with brian's help and so i should have i should have sent you a note i didn't feel right commenting back since the two of you that would have been a forum um commenting on it so i did forward it to the committee right at the start of the meeting um brad do you want to brian i'm assuming you have it actually up work on do not uh yeah i do okay um yeah did everybody get it when i sent it okay so if you want to just walk us through yeah um first of all thank you brian for helping i mean i i made the edits that we discussed at the uh at the last meeting uh and put it in uh in this format and brian actually did all the excel work and he brian made some additional edits on it as well um and as you can see it got it down to uh got it down to one page um kelly i'm not sure what kind of detail you want me to go through i mean i i know we uh actually i'm trying to even read it now this thing so the print is so small um but we we basically kept in the project schedule the operating and capital budget impact uh we uh made a couple changes on that um and then added the section about whether it's uh the project didn't take one year or more um and then kept the prioritization of funding request uh format and then below that we added the uh ranking kelly that you wanted um added so that the department has to do their own ranking um attachments and then the long-term planning request uh language it's it's pretty much the same uh as what was in there before it's it's really more of a narrative it's not intended to be um specific in specific in a year-to-year basis it's really more of a more of a narrative um and i don't know if anybody had a chance to why don't brian you look to you look at it yeah i think people should comment on substance and content uh as to the layout of the form i press press i just kind of put it in the order that he told me to put it in and in a way that i hope people are managed can fill in um and i would just note in the very last item the long-term piece i i felt compelled to put a note there that you know they don't need to fill us in on every cip form we're looking at their departmental long-term plan right and if we're going to use this form to collect it just do it once this is a nip but i think um uh look at oh you i'm in excel so uh if i go down to the box underneath operating capital budget impact where you break it out if it has multiple years for reoccurring appropriations um and in 32 i would just say 32 plus in case it extends beyond the five year so again we're we're we want folks to think full project not just be capped because you know it's going to carry over into 33 or 34. one of the things i don't see if i'm just missing it was for secondary funding like grants and other things it seems like that fell off whilst i'm just missing it we we put it i put a little on it somewhere it's in the attachment attachments it talks about grant applications uh yeah in that box that liz was just referring to oh wait a minute i thought that's where i put it yeah i think we want to do something to capture gross cost any other outside funding sources total right which takes you to a net cost because that's a problem we've had is not knowing the full cost like they approved they're coming looking for the appropriation but i've had more than one instance brian i'm sure you have where they came for a certain amount of money and then we heard later of like oh we didn't get that grant or the grant we got was only this much so we need more and i was like why didn't we know that that was the total cost to begin with it dropped out i thought i had a line in there to have the shorter list of grants federal and state funding so where are we i mean i would think it would be somewhere in like maybe 44 to 40. somewhere in there there should be a line of funding source from you know non-town i may have put it and forgot to save it and then motored along so i'll yeah i go back look at it i know it was it was in there in the prior prior form yeah we talked about just uh skinning down the list from the prior form yeah anything else we had i love uh prioritization question of prioritization just from a wording standpoint do we need to say submitted versus open like if we pushed a bunch of projects from 27 28 i assume they're not resubmitting this form if they've done it i mean it's a new one just the way i read this is if i'm only submitting five new projects then this is one of five but if i have 20 open projects already in the year i'm in 28. yeah i'm i don't i've that's the only section i struggle i i know i want i want it but i'm trying to think about how i wasn't gonna be wrong how to get it i mean i don't know if it's like okay you gave me all your projects i put them all on piece of paper now here like you hand it back and say put them in order it's hard to do it on each individual request right without seeing them in my mind but maybe i'm wrong yeah maybe it's better off being like would you rate this as a priority project like high medium look like more of what we did just so we know where like what bucket they see it slot into because yeah it'll be constantly rolled i mean i mean that's what the i mean the more detail section above i think replaces the high medium low yeah i wonder though if there's a way to do this just hear me out for a minute maybe it's not possible now so if we send cell file to a department manager and it's got the template for a single year cip form which is most of what's on this page it's got a tab that in my perfect world all your individual tabs would feed into that's in the summary format right that gives you the by year by project name yeah right something some sort yeah and then that's the form that you put right it feeds in and that's the form that you put your ranking on right um and that's also the form where you put your box at the bottom that's like okay and in addition to this five these five years of projects here's the other things that are on my horizon so it's sort of you know one one tab is one that you repeat for every project and the other tab is your overall and you're going to send back one spreadsheet that's got that would be ideal right yeah i mean one of the things we used i mean one of the things i used to do this yeah i assume you still do this right is when you write the request that's one for the year like it's request one you know schools and then the next one you write is two and if you know it continues on it just you just use your own numbering system just so that you know when you generated it and that's essentially the list they sort by just some sort of key okay all right i think i gotta get a little bit of thought about that from it and it kind of goes along with the formatting and no one will be um hurt if i if i reformat this right i think you can definitely layer some of this in just to get it to
but no i mean overall looks good to me i think the only mission is the other funding and how that yeah makes sense i think that's the biggest piece that i see this needs to be intuitive on how it needs to be filled out yeah and if not little directions or instructions need to be yeah
my objective is simply to get all the information that we thought we needed just make sure we all agree and it sounds like um yeah it sounds like the gross cost down the net cost and other sources are the only substantive items missing um we have lizards at it and then possibly a project number discrete project number i mean the the accounting department assigns their own project numbers um
yeah that might be hard having projects with two different numbers reconciling between the two yeah um i'm gonna table that one a little bit we can that's a and so all you're talking about kelly is taking some of the items some of the inputs on this section and have them feed up to a consolidating form and on the consolidating form include things like the long-term request yeah my my first priority though is like you said brian i want to reformat a little bit and get it in a very easy readable format and the first step will be that i don't use the format of this spreadsheet because it's it's violates all the rules of spreadsheets that i live by uh yeah i was just i was trying to make them look like they're used to it's the way the format started right so it's somebody using excel like it's word yeah um so um i'll i'll clean that up a little bit and then i gotta think about ideally i want everything to feed into a consolidation whether or not i can make that happen um i'm thinking ai might actually be able to help you with that yeah i mean you'd think it would be some sort of button that just make a new tab but it just edits something yeah well it's like write me it's just write me the macro coding that takes all the tabs and creates creates the consolidated schedule very yeah you check the lock and so they can only enter data and not move whenever kelly chooses to do someone else on the committee needs to make sure they understand what she's doing because otherwise it won't be very helpful to us when it breaks next year yeah well you'll just ask ai to fix it for you my 13 year old or your 13 year old yeah yeah let me know i'm happy to shout out yeah my goal is to make it as easy to use as possible i just don't want like we can avoid us and the department manager because you've you've done and doing it all here's your workbook here take in take everything and put it into a format that we can all read it in like i'd like it to work on its own yeah i mean in my head i'm thinking it's almost like i've seen it done before where it's just one form on one page you hit save and it creates the tab and it does like it's just like it's not you're not actually going to the tab yeah if it's google like if you did like google form it would it would populate it in right and create your schedule but i'm not i'm i don't know that i have enough time to play that okay so if there's something you want me to poke at send me a note and i can leave them
go ahead no i just i think we also said okay it'll do a summary tab and then that will be the forcing function to go back to each of the departments and rack and stack when they submit because i think we certainly ran into that when we were trying to do our own weighting we have you know i'm exaggerating here but a thousand mediums and you know some of them got pushed out because we didn't have the budget to pay for everything and it was you know said more than once that it would be good to know what was important to the departments and would save us a step of having to go back and you know make sure that we're we're budgeting for the appropriate things based off of their needs
yeah i think the priority ranking section will get at most of that uh assuming i think what we talked about last week that's a sooner two weeks ago that's assuming they don't just you know populate it all with one which is the context in which kelly raised the the rank order uh as sort of a uh threatened double check well they populated all the fives or fives whatever whatever the high
that's the only reason we would have that is to just check them you don't have to put that there and if they you go through one cycle and they seem to be filling it out reasonably um and if there's someone that's an outlier you can just call them up and say here tell me one to ten yeah you know what i mean rather than worry about that on the form be like one of my early bosses who poorly scored everyone he reviewed and leadership knew that they would just like apply a factor to all those readings which was the curve they did they curved his readings
report reviewer and they'll have all sorts of curves here but i think conceptually we're closer to what the information that we've been looking for right yeah and i think you know this is just the form i for one other than checking a box or having boxes to check for attachments i'd actually like to see people provide provide attachments like particularly where the detail estimates came from even if it's just like the fire chief had done you know mathematical this was the last time we got a quote there's you know three years worth of inflation yeah you know whatever it might be uh just so we're not sitting there guessing as to how good the number is some people actually have will have estimates or you know outside estimates so we need this form by july 1st if we intend to get it out by july 1st which means whatever we do it's got to likely be reviewed by the town manager and the finance director and buy it get them to buy in so if we meet with them next week we can at least tell them we're working on something like to preview it with them just maybe not i mean could you say the form could you send them this just to give them a sense of the information and just tell them we're clean it up a little bit more because i'd like it in i want it in user friendly mode so that there's not a fear of like i don't want the reaction to be that's too hard for everyone to do right i think we can i can clean it up a little bit and we can get through just format wise and like you said brian i'd like to add clean up the format and that should allow me to add a little bit from an instruction standpoint um we can do that one of two ways you can do it right on the surface which i probably would lean towards given the users or you can put it in a comment on the cell but i if somebody's not a you used to working in excel they might not know to click to click the comment button right yeah um okay i i think it's really good thank you brad and i think they're you know they're i think i said last meeting there probably should be assuming we get this done time management finance director agree to it and it's definitely going to be distributed i think there should be a meeting you know with the department managers that are going to have to fill it in to walk through it and whether i assume that should be at least with one member of this committee and presumably the town manager and or finance director
a lot to get done in a short period of time but keep repeating myself we're doing the best we can brian that's all we can ask um thank you
all right and then succession planning do you have anything update on project plan or status quo no other than i need still need to send you the actual written version um okay um so different plan i just have one uh i just want to maintain total transparency with everybody um so i i have been in touch with the chair of the school committee she and i agreed um their meeting tonight but they're two new members i said it probably makes sense to let you get your two new members up and running and then we can talk about whether you want me to come before school committee to talk through what the issues are that i've already informed you guys about in them but in full transparency i've um i'm in various stages of giving thought to going back to the fincom for uh one year uh i was gung-ho to do it and i've kind of paused that a little bit um they're potentially down five members although likely three and um many members are seven um and so there's two one-year slots and three three-year slots one of the current members has already put in her um resignation notice i presume effective june 30. uh the chair will be stepping down for health reasons with one year left on his term uh pam roman who was supposed to go off a year ago and agreed to stay in there is not going to do that again um so she leaves a term that has one year remaining um uh one one of the members whose term is up has expressed interest in reappointment when they heard i was interested in coming back for a year uh and i haven't heard from the vice chair uh my uh my participation is conditional on two of the three current members whose terms are up going for reappointment one has already said no so i don't you know i don't know if those other two are going to happen i've tentatively said it's conditional upon uh me being able to continue to do some work on this committee hopefully through the october report but i'm not 100 sure a i i have the time to do both uh or i'm pretty sure that fincom bylaw and this bylaw would allow me to do it um i don't i don't think there's an inherent um prohibition um and this three um just said i i look if i go back i don't want to be the chair of the committee she heard me say um so you're the chair no so um anyway i was gung-ho to go ahead and proceed and then uh step back and said um why don't you go try to fill the slots and if there's if you're still having trouble beginning of september i may offer up my services so you you probably should unless the school committee on the other issue decides that um between them and me uh i need to step aside as their representative on the committee um uh if if they and i decide that that is workable uh and at the moment i don't foresee a similar issue that i have at the ball field and uh the irony of all ironies just another town meeting anecdote uh you heard me say on the holiday road site when we voted that uh if i wasn't the school rep i would vote against it not to support it but i felt compelled the school committee rep to vote to support it we ended up deadlock to 2-2 didn't have this committee support that same night the school committee was voting to rescind their co-sponsorship and support of that article yeah unbeknownst to me which which passed so they were sending their support and ultimately a select board at town meeting passed over the article so uh it was just another example that um the issue i'm having trying to do what i think i need to be doing to represent the school committee on this committee and and that may cause me to step aside as soon as they feel they can find an adequate replacement um so uh you know they're going to have to fincom's got to come up with fincom and or the suck board's got to come up with somebody to replace kelly and hopefully kelly you're going to tell both of them they should be trying to convince a fincom member or a former pincom member to do it i've already tried with one who had some experience with capital budget and the answer is no thank you yeah so fincom vice chair reached out to me and asked me great if i would continue on obviously subject to their approval uh i informed him that that was not highly unlikely um maybe i even said no um highly unlikely is different i think i said um how that was not going to work in my in my current life uh so i could you know i said no um i can't and i can't take on a three-year term for sure um right once again i think i sent him a note that said as is typically the case i'm writing this email past midnight um and so i'm thinking clearly yeah this is why we'll be continuing um but i will talk to the chair of the slack board actually that'll change soon right um or maybe not so i'll i'll let them know right they need to look um for additional members you guys certainly if you know anybody who you think would be uh helpful and asset to the committee you should let the slack board and fincom know um but yeah i mean change every year in every committee it's just like this one's just getting off the ground that's the hard part well i'll just review what i said before i think you know given what given what we do i think having somebody with fincom experience i think is is critical um i mean you guys know the ins and outs yeah the way it works and i i think it'd be we're just guessing what happened before yeah it'd be tough and yeah i mean i don't disagree with that although that was not a consideration when they other than having a fincom uh designee uh but i and i kelly was on the workbooks you can comment i don't know if the intention was to have that designee be someone with fincom experience who could we help out we we discussed it and said it didn't have to be because we didn't want it restricted there won't always be a former fincom that's what i'm about to say you didn't want to restrict it but obviously we discussed the fact that there would be could be a preference for it because it it connects you know obviously if you've been on fincom it's easier for you to talk to what they're going to ultimately look at it's also easy for you to communicate to them so i'll raise it um you can tell me after the meeting who you talk to and you know there's other there's other fincom members former fincom members out there that might no i talked to april okay so um i mean the other consideration for me again i'm just trying to be fair to everybody um um you know just for myself i suspect some or all of you felt a little bit this way too i'm pretty frustrated with the way the first year process went in in relation to the dealings with the town managers and the finance director and uh when i compare my time on the three years on the fincom versus my one year here really the only difference is this is an advisory committee to the town manager and the fincom is the last stop before town meeting so i could do exactly the same amount of work related to the capital budget as a fincom member and yet have more of an impact ultimately on what goes to town meeting because the fincom is the body that closes the capital budget and so i'm sitting there now because of their you know one i'm looking to help out if i can just because they're all good at what they did but they're still pretty inexperienced um and it's a lot of work and it's likely to be an override year and i just i feel badly that for the town and for those that are hopefully going to volunteer that they're going to be overwhelmed and some of what we're seeing that i talked about earlier is is probably a little byproduct of you know that issue but really when i looked at that i'm really trying to balance if i only have a certain amount of time to spend versus commitments at home um where is the best place for me to be and so um right now i'm telling you i'm gonna i'll be here until i'm not here but if i end up not being here because the school committee you'll know why if i end up not being here because i've opted to revert back to the fincom that likely keeps me here through the summer which at least might be helpful if we're able to get partly through our process if i knew kelly was that you know point zero zero zero one percent was going to hang in here i wouldn't feel as badly if both of us are departing um for the reasons you're stating but but at some point you know all of us confront these on different boards and committees i mean i think the challenge for us is i mean let's maybe i'll be frank which is if you two weren't here i mean this would we went to we would have gotten nowhere right we would have just submitted something which would have been like i mean i i i absolutely expected a lot more communication it seemed like that in the beginning that it just petered off completely and so i don't you know i think that's i mean that's part of the conversation we're going to have which is for this to even work otherwise i mean if there's no input no direct connection and we're just asking blind questions yeah i think i can't see the committee surviving right yeah and also another part of it both of both of you have deep um ties with the town and you know you can pick up the phone they know who you are i mean they don't know who i am um yeah that's not fair but no but i i i mean i've seen it i think both of you guys have you know who to call and uh and i agree with you i think it would be very difficult if we don't have somebody with um experience yeah preferably with fincom i mean very very hard to perceive it but i'll say a couple things right so i i did not have time to do this i knew that going in i agreed to do it for the reason you just said john which was how does this get off the ground with people who haven't touched it right who may have experience and expertise in the various areas but have never touched it so that's that's why i agreed to do it but i also said at the time i'm only doing it if you give me the one-year slot and i'm not going to be chair um and you didn't see you can see i failed at one of those thoroughly um so well you guys get to watch right that's the problem well you didn't know you didn't know not that it that i mean you have your own body of experience and wealth of knowledge but you didn't know at the time you agreed to come on the committee that i had approached the school committee because i didn't do that until they were having trouble finding somebody but i think part of john's point which i um i think is i think the intention was that as an advisory committee it would have been you know the assistant town manager i think was slotted in to be a go between with the town manager's office i was fully expecting the finance director to be much more active with the committee providing you know some of the the institutional knowledge financial you know background etc and i think once it was clear that you had two former fincom members and or long-term volunteers from the town operating on the committee and they got plenty of other things to do my guess is well they seem to be getting things done if the two of us weren't here i think you would have absolutely seen and i think we need to confirm that uh when we meet with them that that isn't that is in fact the intention because you may want one more fincom experienced people but there's absolutely no assurance that that you're going to be able to find somebody to step up and do it at any given time over the next you know decade or whatever so what i'll say and i'll say it out loud because it's i i am willing to do something like what pam did for a period of time or similar what you're saying like i i stick around for a little bit but i cannot take on another multi-year term right so she stepped down as chair too yeah and i stepped down as chair i cannot be chair so um i'm willing to support in that way but someone else has got to be chair get those agendas in um yeah well i mean i i mean i'm i can i can do that the um in terms of being chair it's it's more the the the the process uh that you went through because you put in a ton of work i mean yeah and uh uh and i would have been and still some of the clues as to even how you did it all um apparently one of the morning is the key
so right so what we can continue this discussion um but i will not be chair and it will not be citing up for a multi-year general the the difference between what you just said and what i just want to understand for everybody's benefit myself included um what pam agreed to do was uh not continue to serve she ended up getting appointed yeah for the remaining two years of a term she had the ability to just keep serving even though she wasn't reappointed which you can do um why didn't you and the appointing board decided that since she agreed by the time they got to the point where she ultimately said okay i'll do it it was sort of close to when the cycle was going to start so she said okay i'm gonna i'll do this through the end of town meeting and at that point the appointing board said okay why don't we just appoint you we understand you're only going to do it for one more year and then we'll have a one-year term left which is generally the things i've i signed up in the past for three one-year remaining terms because i didn't want to commit to three years so now there's two one-year terms remaining which is the only reason i i mean i could go for a three-year term and tell them same thing i'm only going to do it for one year but um so my question for you is are you are you in the if you did that would you be saying don't reappoint me but i'll keep serving until you find until you but you need to be looking for someone to take my spot but i'll keep working with the committee until you found somebody and i'll keep checking in with you but you better find somebody back and i'll keep checking with you fincom that your support that you're you're actively trying to find somebody versus and the reason i picked october 15 is because that's as to the short-term planning that's the heavy lift right between now and october 15th okay and so you know you might give some thought could you at least legitimately because bringing someone new in in the middle of that process any time staying my term ends up june 30 for board so i i would give some thought to staying through october 15th same concept but if the report is running if i don't and i don't anticipate that we're going to issue a report on october 15th if i'm here we're issuing it whatever state it's in because at least now we have one drafted right and we can work from it but i would not be passed by so i i it's not until they appoint somebody i'll give you a little bit longer right to find somebody but not not beyond october 15th okay so are you still thinking about this or are you now committing to this i'm not committing to it i will consider it but the conditions of the considerate are i will not be chair i will not stay past october 15th and i do not want to be reappointed so uh so we'll take it we probably should probably should put on the next agenda uh chair vice chair minute taker um discussion next meeting just because that you know that may influence yeah decisions but sitting here right now um uh again subject to what the schools and i decide once we have our discussion um uh it sounds like you're going to get the other three of you will get the good ways through the heavy lift between now and october 15th you may get all the way through with both kelly and i still here um and uh if i choose not to pursue the fincom then i'll probably just finish out my term again and this assumes the schools and i haven't agreed to part ways um but but again i just don't know what they're thinking as they as i said they um you know and they have two new members so i just if they need to come to terms with you know the issue i raised who came on school committee um two people sit on the right side of the school committee yeah i'll look at it um aaron aaron baller the other aaron and uh christine okay so uh anyway uh i can tell you so you again you might because the fincom's 20 boards meeting on friday so i didn't want you to see my name in the public in public documents and go what is this doing and uh maybe i'll start working on kelly to go back to the fincom for a year you know oh my cold dead body well this is one of benefits of being on zoom when we have this type of discussion because people forget you're there how do you feel about all this was well i think you ever gotta do what's right for you so i would never i i will say this yes there's a lot of heavy lifting that that kelly and you brian do but i would never want to pressure you into sticking on if it wasn't a good fit um so we would figure it out we would just you know we would just really start i don't want to say hammering down the door of of either folks in finance town manager and not to say that you haven't done that but i i think the it was mentioned there was a certain amount of not convenience but um knowing that both of you are on this committee and you have all this innate knowledge that you come with you would figure it out because you've been doing this for what the larger part of a decade or plus i mean yeah you know so you helped i mean i i remember kelly you saying i wrote this part of the warrant so you just you knew it like the back of your hand whereas i think the rest of us were like i don't even know if i got hands right now so so but but i think we learned a lot this past year we're in a better place and and you know um there would we struggle yes good learning opportunities for all but yeah you got to do what's right for you so i would never want to say you need to you know hang on because we can't hack it we'll we'll figure a way to get it done even i might figure out a way to set emotion or acknowledge emotion or second in emotion that's my struggle so but uh but i can always pick up a phone and chase down what focus either of us or any of us bring to a particular period of time it isn't necessarily what future committees you know think is important to do um i i i personally think more of this committee's time needs to get spent on long-term planning and if at the end of the day maybe i don't want to go too far astray well it's not in the including this agenda yeah we can we can talk about that i think we can talk about it future i know i know where you're headed right and i i don't disagree with you it's like anything else so when you start something brand new right it doesn't even room isn't built in the day right so is long-term planning need to be the focus yes can you get there if you haven't built the foundation no um so it'll get there we do need more support from the town i think we can while i i asked a lot of times there was a point where i just gave up right because we had too much to do and i wasn't going to chase right because we weren't getting anywhere and we needed to finish so the original draft report is written right there's a little more ability right there's going to be a little more room to to chase um and so i think we can change i think and i i think we can change the way we operated with the town a little better um but i don't expect at the end of this year it's going to be in the end state it should be in either and that's okay i would have envisioned it's going to take it takes three years to get this fully up and running to where it was supposed to be i mean gotta remember all these other committees fincon's been around right for a really long time so there's a lot of deep knowledge and even with people rotating off right the process has been in place the town manager and and finance director's process has been in place a long time this is all new and it's another and i do respect the fact that it's yet another committee that they have to support right they didn't they didn't get more time either um in the day so i think we're headed in the right direction it will get better and that and that could influence the uh the um backgrounds of the people that need to serve on this committee in fact if you go back and look at the uh the bylaw it calls out you know different professions and skills and and uh so i think under succession planning that's why it's i think it's important not not necessarily get wet of what we just did or what we might do this second cycle but what what really is this committee where can it add value to the town's process despite what it says in the bylaw and on paper and if that has to be you know tweaked and approved by town meeting in order to come up with something that's useful uh otherwise i agree with john you end up with a committee that people say you know why am i why am i here coming up with this or me for that matter you know i can have a bigger impact somewhere else and i'm going to go do that i will say though although i i felt that way at one point along the way um where we landed where the town landed does indicate that we had it was we had an impact and it was a value so i i wasn't sure at one point that that was the way we were going to land but we did so it had an impact it is worthwhile um we've got work to do but i think we're we're poised to do that so and the other thing i will say brian relative to your succession while i i think you're a tremendous asset to this committee you are also a tremendous asset to finance committee and having worked with you for a few years i'm not overly concerned that if you're on the finance committee whoever's on this committee is not still going to get the benefit of the things that you've seen right in committee meetings or aware of so i i don't are you saying we might actually have public comment from brian well i've cut down on my emails to the fincom after they didn't seem to be overly appreciative of the number of emails they were getting i am appreciative of your emails i may not have always have time to to understand them fully but i'm very appreciative of them and i think others on the committee will be as well because if you've already watched a meeting and you know what's going on and you can summarize that just allow things to move it moves faster yeah yeah so i don't think it's the end of the world if you were to go back to fincom and quite frankly knowing what the town's facing i i fully understand and and i don't think that that's necessarily the worst thing for this committee either for you just as fincom isn't it it's good to have fincom skills on the cipc i think it's good to have someone who's done cipc on the fincom right so that we're not talking pat right yeah so i think yeah i mean we didn't say yeah it's great for us having both of you right i mean i couldn't imagine learning half of this and yeah i mean further procedures just oh hey this meeting this happened this is going on this is the history right because some of these projects they're six seven years long yeah if it's any solace the the fincom got through their process with pretty inexperienced group of very smart hard-working very true but but inexperienced from the standpoint we're talking about here in terms of institutional knowledge they had the one member that hung in there pam roman that was available something came up but uh um so it can be done you just have to do things differently and um sometimes it's a good thing too yeah no absolutely that's having different perspectives um i just wanted to be safe here and go back to the 640 agenda item briefly yeah uh just want to comment on one other town meeting thing uh you all might be interested nobody got up and asked a question on the capital budget uh why why is the recommended budget so much higher than the cipc's recommended budget that's the one thing i was anticipating getting at least that question and it didn't come up so yes we had an impact it was lower than what the town manager recommended so that's good but uh personally i think it should have been lower yeah well i should have gotten
then you could have answered it and as you as we face this next year that's going to be hard that will be so easy to do like to go over again this coming year because it'll it'll directly impact that question from a succession standpoint i mean next week we can talk about this but you know i watched this as the media being described right brian's doing the minutes right like this is where ai becomes like hey like why are like i mean what he puts down is you know much more facility but as we take over and try to rebalance the knowledge with effort can we use tools like that we don't know if we have that answer but yeah i think i think april method took over my job of doing the minutes and i pretty sure she's been using ai okay i think it appeared like it was a little rough getting going because it was just kind of a dump so she uses the way cam recording and then you transcript and then yeah and ai pulls out and i think it got i haven't read all their minutes but i got i had a sense that they got they got a little bit better uh over time but it still requires um hopefully you all review the minutes but it still requires people reviewing the minute but ai is not perfect you have to what i learned last week is you have to tell it not to hallucinate yeah i mean the the rest of you might want to be thinking i mean i'm happy to keep doing the minutes it's not that big a deal for me it takes time but and and yes i could probably figure out how to use ai and speed it up a little bit but i i kind of do them as soon after the meeting as i can because i literally don't have to review my notes that closely because she kind of can remember what i consider to be votes and highlights but uh someone else you know some committees will rotate that around each member except for the chair uh but um it that my experience with that though is it ends up in minutes minutes inconsistency in the minutes and the way that they're done and inconsistency in what gets posted so back when i first joined fincom that meant that that was some minutes got posted and some minutes didn't get posted yeah this isn't easy here's brian's minutes for the last year please replicate these results with new data we're done yes right but the open meeting law requires within three meetings or 30 days whichever is the latest you have to approve a set of minutes and uh what kelly's referring to unfortunately and they had an outside minute taker on the fincom before i got there and it was just sure things are getting behind because of the work schedule and uh if you miss it if someone brings an open meeting law complaint yeah problem so i just i didn't know what i was dealing with so ai would be a good way to in brian's absence that's what i would do i would take the recording run it through ai i think you could give it the previous minutes as a structure right you have to tell it not to hallucinate you can tell it i hallucinate no ai hallucinates right only use right only use what's said don't infer don't right oh okay gotcha yeah yeah yeah i mean if someone wants to practice that uh as we get into the summer months uh while i'm still here that's fine um you were a minute taker don't tell it it's a court reporter because then it'll give you every okay some committees ended up spewing out literal literal transcripts which you really don't need to do yeah probably satisfied but i listen i do always have it's 2026 there were as long as the recording is available it's all there right and so it's it's a lot of time i know it's what we have to do but it's a lot of time invested in something that was in was created in a time when that didn't exist there was no recording maybe one day the state will change a lot of say if there is a recording your recording your minutes can say you can document the boats and the minutes can say see recording and it really there's no reason not to do that well so there are every once in a while the meeting recording fails oh well yes those fail once in a while when you're the minute taker and you're like i'm gonna go look rewatch rewatch that section oh wait it's not there it's not there you're like oh i really needed to see that um okay we've had enough discussion on that so can we move on to reviewing to vote and approve the minutes of april 29th all right so the minutes you should have in front of our redline version which if if we vote them don't need to be voted as an amended set because they're your original version that we're reviewing if you have other edits and we'll have to do a motion as edited but uh in my email i noted that um i didn't realize there had been an amended agenda for the last meeting uh to change the link and i didn't realize that either um i didn't look did that last agenda also drop the topics i doubt it because that email okay so i'm good on that item no and it and just make sure that the last agenda and i know you mentioned it in your email i had submitted it with the wrong date on it yeah that got changed and they fixed it but they fixed it before they posted it right or did they post an amended because when they sent me back a note to say they posted it they told me it was wrong and they had fixed it yeah they fixed it when they posted it it it wasn't right so i got back to them again and they reposted it they just posted it without the corrections they had the right date but they didn't so they took that one down they now have up there the correct date at the top they have the correct uh revisions highlighted so i think we're set on that okay and so uh you'll see in my red line version that so i had to change that because i wasn't aware at the time that there was in fact a an amended agenda and then i did have to go refer to the tape because uh i misheard kelly i thought we were going to be meeting tonight at the council on aging center on andrew's app which was in the first draft i sent you so i changed that to what you see in the craft it's redlined other than that i have no other revisions anybody else have any questions revisions no no can i get a motion to approve the minutes so moved motion to approve second take them take them take them take them that's good yeah i'm gonna have to put a remedial school on um on that there's a take the one orange was bleak all right we're gonna have to do a roll call vote uh brian yes brad yes john yes liz yes kelly yes passes five zero zero all right and can i get let's see can we talk next meeting so we talked about earlier i will offer the thursday of next week and it's not the tuesday if i can get them in here um and send your note letting you know what they said otherwise we're looking at the following wednesday which is the 27th okay which is our schedule already um and then the meeting after that uh is the one brad you are going to have to chair right that is the 10th yeah yeah okay so the next meeting we'll talk about how the two of you will coordinate an agenda at least for the 10th meeting where you want to we'll coordinate an agenda yeah next at the next meeting we'll coordinate an agenda and um i know you're just trying to figure out a date to meet with the town manager finance director is the tribe board meeting anywhere on the horizon no um the vice chair was on i don't want to say i was giving him a little a little bit of time because he was on he was aware so um vice chair of income okay yeah they're they're going to be doing a reorganization monday night i assume of the select board so yeah new chairs and they may yeah may be the same party members coming yeah on so i will i've got a list for the current chair of the select board so i will so right now our prior our primary mission is how do we get to a point where we can get the next cycle going and that tri-board meeting i think it's important yeah we get to try to set a new baseline and go forward but i don't know what us from we got stuff to do and it doesn't stop us from getting going yeah because we got a lot of work to do and we can incorporate the results of the tri-board meeting along the way i have you charge at a topic yes um in the assignments i had the assignment of figuring out like his status of capital assets in the town maybe we can have a discussion of how to approach that with who since and i also have to get lives now that time meeting is over yeah kelsey yeah let me make one note just because i saw that they voted down of the town manager said no to actually making the committee to do that study unless i misunderstood that it wasn't a committee it was a petitioner you're talking about the petitioner article for yeah creating an asset inventory yeah that was voted down because it was someone from the blackboard said that's kind of what this committee's supposed to do and our town staff supposed to do yeah but one thought i have and i i didn't hear back from her that petitioner conceivably she has an interest in in processes and planning and and obviously had enough interest in the town having a active list of assets that um um um maybe she might have an interest in this committee um who was the petitioner uh carol plum okay that's what i thought it was um so that goes into the succession agenda item yeah yeah i just figured i mean i don't know what it began to talk about it but it fell off well and i think in the order it fell off because of the order of the things that have to get done it and even it's big yeah it might to that point um because again i think she put a lot of thought in and i think it i think it it is i think it is on point with that item as i wonder whether we might think about on the agenda inviting reaching out to carol inviting her in maybe to share with us her view of why she what she hoped to get out of that article just because i think there's a lot of stuff that that was baked in there that probably should be getting done yeah and that um why why reinvent anyway just a thought she might not want to do that okay i can you're just trying to filibuster till 8 30 what else can fit under the agenda no i do have a clarifying question so i i we had talked about you know not engaging with kelsey until after our town meeting but did we actually give either michael or kelsey a heads up that i will be reaching out to oh no i'm gonna i thought i'm gonna do okay all right then i will to follow up on meeting dates and to ask him or to let him know that that's what you're planning to do yeah maybe just let him know yeah we know um but if he comes back with a hard stop let me know but otherwise we'll just assume that you know he'll be notified and then we'll get started there okay and uh liz um probably send it around but i'm going to send you the excel spreadsheet workbook that i put together that resulted in the tables for open capital that were in our report just because that you might want to look at that as we're going to need that information again which is kind of what your work would be working on right yeah so um i'll send that to everybody and i'm sure i'm sure i offload this stuff yeah okay okay yeah two more minutes we don't have to stay until the adjourn time all right can i get a motion to adjourn so motioned and a second second second uh sorry uh head i'm gonna go around the room uh all in favor brian yes liz yes brad yes john yes kelly yes that passes five zero zero and we are adjourned at 8 27.
you may join us in person at the town building or at the link on the town's website remotely on zoom
when required by law or allowed by the chair persons wishing to provide public comment or otherwise participate in the meeting may do so at the meeting location or on zoom public comment should be limited to two minutes per person all right so members attending in person are john brian brad and myself kelly and then we have liz on zoom so we are in hybrid mode um and that means we will need to do we'll call vote if we vote on anything all right so agenda 630 is call to order review agenda for public and announcements 635 is public comment and members response 640 discuss the comparison of the five-year plan the annual time meeting warrant versus cipc's fiscal 27 to fiscal 31 report amended april 29th including related questions and debrief on the capital motions at annual town meeting including but not limited to items 8 9 and 10 brian will will fill us in on that seven o'clock discuss next steps to advance future cipc report process including but not limited to those outlined in the report um potential revisions to the draft cip submission form and the cipc project plan for the remainder of 26. uh 8 10 is discussed succession planning finance and school committee designees to the extent there's any updates there 8 20 review and a vote vote to approve the minutes of april 29th 8 25 set the time of next meeting and 8 30 adjourn um i will just note there was a change to the agenda uh sorry yeah the agenda template um and as a part of those changes one of them was the change i think the link and the other because of the new website and then the other change i just want to call out is we used to have a an item on the agenda that was um topics not anticipated 48 hours in advance uh town clerk has said she was at a conference and that that attorney general so that's not um the way that we should be doing in general that that shouldn't be the case if you have a change to your agenda not anticipated 48 hours in advance you should be revising your agenda which you can do once you've submitted 40 hours in advance you can revise the agenda so i've removed that if you're curious if you notice or curious why um and do we have any public comment okay there's a question about that so if on my way to the meeting i decide that there's something that i didn't tell you about that i think is important to bring up does that mean we can't talk about it since there's no mention of that i i think we can't talk about it but i think you could in my opinion you could mention that you want it on a future agenda in announcements but at least for this committee we're simply gonna it's not on the agenda we're not going to talk about it other than correct asking for a placeholder on the next agenda that's that's my plan okay just from a conservative standpoint i don't okay thank you i think we should do it i don't think we should risk that so is attendees us or is that someone else do we know robbie is there anybody
there's nobody else other than me on zoom just lonely out here in zoom land
got your space background on now yeah yeah um okay um any other announcements comments since we're on that house from others okay so let's start with um first item since there's no public comment um i think there i got some questions brian from you um other questions came in in the last day or so so i hadn't had a chance to consolidate them i can do that and get them to the town manager and the town and the finance director they were not available to be at our meeting today and we are still working out when they can i've asked them if instead of the 27th if they could do next week so i did just talk to town manager on that before the meeting started he was here so i asked him to please get back to me with their availability so i will consolidate our questions and send them over brad i didn't see any from you and that's i completely dropped the ball on that's okay yeah if you send them to me like in the next day and consolidate them and send them over the wall um is there anybody in the questions you guys have was there anything you wanted to talk about before i send them over or anything you were like puzzled by that you that you didn't want me to include before we talked about well i mean most of them were i think obvious like just why did i move or what was the priority or where did it come from it was one or two that weren't there before i mean i would guess the answer will be a submitted way but just more then how do we resolve that going forward
anything else yeah i i would just say i mean i saw the takes and puts so things split in moved out and wasn't so concerned about those because they were accounted for somewhere but i did notice there were a number of items that just didn't seem to be in the town manager's budget at all so it does beg the question of and maybe they were relabeled to something but where did they go it's like 3.4 million dollars which isn't you know it's just shy of 10 over the entire span of the five years but it's it should did they go away is it moving out five years is it do you have a purgatory yes well that's what i was thinking well i knew about our purgatory but i was like what about what about their purgatory yeah so but i gave you the list of ones that i was like hey these are just things that didn't i couldn't find somewhere else so um yeah so i'll try to group i did see that i'll try to group the questions sort of like you know hey these were time shifts these were disappeared these were new that we didn't know about right and kind of break them into categories i know then we had a couple that were we thought these were canceled but those were in big groups yeah and on your 27 questions john i know you had a bunch of 27 those are kind of my lowest priority because it is what it is but i i think they're good from a let me understand how you were thinking that was really yeah i think they but they don't they don't help us discreetly but they do indirectly from uh yeah what was your thinking maybe you could put a a general question related to understanding you know their decision process for fiscal 27 yeah i mean there's also a decision process for the other four years but yeah there are other fiscal 27 potential issues that we need to talk about here shortly yes so that's going to be next the agenda yeah assuming my questions and liz and john's questions all you know circle around the same things you should be able to they do i'm just yeah i'm just going to consult some of them are the same um or they're getting at the same thing and i'll consolidate them um but together they were i think they were pretty no surprises i don't think so data is the data yeah i don't think we there was let's put this right there was no rocket science in terms of like what we were asking like why is that earlier why is that later where did that come from um yeah so i won't belabor that any further um i do want brian could i just ask liz one follow-up question was you you referenced um
maybe you're just pulling a number off the top of your head three million of aggregate over the five years that you said were in our recommendation that didn't seem to be anywhere in the five-year plan from the town management yes and and i i mean there were some instances where things moved i'll point to like adding sand to the the lake you know that was under a different bucket so there was like some mismatches that washed themselves out but there was a number of instances where did you identify any was there any one that that doesn't sound right to me but did you did you identify any one you know significant item that seemed to appeal for a big slug of that just as an example when we say big item i mean there are you know a couple hundred k on average well i'll take a look and just make sure i'm not going to send anything until i i can i see the same question so i'll make sure that we are aligned i won't ask the question if we're not aligned with the data
i did try to spot check and go back to see like and that's how i found like the town sand because it was just because i went through everything right well well yeah i mean now now that you so i think there's i know kelly asked at the last meeting when she looked at the aggregate total dollars she noted that the levy debt our levy debt recommendation for five years was a couple million dollars more than the town manager's recommendation and uh that largely is due to the the town roof where we we included the request for each of the four out of the five years the total a little less than two million whereas uh the the finance director town manager uh pulled all the town building costs out uh other than the fiscal 27 over the gymnasium roof a lot of it is town building tb yeah yeah and he put those quote below the line so that that accounts for you know probably about two-thirds of what you're seeing that appears to be missing in the five-year plan yeah so that is about half of it yep yeah so i just i just want to make sure that i wasn't missing something but yeah there may be a couple other items that um okay i will i will verify so you consolidate you send along and then the question is how long before we think you know so we'll get answers back um i don't know because i don't have an answer on when we can meet so i wish i could answer that but i'm pushing for so first question i guess i can ask it now is can we can any of you meet right can we meet next week if the answer to that is no then it's the following week however i know brian said he could join us on the 27th but the town manager does not think he can he's he's had something another commitment for the town so first question is are there dates times next week that we can meet yeah i'm available and i i would say is if we could get a quorum we should do it proceed assuming that unless you think we should meet without necessarily having gotten responses to the questions that you're going to send along yeah and i'm okay meeting without the without the answers as long as we can have it just like they'll have them and we can discuss them and if they have to follow up and bring us back questions i think that's okay um but i would like to have that face-to-face discussion right particularly around and for me it comes down to priorities right we made an attempt to prioritize we did so on criteria that we laid out in the report i've asked the question multiple times it seems like their prioritization was based on whatever was prioritized last year and then pull some in and put some out and i just want to make sure going forward we're on a mutual understanding of priorities like i want to hear if you pulled something forward that we didn't i want to hear about why that is so i can understand it better and maybe that adjusts the way we think maybe it doesn't but i'd like to know that that's a fundamental like that's a difference in what we think is a committee versus what the town thinks yeah um so i think we can do that without having the answer to every single question yeah i would say that and the other piece is like if project shifts i mean not a small project but if project shift like he gets someone gets new information after that so how like how can we get we can just so that this isn't like an unknown right i'd say that's another because i'm sure that's happened like someone so reached out i need a different truck yeah you know then just loop us in versus making it an action you know an extra step yeah not that i want a lot more work for us but if if that were the case i was like hey these are these adjustments i'm not out of the gate opposed to like okay i'll amend for that so that we're aligned right if it's but i'm not going to do that 16 times like i'm going to do that once right i'm not it's just an amended more just so we understand okay if it's new information that comes between when we issue our report and when we go to town meeting yeah right it's like there's a final update you could do that says okay i understand those tweaks we're aligned we don't need those to be differences but i'm i'm not committing to that i just think that there's a world that that could work yeah i mean i have there's a related issue that occurred at town meeting that might influence what you just said as to our the requirement that we it'll definitely influence what i do in fact update part of part of the reason i said it yes um all right so first i'm available you're available only at the 20th it can't be monday because select boards meeting yeah oh any day next week i'm looking up so tuesday i can't do okay wednesday can do tuesday or thursday i cannot yeah wednesday i'm fine to tuesday and wednesday i'm fine it's and thursday tuesday no thursday may not be fine i think he said that they want for tomorrow oh not for national yeah no i i wednesday he was the one day he said they maybe couldn't um so that kind of tuesday or thursday you think for tuesday or thursday who's available i'm available thursday probably i could probably be available thursday if i know by the end of the week right i could do thursday even monday is properly doable yeah i can't do monday because it's a slack board um tuesday if we could get me brian and brad i might put a comment maybe any chance we could um for the benefit of the town employees that are meeting with us do it earlier than 6 30. like it for those of you at work no it's really hard for me to do that okay yeah i mean if you can't you can't maybe brian kevin i'm sure will join by zoom the town manager would probably stay here so you're going to check with them on tuesday or thursday at 6 30. and with that the in addition to the tentative meeting we have on the 27th 27th yeah we could we meet with them we could figure out what we're going to talk about on the 27th okay so you'll let us know yeah okay all right um actually another matter that fits under this agenda item um as it deals with funding sources uh so one of the differences in our recommendations versus the final five-year plan um is that the finance director was able to determine which projects uh might be available to generate surplus capital um there's actually two related questions or issues um i think kelly you asked a meeting or two ago uh where did the surplus capital come from where the projects actually fully completed you know or if not you know why not and and uh so um i haven't i didn't circulate to everybody but um there was approximately a dozen uh specific uh prior projects that the finance director had identified and then spoken with the department managers about those projects um and uh he listed out the uh excess surplus capital related to those items and two questions that i'll have for them and you can either put it in your questions i don't think i wrote this down uh so there was uh two school items one was fiscal 23 district-wide flooring which he said uh had a hundred thousand dollars round number of surplus capital um and uh there was a 20 fiscal 25 district-wide roof replacement repairs that had surplus capital of 146,444 i just want to focus on those two items two different reasons and and those are the two items that funded part of the elementary installation of hvacker conditions correct um so as to why those would be surplus capital i guess i'm questioning because both was funding for district-wide flooring and district-wide roof replacement and repairs the whole reason for doing which suggests to me is that that gives them a lot of latitude to figure out what needs to be done when it needs to be done yeah i just don't understand how you could determine that project would have kind of come to a closeout point it would seem to me they'd always spent all that money because it was you know i'm sure they have more than enough projects to to do and in fact i didn't go back but i expect if we look at our five-year and their five-year plan there's probably a request in there for district-wide flooring and district-wide roof replacement repairs so i'd kind of like to know why and how he could determine and how the schools agreed to let him determine because they wanted another item and he told i understand yeah and i know he told us that right or he told finance committee that that you know they the other one of the items that they added that they had to find a way to fund it and so but that's um yeah now i'm not saying you can't you can't do this uh but if you choose to do this um well so that that's one question um i mean i know why he was looking for money and and why he picked on schools and he did apply it to another school project but it just doesn't make sense to me when they're asking for more money for the same things in subsequent year budgets that you would pick on those two items it's yeah it's not actually it's not surplus capital like it would be if like hey i had money to buy a truck the truck costs twenty thousand dollars less that's surplus capital in those where those were intended to be able to like so i can use what's left over on the next phase of district-wide flooring or the next phase of roofing that's just taking repurposing but it means that we've got the next project that that's going to have to appropriate money for stuff that you thought you already appropriate that that's really my question it's not really surplus why did that make sense right so the for an example but they're not didn't go out to bid for a they do school-wide they don't go out to bid first they don't go out to bid for the whole district what they do and this started probably five or six years ago was when it's a project that is something like flooring where basically you're continuously updating flooring right you work your way through the buildings by the time you're finished you have to go back and start again right um they do it as a district-wide project for approval so that if there's money left over from the last you know the ones you did last summer at the middle school you can go ahead and get started on the ones at happy hollow right with the money that's there and then you have subsequent funding but it was intended so that you wouldn't be in a situation where you're short ten thousand dollars to finish the project and you've got to go back and ask for more it's because the nature of the project is that it continuously right is being done is it is it done by town employees or is it no they don't identify a roof on a school and say or a floor in a school and say okay this we estimate it's going to cost 50 grand we have 200 grand in this appropriation for district-wide flooring probably go out to bid to figure out what that discrete project will cost use that money away they go finish that project they still have a bunch of money left if they have other flooring and other school buildings which they will so it'd be to me it's kind of like saying to the dpw you have this this highway funds that you've been appropriated but i want to repurpose now i'm not i'm not saying you can't do it as long as town meeting authorizes you doing it and the project proponents or department managers say okay you can do it because they thought they had the money for projects needed to spend it but um i just want to understand why it makes sense if you then just have to come back in you know in your five-year plan in the near term and reappropriate money so maybe it bought you you you know a little bit of of capital that you didn't need to borrow but it's just coming back at you so i just want to understand that the thought process because i haven't seen that before most of the times what i've seen is the projects are done or and there's money or they're not going to do it they're not going to do it yeah right the project the need is no longer there something has changed um the other thing i'll say brad about doing like using floors as an example in particular with the school buildings you know we appropriated atm right in the spring and sometimes what happens is okay well where we decided to hold summer school change like you've they've got a slot which floors they're going to do based on when they've got availability to get into the buildings and that may change so that was another reason to do those projects as district-wide rather than a specific building because it gave them the flexibility to you know flex if the needs and open dates right where they could get into different buildings differed so i'm with you brian that's not traditionally how i think that has worked and it it doesn't in my mind especially when we're doing the report right we talked about if there's surplus capital like these are the additional projects at that time i would have surplus capital is not because you took it from another project that we're just going to keep doing it's because you actually finished and have money left over well it's interesting with the floor and we they had a request in 27 we pushed the 28 probably because they had money left over so foreign was in the budget we would have seen it in the open capital i mean there are other two other big items i picked on these two for a specific other reason which i'll mention but there was also 202 000 and change again taken from the schools for a fiscal 20 appropriation for district-wide core network cyber security no district-wide core network related costs at cyber security so that's the school computer network and then there was district-wide classroom cabinetry replacement 128 000 and change so they were big amounts they're sort of this district-wide it you know whatever so i just want to be able to talk through kind of brian's thought process i know why he was looking for money and i'm not concerned about that it's just it's just what what you know maybe his philosophy is you know when we appropriate that money the intent is you're you're supposed to use that in a one-year cycle and if you can't as kelly said for something maybe it's beyond your control uh then that should be part of your sort of uh plan going forward i'm i i don't want to guess what his yeah we've talked before with i've talked before with brian and he does have an opinion not a one-year but he does have an opinion if project was appropriated and the money sits there and sits there and sits there right year after year and doesn't get that then it should be rescinded and and given back you know fiscal 20 for district-wide core network yeah and i know that the board you know our board of selection liaison feels the same that there should be a time limit yeah and when we talk to department managers about it they express concerns which were understandable around there are some projects that just they're going to take right we know at the outset they're going to take three years to do and that's part of why in the cip form right i want to get to if you can lay out start and end dates then there's something to measure against at least before you take it away of yeah you got that money four years ago you were supposed to be done in a year and you haven't used it there's that's a reason so we'll ask him i'll add that to the question yeah if you just put that on a question um so so and and that's relevant to us only if which we'll also talk about process-wise uh at the in within the window we need to know what it is he can provide the committee with his estimate of surplus capital prior to completing our recommendation because otherwise you know doesn't affect anything we do because if he's going to continue to deal with it you know in december january other than if we decide to go back and issue an addendum the real relevance and why i brought up those first two items uh is when when i looked at um again his workbook um there's something described as surplus capital which is what we just were talking about and uh then there's something called surplus bond proceeds and those are those are prior appropriations for projects that uh the town meeting approved use of borrowing and they have gone out and borrowed and the funds are sitting you know in a special account waiting to be spent and similar to surplus capital it kind of is affect both it's both surplus capital and in this case surplus bond proceeds because if the project is let's say done or it's decided that he wants to someone wants to repurpose the use of those uh bond proceeds you can do that but under mass law uh you've got to go get town meetings approval to do that and uh last year if you go back and look at the i'm sure there's been the case in prior years you go back and look at the motion that was made at town meeting for the capital budget it specifically calls out surplus bond proceeds with very specific language it was provided by town council and outside bond council identifying which appropriation and project it came from and that it was to be used in the course of state law on a project that has a estimated useful life equivalent or longer and for whatever reason i went to town meeting and motion was read and i didn't hear any reference to surplus bond proceeds and i'll be honest i didn't look at this schedule that i pulled from brian's spreadsheet until after town meeting because something wasn't sitting right and so i've asked the question of him and i haven't gotten response um should they have asked in that motion and because they didn't and it's required by state law that town meeting approved for the use of those proceeds
is the funding of the line item that that was used for it's 246 000 and change was used to fund about half of the elementary installation of hvac if it's not if it wasn't legally appropriated because the motion didn't contain the right special words um is that line item for that project now short funded and that's what's relevant to us because that could then need to be funded in fiscal or fiscal 28 when we get to it so that's the reason i'm bringing that up it's nice perhaps educationally for everybody to hear that it's maybe important that the motion have these special words in it and what line did you see that in because obviously there's no bond surplus in the debt yeah okay yeah if you look in the detail in the warrant and if you have your warrant available on page 51 everything in the warrant which is not different from what it was last year everything in the warrant was well it may not necessarily be correct everything in the detail on the warrant on page 51 where it's your source of funds it simply references surplus capital okay 246 000 which is about half of the cost of that item so it would appear in capital closeouts on the spreadsheet is that where it would have gone that's it was on his capital closeout spreadsheet but he had two columns one for both surplus capital and then he had three three uh surplus bonds the other was he used to list that here separately as surplus um not if you look at last year's war we we we took the shortcut and we included everything in the source table as surplus capital okay but the moment you're saying the motion needs both needs the extra piece in it then yeah but i think in the in the motion printed in last year's warrant we've referenced surplus bond proceeds so you'd have to add the numbers in the motion printed in the warrant and what was read on timing floor to surplus capital to get the total surplus capital that's shown uh in the table and then on the description i think again we just referenced surplus capital the short you know short change it so um anyway my guess is that brian's going to have to ask town council whether or not that's a problem i'm not a lawyer but i think it's a problem because state law requires the vote and um uh so that's one issue that came up at town meeting um the second issue which again which relevant for us is um there were uh three it items listed in the warrant on stage 46 and 47. uh one titled cyber security remediation modernization second title public safety regional emergency system third title cyber security firewall replacement um all three of those title line items were included in our recommendation at the requested amounts and we included a fourth in our recommendation which is a an item for phase two of video monitoring which we brought up in the fiscal 27 because we thought it appeared important for security and that was 160 000 uh the town manager's uh recommended budget and the finance committee's budget did not include 160 000 item so that's one of the reconciling items so we went to town meeting and they get to item eight on page 46 and all of a sudden an hour later there's been debate on video monitoring and i'm sitting there listening to this going brad you want to read i don't i don't quite get it but um read the title and the description of item i i didn't crack open my warrant at town meeting and i just assumed that because the town manager dropped 160 item or 60 000 item maybe they combine that with the the cyber security remediation modernization but i got home that night monday night i realized that the description on page 46 for item 8 was a description taken from the 160 000 video monitoring item which isn't in the budget that presented in the warrant so said another way the title of the item title and amount of the item do not match with the description description is from a different is from the security camera project so i raised the point before it started coming on the second night with both the finance director and the town manager the manager didn't have time to look at my issue the finance director basically said well if it's wrong we'll have to fix it maybe in a special town meeting in the fall that was the answer then the town manager caught me at town meeting and said i really haven't had time to look at your email but i think the language is broad enough that we can do what we want and i said maybe you haven't read it it talks about video monitoring not doing all this other cyber security remediation modernization and um anyway because i was pondering reopening the budget which you can do if you have new information the new information was the hours worth of debate was on something that we weren't wasn't being requested and the it director spoke to answering all the video monitoring questions but also said in the same points he was making uh he also planned to spend some of that money on cyber security remediation etc which you can't do if that's not described so anyway i didn't choose to reopen that article i go home pick up i said i better read all 31 of these items just to see if there's any other issue and lo and lo and behold the description for item nine is the description that should have appeared in item eight because that is the description for the 250 000 that was requested except for a sentence that was tossed in at the very end that talked about funding will support video monitoring and management systems for the library which we have to ask the town manager and the finance director my personal view is they may have gotten rid of 160 000 that we had recommended for video monitoring and may have tacked on a sentence to the other 250 000 item the fincoms the one that produced these schedules that are in the warrant now my issue is the motion read for the capital budget basically asks for authorization to appropriate the money shown in the table on page 43 as well as all the descriptions that appear on page 44 through 51 and so the question which again i think they're going to have to ask town council is given that and that's what town meeting approved uh given the descriptions for item eight appears to me to be limited to video monitoring can the town's it department spend that 250 000 on anything but video monitoring it's it's i'm not aware but it's pretty hard to i don't believe so it's pretty hard to justify for several reasons one town meeting floor spent an hour debating video monitoring system so there's good indication that that's what they believed they were voting on based on their hour of debate to the description of the work that is to be done under the cyber security remediation and modernization project is in the next item so it's hard to say that the description under the title of cyber security is when you've got the actual description down here so i won't let the lawyer decide but and the last the last piece of that is the the actual description for item nine the public safety regional emergency system is not there it was a relatively short description in the cip form so uh i guess again not being a lawyer it seems to be item nine at least even though the title doesn't match up with the description i suppose there you might have a fighting chance to argue that the description governs and the it director at least could spend 150 000 on on that work but that's 100 000 short of what he requested um and he has nothing to spend on the public safety regional emergency system because that's not described anywhere so that needs to be resolved and again the relevance to us is that however that's resolved will potentially impact what we may need to do for fiscal 28 absent um there perhaps being a special town meeting for some other reason in the fall and the town manager and finance director and the select board decide to you know go back and fix this so that they have the money they need for those items so we'll have to stay tuned on that stay tuned on town council's input um the other issue that came up um the trifecta um the it director um uh uh in responding to questions particularly as to what he needed to do and the issues that he sees in the town's security posture which he described in more detail than i would have expected um uh he was asked the question um how much more money do you think you need to spend to get all the problems fixed as soon as possible and of course his response was a million dollars and um i think what he meant was i need i you know i've got money in the plan over a couple three years i think it's not a million dollars but you know you ask him how much he needs um so a town resident i think it was dave bernstein um got up and was basically asking because he then proceeded to um uh proposed to amend uh line item nine on page 46 to increase it by two hundred thousand dollars from 150 to 350. now again this is before i realized that the description of that light on him really belonged on the prior line so that would have at least been 250 so maybe you've only asked for another 50. so there was some back and forth about how much he was going to propose to amend so i was sitting there listening to that and i said i really don't want to get up but i finally said i got to get up and i made a point of order and kelly i just want to get your input on this you know we may need to talk about it again the point of order i made was under the art committee's bylaw it required i think we've talked about this report it requires that any capital appropriation intending to be dealt with a town meeting needs to first come through this committee unless it's determined to be an emergency by the town manager so i made a point of order that increasing by two hundred thousand dollars that line item uh was not before didn't come before this committee and therefore uh i was asking for ruling by the moderator it was out of order she deferred to town council who in turn said i agree here's inconsistent with your bylaw it seems like that has to come first it's not necessarily a new project per se but the amount has now gone up and then the town council threw in an extra and by the way that's a pretty big increase from 150 000. um you know i think that probably shouldn't be allowed either because the town's not on notice that it was going to be that big a number and that ruling um the mod the town moderator didn't necessarily rely on which is a good thing because under her rules you can amend the omnibus budget both operating and capital uh without regard up or down without regard to how much you're asking to change it and i've confirmed that with her so he you know he was thinking maybe about another town but uh anyway the relevance here is that that amendment uh therefore wasn't allowed to be brought to you know to vote and as i was thinking about this after town meeting because a resident got up uh perhaps being an attorney questioned the moderator's ruling that my point of order was appropriate and i don't think he had looked at the bylaw right and then after i made that motion student weinstein got up and said uh mr town manager would you view what we heard from the i.t director about our security posture as constantly an emergency now understand this was his budget so of course now he's got to get up and say well i heard what the i.t director said i had already met with him what you see in front of you is what i posed no i don't think this would constitute an emergency from my perspective so we didn't no additional money was put in that line item okay uh someone else made an amendment to eliminate it completely the 250 of the item above it and that was voted down so once we got all that done what was in the warrant got approved but my question for you specifically kelly is when this bylaw and you're on the working group and that section of the bylaw uh came before the fincom i raised an issue that was focused on petitioner articles that if a petitioner article came forward like for the loker site was a petitioner article years ago to buy the land capital project uh i didn't think it was not a lawyer but i didn't think it was legal that the town have something in the bylaw that would prevent that petitioner's article from being considered at a town meeting and ultimately after several asks they asked town council and should know state law requires the select board to put petitioner articles on the warrant and so i documented that in the minutes because they weren't willing to change the bylaw language to exclude that i never contemplated the potential for an amendment on town meeting floor and part of me says the language in the warrant article says if it's not if it hasn't been before this committee and it's not a petitioner's article which isn't in the bylaw but i would get up and tell everybody what town council said um on its face i think it was appropriate to make that point of order but part of me says why can't a resident at town meeting get up and make an amendment even though the cipc hasn't looked at that request i i think i know what the bylaw says but in the spirit of everybody here is working in support of resident like representing residents if the residents ultimately get up and make an amendment that's their call to make i i i didn't at least when i was in the working group see the bylaw as restricting residents in any way i saw it as for just creating boards committees and town staff right to follow a process and so i view getting up on town meeting floor to amend the same as a petitioner's article and that that's your your right as a as a resident to do um that's one two i don't i don't know that i ever viewed a change in an amount of a project meaning that it had to come back because the way we envisioned the process was we review the projects we make a recommendation to the town manager the town manager makes his recommendation to fincom and fincom makes a recommendation to town meeting that their town meeting then votes on it's absolutely possible even likely that amounts are going to change between our october 15th report and town meeting right and i always viewed the bylaw as like no we've considered this project if the amounts change well that that happens i differentiated a little bit it's like hey if the scope of the project was this when we reviewed it and by the time you got to town meeting the scope of the project was this then i think i feel i think i feel a little differently it should come back around but if it's i'll take an example was the uh the um construction of the pipes on whatever the road was i think it was a 1.1 million request and then he said he needed another 170 000 something we were aware we were aware of it yeah and i deferred him to the to the town manager because that's where it was in the process but we were aware of it and i i think i view it brian i want to be aware of it and if we feel strongly that it changes our opinion we would amend the report yeah so that's where i i differ slightly and the others should weigh in here i i feel slightly different that for for for what we might determine as of insignificant or insubstantial or immaterial changes which could be 170 000 particularly if we're aware of it um but you know a lot of what we were doing was trying to fit projects into particular years based on funding sources and relative to other projects priorities and so i for one view at least a material change in a request a dollar amount to be akin to a new request yeah um and would would want to see it back but um i don't really need to debate this all tonight but i guess what i'm suggesting is maybe on um another agenda we can uh talk about what if any uh changes to the bylaw uh our committee might think might be appropriate one of which i happen to think is the petitioner article issue because it's just not it's not in the bylaw two would be amendments on town meeting floor by other than not other than boards and committees for town staff i.e residents and and it could be a board or committee member who's doing it as a resident so uh and three would be this question about you know if dollar amounts change after we've you know reviewed a project you know do we want to create a um some sort of threshold uh because otherwise you know i i really felt badly of doing it on the one hand um because i was the one that raised the issue about petitioner articles saying that i was troubled by the language in the bylaw as providing a hard gate and i i know from the input that we got at the time that it wasn't the intention to be applicable to other than boards and committees within the town but i kept saying but that's not what the bylaw says so anybody could get up and use the plain words and do what i did right and the ruling of the moderators ruling the moderate so i just wanted to raise that vote to let you know i had done that and that we might want to consider um proposing edits or not i i wrote it down i think we can talk about it at a future meeting um you had some other and so did i had some other edits to the bylaw i think we can add them to the pile right if we feel strongly about it we can add them to the pile and submit them back to the select board of like these are the things we've done this now for a year um we think there's some edits necessary and it may be like okay great let's wait another year or two like let's really get sort of up and running fully on this and then we make edits but i i hear you brian i think there's there's room for improvement to the bylaw i think some of it we could tactically address in the short term before bylaw change by similar to what we talked about half an hour ago doing another vote or amendment right at the end right which is encompassing all the new information to the extent there there's changes in scope changes in price expected and sort of true up our recommendation for them right before the town meeting yeah so i i think that's the way we can address it in the near term in the process that that item is a process matter yeah yeah yeah i just left it left me with a bad taste in my mouth uh to um i mean i wasn't necessarily going to vote for the increase just based on everything else being screwed up but um but nonetheless i always felt town residents should have yeah i don't i feel strongly that our bylaw should not restrict the ability of town meeting floor to change what they want to vote for within all the other rules i did that seems really wrong but do you agree that the language as it exists now would suggest that that is the outcome it does because yeah it does i just don't think that it wasn't the intention i think it was intentional yeah i think if you would ask that question when it was being written people would have said of course you can amend on the town meeting floor otherwise why do we have town meeting if you can't you can't do that okay right well again it was intended to prevent right the surprise projects get thrown in at the last minute and jump in the line in front of other things right okay so uh it's relevance again to us is that uh the budget didn't get increased by 200 000 for that reason and it's spawning a uh another issue that we need to focus on at a later date and uh also allowed us to have a public discussion so i feel i've unburdened myself from feeling badly feeling badly for what i had done even though i would have voted against the amendment you should feel badly because i think they're valid valid items for discussion so i don't think you should feel badly about it um you know other than the fact that you know it would have increased that project to enough you know over what was asked for for the actual projects inadvertently um but you know i have all these written down i know you've sent them to the town manager and the finance director um at least the the issues at town meeting um we need answers back from town council i know the chair of the board of selectmen's aware and we need answers back from town council on what they're going to do there as you said to inform what we have to consider in fly 28 the good news i think is if we have to consider additional funding for any of these projects as long as they don't spend money that wasn't intended so for example there's 250 000 potentially appropriated for cameras which was 160 ask originally as long as they don't spend 250 you could return that surplus right like your net in that you're going to end up in the same place just at a different time so it's not not the end of the world but it's messy and needs to be cleaned up um the last i know you want to move on but the last item and i don't think it's our job to do it while i was on the fincom i would have proofread those pages that had the errors before when just submitted for the warrant wasn't on fincom so i didn't proofread it and actually didn't see it until the warrant was posted on the town and i missed it because i didn't read every one of those descriptions i'm assuming we don't have responsibility nothing we did i guess my question is did anything we do and most specifically i'm referring to your your workbook to the extent it was utilized by the fincom member to produce those tables and for whatever reason it was it's too well it's so it's two different workbooks the big workbook that has all the projects is not what was used as a separate workbook that does this was it my spreadsheet originally yes did i give it to them this year so it didn't come from this committee okay no and it's linked to the cip so as i said to you earlier i think it's the linking to the cips was off okay um but no it was nothing that we produced and while i now wish i had read proofread at all i did not then nor do i now view it as my responsibility to the committee's responsibility to proof the recommendation right all right yeah so we make an advisory we make an advisory report we did that um i mean if i had been asked to i might have but i wasn't asked to so okay well i apologize for taking that extra time in this agenda item but um no it's good it was in most of that stuff that's helpful and most of that stuff may end up we're going to need to know it because otherwise without that we're going to be really confused as to why you're putting things in that we already wait a year later what is this
you get to draft the section reconciling that next year's report brian or we may have a special town meeting that again we'll need to comply with our bylaw and if they're proposing that's another question if they actually if there is a special town meeting say to move union money for settled contracts as they did a couple years ago and they decide they need to fix these do these need to come back you know good question contemplate it in this committee what would be they stick to what we originally approved okay thank you yeah i'll get that down in one paragraph i don't think it has to come back here that'll be our report the best person he has to know 15 minutes of what he just said all right so next on the agenda we want to talk about the cip forum which i did i'm sorry i just sent out um brad made some edits with brian's help and so i should have i should have sent you a note i didn't feel right commenting back since the two of you that would have been a forum um commenting on it so i did forward it to the committee right at the start of the meeting um brad do you want to brian i'm assuming you have it actually up work on do not uh yeah i do okay um yeah did everybody get it when i sent it okay so if you want to just walk us through yeah um first of all thank you brian for helping i mean i i made the edits that we discussed at the uh at the last meeting uh and put it in uh in this format and brian actually did all the excel work and he brian made some additional edits on it as well um and as you can see it got it down to uh got it down to one page um kelly i'm not sure what kind of detail you want me to go through i mean i i know we uh actually i'm trying to even read it now this thing so the print is so small um but we we basically kept in the project schedule the operating and capital budget impact uh we uh made a couple changes on that um and then added the section about whether it's uh the project didn't take one year or more um and then kept the prioritization of funding request uh format and then below that we added the uh ranking kelly that you wanted um added so that the department has to do their own ranking um attachments and then the long-term planning request uh language it's it's pretty much the same uh as what was in there before it's it's really more of a narrative it's not intended to be um specific in specific in a year-to-year basis it's really more of a more of a narrative um and i don't know if anybody had a chance to why don't brian you look to you look at it yeah i think people should comment on substance and content uh as to the layout of the form i press press i just kind of put it in the order that he told me to put it in and in a way that i hope people are managed can fill in um and i would just note in the very last item the long-term piece i i felt compelled to put a note there that you know they don't need to fill us in on every cip form we're looking at their departmental long-term plan right and if we're going to use this form to collect it just do it once this is a nip but i think um uh look at oh you i'm in excel so uh if i go down to the box underneath operating capital budget impact where you break it out if it has multiple years for reoccurring appropriations um and in 32 i would just say 32 plus in case it extends beyond the five year so again we're we're we want folks to think full project not just be capped because you know it's going to carry over into 33 or 34. one of the things i don't see if i'm just missing it was for secondary funding like grants and other things it seems like that fell off whilst i'm just missing it we we put it i put a little on it somewhere it's in the attachment attachments it talks about grant applications uh yeah in that box that liz was just referring to oh wait a minute i thought that's where i put it yeah i think we want to do something to capture gross cost any other outside funding sources total right which takes you to a net cost because that's a problem we've had is not knowing the full cost like they approved they're coming looking for the appropriation but i've had more than one instance brian i'm sure you have where they came for a certain amount of money and then we heard later of like oh we didn't get that grant or the grant we got was only this much so we need more and i was like why didn't we know that that was the total cost to begin with it dropped out i thought i had a line in there to have the shorter list of grants federal and state funding so where are we i mean i would think it would be somewhere in like maybe 44 to 40. somewhere in there there should be a line of funding source from you know non-town i may have put it and forgot to save it and then motored along so i'll yeah i go back look at it i know it was it was in there in the prior prior form yeah we talked about just uh skinning down the list from the prior form yeah anything else we had i love uh prioritization question of prioritization just from a wording standpoint do we need to say submitted versus open like if we pushed a bunch of projects from 27 28 i assume they're not resubmitting this form if they've done it i mean it's a new one just the way i read this is if i'm only submitting five new projects then this is one of five but if i have 20 open projects already in the year i'm in 28. yeah i'm i don't i've that's the only section i struggle i i know i want i want it but i'm trying to think about how i wasn't gonna be wrong how to get it i mean i don't know if it's like okay you gave me all your projects i put them all on piece of paper now here like you hand it back and say put them in order it's hard to do it on each individual request right without seeing them in my mind but maybe i'm wrong yeah maybe it's better off being like would you rate this as a priority project like high medium look like more of what we did just so we know where like what bucket they see it slot into because yeah it'll be constantly rolled i mean i mean that's what the i mean the more detail section above i think replaces the high medium low yeah i wonder though if there's a way to do this just hear me out for a minute maybe it's not possible now so if we send cell file to a department manager and it's got the template for a single year cip form which is most of what's on this page it's got a tab that in my perfect world all your individual tabs would feed into that's in the summary format right that gives you the by year by project name yeah right something some sort yeah and then that's the form that you put right it feeds in and that's the form that you put your ranking on right um and that's also the form where you put your box at the bottom that's like okay and in addition to this five these five years of projects here's the other things that are on my horizon so it's sort of you know one one tab is one that you repeat for every project and the other tab is your overall and you're going to send back one spreadsheet that's got that would be ideal right yeah i mean one of the things we used i mean one of the things i used to do this yeah i assume you still do this right is when you write the request that's one for the year like it's request one you know schools and then the next one you write is two and if you know it continues on it just you just use your own numbering system just so that you know when you generated it and that's essentially the list they sort by just some sort of key okay all right i think i gotta get a little bit of thought about that from it and it kind of goes along with the formatting and no one will be um hurt if i if i reformat this right i think you can definitely layer some of this in just to get it to
but no i mean overall looks good to me i think the only mission is the other funding and how that yeah makes sense i think that's the biggest piece that i see this needs to be intuitive on how it needs to be filled out yeah and if not little directions or instructions need to be yeah
my objective is simply to get all the information that we thought we needed just make sure we all agree and it sounds like um yeah it sounds like the gross cost down the net cost and other sources are the only substantive items missing um we have lizards at it and then possibly a project number discrete project number i mean the the accounting department assigns their own project numbers um
yeah that might be hard having projects with two different numbers reconciling between the two yeah um i'm gonna table that one a little bit we can that's a and so all you're talking about kelly is taking some of the items some of the inputs on this section and have them feed up to a consolidating form and on the consolidating form include things like the long-term request yeah my my first priority though is like you said brian i want to reformat a little bit and get it in a very easy readable format and the first step will be that i don't use the format of this spreadsheet because it's it's violates all the rules of spreadsheets that i live by uh yeah i was just i was trying to make them look like they're used to it's the way the format started right so it's somebody using excel like it's word yeah um so um i'll i'll clean that up a little bit and then i gotta think about ideally i want everything to feed into a consolidation whether or not i can make that happen um i'm thinking ai might actually be able to help you with that yeah i mean you'd think it would be some sort of button that just make a new tab but it just edits something yeah well it's like write me it's just write me the macro coding that takes all the tabs and creates creates the consolidated schedule very yeah you check the lock and so they can only enter data and not move whenever kelly chooses to do someone else on the committee needs to make sure they understand what she's doing because otherwise it won't be very helpful to us when it breaks next year yeah well you'll just ask ai to fix it for you my 13 year old or your 13 year old yeah yeah let me know i'm happy to shout out yeah my goal is to make it as easy to use as possible i just don't want like we can avoid us and the department manager because you've you've done and doing it all here's your workbook here take in take everything and put it into a format that we can all read it in like i'd like it to work on its own yeah i mean in my head i'm thinking it's almost like i've seen it done before where it's just one form on one page you hit save and it creates the tab and it does like it's just like it's not you're not actually going to the tab yeah if it's google like if you did like google form it would it would populate it in right and create your schedule but i'm not i'm i don't know that i have enough time to play that okay so if there's something you want me to poke at send me a note and i can leave them
go ahead no i just i think we also said okay it'll do a summary tab and then that will be the forcing function to go back to each of the departments and rack and stack when they submit because i think we certainly ran into that when we were trying to do our own weighting we have you know i'm exaggerating here but a thousand mediums and you know some of them got pushed out because we didn't have the budget to pay for everything and it was you know said more than once that it would be good to know what was important to the departments and would save us a step of having to go back and you know make sure that we're we're budgeting for the appropriate things based off of their needs
yeah i think the priority ranking section will get at most of that uh assuming i think what we talked about last week that's a sooner two weeks ago that's assuming they don't just you know populate it all with one which is the context in which kelly raised the the rank order uh as sort of a uh threatened double check well they populated all the fives or fives whatever whatever the high
that's the only reason we would have that is to just check them you don't have to put that there and if they you go through one cycle and they seem to be filling it out reasonably um and if there's someone that's an outlier you can just call them up and say here tell me one to ten yeah you know what i mean rather than worry about that on the form be like one of my early bosses who poorly scored everyone he reviewed and leadership knew that they would just like apply a factor to all those readings which was the curve they did they curved his readings
report reviewer and they'll have all sorts of curves here but i think conceptually we're closer to what the information that we've been looking for right yeah and i think you know this is just the form i for one other than checking a box or having boxes to check for attachments i'd actually like to see people provide provide attachments like particularly where the detail estimates came from even if it's just like the fire chief had done you know mathematical this was the last time we got a quote there's you know three years worth of inflation yeah you know whatever it might be uh just so we're not sitting there guessing as to how good the number is some people actually have will have estimates or you know outside estimates so we need this form by july 1st if we intend to get it out by july 1st which means whatever we do it's got to likely be reviewed by the town manager and the finance director and buy it get them to buy in so if we meet with them next week we can at least tell them we're working on something like to preview it with them just maybe not i mean could you say the form could you send them this just to give them a sense of the information and just tell them we're clean it up a little bit more because i'd like it in i want it in user friendly mode so that there's not a fear of like i don't want the reaction to be that's too hard for everyone to do right i think we can i can clean it up a little bit and we can get through just format wise and like you said brian i'd like to add clean up the format and that should allow me to add a little bit from an instruction standpoint um we can do that one of two ways you can do it right on the surface which i probably would lean towards given the users or you can put it in a comment on the cell but i if somebody's not a you used to working in excel they might not know to click to click the comment button right yeah um okay i i think it's really good thank you brad and i think they're you know they're i think i said last meeting there probably should be assuming we get this done time management finance director agree to it and it's definitely going to be distributed i think there should be a meeting you know with the department managers that are going to have to fill it in to walk through it and whether i assume that should be at least with one member of this committee and presumably the town manager and or finance director
a lot to get done in a short period of time but keep repeating myself we're doing the best we can brian that's all we can ask um thank you
all right and then succession planning do you have anything update on project plan or status quo no other than i need still need to send you the actual written version um okay um so different plan i just have one uh i just want to maintain total transparency with everybody um so i i have been in touch with the chair of the school committee she and i agreed um their meeting tonight but they're two new members i said it probably makes sense to let you get your two new members up and running and then we can talk about whether you want me to come before school committee to talk through what the issues are that i've already informed you guys about in them but in full transparency i've um i'm in various stages of giving thought to going back to the fincom for uh one year uh i was gung-ho to do it and i've kind of paused that a little bit um they're potentially down five members although likely three and um many members are seven um and so there's two one-year slots and three three-year slots one of the current members has already put in her um resignation notice i presume effective june 30. uh the chair will be stepping down for health reasons with one year left on his term uh pam roman who was supposed to go off a year ago and agreed to stay in there is not going to do that again um so she leaves a term that has one year remaining um uh one one of the members whose term is up has expressed interest in reappointment when they heard i was interested in coming back for a year uh and i haven't heard from the vice chair uh my uh my participation is conditional on two of the three current members whose terms are up going for reappointment one has already said no so i don't you know i don't know if those other two are going to happen i've tentatively said it's conditional upon uh me being able to continue to do some work on this committee hopefully through the october report but i'm not 100 sure a i i have the time to do both uh or i'm pretty sure that fincom bylaw and this bylaw would allow me to do it um i don't i don't think there's an inherent um prohibition um and this three um just said i i look if i go back i don't want to be the chair of the committee she heard me say um so you're the chair no so um anyway i was gung-ho to go ahead and proceed and then uh step back and said um why don't you go try to fill the slots and if there's if you're still having trouble beginning of september i may offer up my services so you you probably should unless the school committee on the other issue decides that um between them and me uh i need to step aside as their representative on the committee um uh if if they and i decide that that is workable uh and at the moment i don't foresee a similar issue that i have at the ball field and uh the irony of all ironies just another town meeting anecdote uh you heard me say on the holiday road site when we voted that uh if i wasn't the school rep i would vote against it not to support it but i felt compelled the school committee rep to vote to support it we ended up deadlock to 2-2 didn't have this committee support that same night the school committee was voting to rescind their co-sponsorship and support of that article yeah unbeknownst to me which which passed so they were sending their support and ultimately a select board at town meeting passed over the article so uh it was just another example that um the issue i'm having trying to do what i think i need to be doing to represent the school committee on this committee and and that may cause me to step aside as soon as they feel they can find an adequate replacement um so uh you know they're going to have to fincom's got to come up with fincom and or the suck board's got to come up with somebody to replace kelly and hopefully kelly you're going to tell both of them they should be trying to convince a fincom member or a former pincom member to do it i've already tried with one who had some experience with capital budget and the answer is no thank you yeah so fincom vice chair reached out to me and asked me great if i would continue on obviously subject to their approval uh i informed him that that was not highly unlikely um maybe i even said no um highly unlikely is different i think i said um how that was not going to work in my in my current life uh so i could you know i said no um i can't and i can't take on a three-year term for sure um right once again i think i sent him a note that said as is typically the case i'm writing this email past midnight um and so i'm thinking clearly yeah this is why we'll be continuing um but i will talk to the chair of the slack board actually that'll change soon right um or maybe not so i'll i'll let them know right they need to look um for additional members you guys certainly if you know anybody who you think would be uh helpful and asset to the committee you should let the slack board and fincom know um but yeah i mean change every year in every committee it's just like this one's just getting off the ground that's the hard part well i'll just review what i said before i think you know given what given what we do i think having somebody with fincom experience i think is is critical um i mean you guys know the ins and outs yeah the way it works and i i think it'd be we're just guessing what happened before yeah it'd be tough and yeah i mean i don't disagree with that although that was not a consideration when they other than having a fincom uh designee uh but i and i kelly was on the workbooks you can comment i don't know if the intention was to have that designee be someone with fincom experience who could we help out we we discussed it and said it didn't have to be because we didn't want it restricted there won't always be a former fincom that's what i'm about to say you didn't want to restrict it but obviously we discussed the fact that there would be could be a preference for it because it it connects you know obviously if you've been on fincom it's easier for you to talk to what they're going to ultimately look at it's also easy for you to communicate to them so i'll raise it um you can tell me after the meeting who you talk to and you know there's other there's other fincom members former fincom members out there that might no i talked to april okay so um i mean the other consideration for me again i'm just trying to be fair to everybody um um you know just for myself i suspect some or all of you felt a little bit this way too i'm pretty frustrated with the way the first year process went in in relation to the dealings with the town managers and the finance director and uh when i compare my time on the three years on the fincom versus my one year here really the only difference is this is an advisory committee to the town manager and the fincom is the last stop before town meeting so i could do exactly the same amount of work related to the capital budget as a fincom member and yet have more of an impact ultimately on what goes to town meeting because the fincom is the body that closes the capital budget and so i'm sitting there now because of their you know one i'm looking to help out if i can just because they're all good at what they did but they're still pretty inexperienced um and it's a lot of work and it's likely to be an override year and i just i feel badly that for the town and for those that are hopefully going to volunteer that they're going to be overwhelmed and some of what we're seeing that i talked about earlier is is probably a little byproduct of you know that issue but really when i looked at that i'm really trying to balance if i only have a certain amount of time to spend versus commitments at home um where is the best place for me to be and so um right now i'm telling you i'm gonna i'll be here until i'm not here but if i end up not being here because the school committee you'll know why if i end up not being here because i've opted to revert back to the fincom that likely keeps me here through the summer which at least might be helpful if we're able to get partly through our process if i knew kelly was that you know point zero zero zero one percent was going to hang in here i wouldn't feel as badly if both of us are departing um for the reasons you're stating but but at some point you know all of us confront these on different boards and committees i mean i think the challenge for us is i mean let's maybe i'll be frank which is if you two weren't here i mean this would we went to we would have gotten nowhere right we would have just submitted something which would have been like i mean i i i absolutely expected a lot more communication it seemed like that in the beginning that it just petered off completely and so i don't you know i think that's i mean that's part of the conversation we're going to have which is for this to even work otherwise i mean if there's no input no direct connection and we're just asking blind questions yeah i think i can't see the committee surviving right yeah and also another part of it both of both of you have deep um ties with the town and you know you can pick up the phone they know who you are i mean they don't know who i am um yeah that's not fair but no but i i i mean i've seen it i think both of you guys have you know who to call and uh and i agree with you i think it would be very difficult if we don't have somebody with um experience yeah preferably with fincom i mean very very hard to perceive it but i'll say a couple things right so i i did not have time to do this i knew that going in i agreed to do it for the reason you just said john which was how does this get off the ground with people who haven't touched it right who may have experience and expertise in the various areas but have never touched it so that's that's why i agreed to do it but i also said at the time i'm only doing it if you give me the one-year slot and i'm not going to be chair um and you didn't see you can see i failed at one of those thoroughly um so well you guys get to watch right that's the problem well you didn't know you didn't know not that it that i mean you have your own body of experience and wealth of knowledge but you didn't know at the time you agreed to come on the committee that i had approached the school committee because i didn't do that until they were having trouble finding somebody but i think part of john's point which i um i think is i think the intention was that as an advisory committee it would have been you know the assistant town manager i think was slotted in to be a go between with the town manager's office i was fully expecting the finance director to be much more active with the committee providing you know some of the the institutional knowledge financial you know background etc and i think once it was clear that you had two former fincom members and or long-term volunteers from the town operating on the committee and they got plenty of other things to do my guess is well they seem to be getting things done if the two of us weren't here i think you would have absolutely seen and i think we need to confirm that uh when we meet with them that that isn't that is in fact the intention because you may want one more fincom experienced people but there's absolutely no assurance that that you're going to be able to find somebody to step up and do it at any given time over the next you know decade or whatever so what i'll say and i'll say it out loud because it's i i am willing to do something like what pam did for a period of time or similar what you're saying like i i stick around for a little bit but i cannot take on another multi-year term right so she stepped down as chair too yeah and i stepped down as chair i cannot be chair so um i'm willing to support in that way but someone else has got to be chair get those agendas in um yeah well i mean i i mean i'm i can i can do that the um in terms of being chair it's it's more the the the the process uh that you went through because you put in a ton of work i mean yeah and uh uh and i would have been and still some of the clues as to even how you did it all um apparently one of the morning is the key
so right so what we can continue this discussion um but i will not be chair and it will not be citing up for a multi-year general the the difference between what you just said and what i just want to understand for everybody's benefit myself included um what pam agreed to do was uh not continue to serve she ended up getting appointed yeah for the remaining two years of a term she had the ability to just keep serving even though she wasn't reappointed which you can do um why didn't you and the appointing board decided that since she agreed by the time they got to the point where she ultimately said okay i'll do it it was sort of close to when the cycle was going to start so she said okay i'm gonna i'll do this through the end of town meeting and at that point the appointing board said okay why don't we just appoint you we understand you're only going to do it for one more year and then we'll have a one-year term left which is generally the things i've i signed up in the past for three one-year remaining terms because i didn't want to commit to three years so now there's two one-year terms remaining which is the only reason i i mean i could go for a three-year term and tell them same thing i'm only going to do it for one year but um so my question for you is are you are you in the if you did that would you be saying don't reappoint me but i'll keep serving until you find until you but you need to be looking for someone to take my spot but i'll keep working with the committee until you found somebody and i'll keep checking in with you but you better find somebody back and i'll keep checking with you fincom that your support that you're you're actively trying to find somebody versus and the reason i picked october 15 is because that's as to the short-term planning that's the heavy lift right between now and october 15th okay and so you know you might give some thought could you at least legitimately because bringing someone new in in the middle of that process any time staying my term ends up june 30 for board so i i would give some thought to staying through october 15th same concept but if the report is running if i don't and i don't anticipate that we're going to issue a report on october 15th if i'm here we're issuing it whatever state it's in because at least now we have one drafted right and we can work from it but i would not be passed by so i i it's not until they appoint somebody i'll give you a little bit longer right to find somebody but not not beyond october 15th okay so are you still thinking about this or are you now committing to this i'm not committing to it i will consider it but the conditions of the considerate are i will not be chair i will not stay past october 15th and i do not want to be reappointed so uh so we'll take it we probably should probably should put on the next agenda uh chair vice chair minute taker um discussion next meeting just because that you know that may influence yeah decisions but sitting here right now um uh again subject to what the schools and i decide once we have our discussion um uh it sounds like you're going to get the other three of you will get the good ways through the heavy lift between now and october 15th you may get all the way through with both kelly and i still here um and uh if i choose not to pursue the fincom then i'll probably just finish out my term again and this assumes the schools and i haven't agreed to part ways um but but again i just don't know what they're thinking as they as i said they um you know and they have two new members so i just if they need to come to terms with you know the issue i raised who came on school committee um two people sit on the right side of the school committee yeah i'll look at it um aaron aaron baller the other aaron and uh christine okay so uh anyway uh i can tell you so you again you might because the fincom's 20 boards meeting on friday so i didn't want you to see my name in the public in public documents and go what is this doing and uh maybe i'll start working on kelly to go back to the fincom for a year you know oh my cold dead body well this is one of benefits of being on zoom when we have this type of discussion because people forget you're there how do you feel about all this was well i think you ever gotta do what's right for you so i would never i i will say this yes there's a lot of heavy lifting that that kelly and you brian do but i would never want to pressure you into sticking on if it wasn't a good fit um so we would figure it out we would just you know we would just really start i don't want to say hammering down the door of of either folks in finance town manager and not to say that you haven't done that but i i think the it was mentioned there was a certain amount of not convenience but um knowing that both of you are on this committee and you have all this innate knowledge that you come with you would figure it out because you've been doing this for what the larger part of a decade or plus i mean yeah you know so you helped i mean i i remember kelly you saying i wrote this part of the warrant so you just you knew it like the back of your hand whereas i think the rest of us were like i don't even know if i got hands right now so so but but i think we learned a lot this past year we're in a better place and and you know um there would we struggle yes good learning opportunities for all but yeah you got to do what's right for you so i would never want to say you need to you know hang on because we can't hack it we'll we'll figure a way to get it done even i might figure out a way to set emotion or acknowledge emotion or second in emotion that's my struggle so but uh but i can always pick up a phone and chase down what focus either of us or any of us bring to a particular period of time it isn't necessarily what future committees you know think is important to do um i i i personally think more of this committee's time needs to get spent on long-term planning and if at the end of the day maybe i don't want to go too far astray well it's not in the including this agenda yeah we can we can talk about that i think we can talk about it future i know i know where you're headed right and i i don't disagree with you it's like anything else so when you start something brand new right it doesn't even room isn't built in the day right so is long-term planning need to be the focus yes can you get there if you haven't built the foundation no um so it'll get there we do need more support from the town i think we can while i i asked a lot of times there was a point where i just gave up right because we had too much to do and i wasn't going to chase right because we weren't getting anywhere and we needed to finish so the original draft report is written right there's a little more ability right there's going to be a little more room to to chase um and so i think we can change i think and i i think we can change the way we operated with the town a little better um but i don't expect at the end of this year it's going to be in the end state it should be in either and that's okay i would have envisioned it's going to take it takes three years to get this fully up and running to where it was supposed to be i mean gotta remember all these other committees fincon's been around right for a really long time so there's a lot of deep knowledge and even with people rotating off right the process has been in place the town manager and and finance director's process has been in place a long time this is all new and it's another and i do respect the fact that it's yet another committee that they have to support right they didn't they didn't get more time either um in the day so i think we're headed in the right direction it will get better and that and that could influence the uh the um backgrounds of the people that need to serve on this committee in fact if you go back and look at the uh the bylaw it calls out you know different professions and skills and and uh so i think under succession planning that's why it's i think it's important not not necessarily get wet of what we just did or what we might do this second cycle but what what really is this committee where can it add value to the town's process despite what it says in the bylaw and on paper and if that has to be you know tweaked and approved by town meeting in order to come up with something that's useful uh otherwise i agree with john you end up with a committee that people say you know why am i why am i here coming up with this or me for that matter you know i can have a bigger impact somewhere else and i'm going to go do that i will say though although i i felt that way at one point along the way um where we landed where the town landed does indicate that we had it was we had an impact and it was a value so i i wasn't sure at one point that that was the way we were going to land but we did so it had an impact it is worthwhile um we've got work to do but i think we're we're poised to do that so and the other thing i will say brian relative to your succession while i i think you're a tremendous asset to this committee you are also a tremendous asset to finance committee and having worked with you for a few years i'm not overly concerned that if you're on the finance committee whoever's on this committee is not still going to get the benefit of the things that you've seen right in committee meetings or aware of so i i don't are you saying we might actually have public comment from brian well i've cut down on my emails to the fincom after they didn't seem to be overly appreciative of the number of emails they were getting i am appreciative of your emails i may not have always have time to to understand them fully but i'm very appreciative of them and i think others on the committee will be as well because if you've already watched a meeting and you know what's going on and you can summarize that just allow things to move it moves faster yeah yeah so i don't think it's the end of the world if you were to go back to fincom and quite frankly knowing what the town's facing i i fully understand and and i don't think that that's necessarily the worst thing for this committee either for you just as fincom isn't it it's good to have fincom skills on the cipc i think it's good to have someone who's done cipc on the fincom right so that we're not talking pat right yeah so i think yeah i mean we didn't say yeah it's great for us having both of you right i mean i couldn't imagine learning half of this and yeah i mean further procedures just oh hey this meeting this happened this is going on this is the history right because some of these projects they're six seven years long yeah if it's any solace the the fincom got through their process with pretty inexperienced group of very smart hard-working very true but but inexperienced from the standpoint we're talking about here in terms of institutional knowledge they had the one member that hung in there pam roman that was available something came up but uh um so it can be done you just have to do things differently and um sometimes it's a good thing too yeah no absolutely that's having different perspectives um i just wanted to be safe here and go back to the 640 agenda item briefly yeah uh just want to comment on one other town meeting thing uh you all might be interested nobody got up and asked a question on the capital budget uh why why is the recommended budget so much higher than the cipc's recommended budget that's the one thing i was anticipating getting at least that question and it didn't come up so yes we had an impact it was lower than what the town manager recommended so that's good but uh personally i think it should have been lower yeah well i should have gotten
then you could have answered it and as you as we face this next year that's going to be hard that will be so easy to do like to go over again this coming year because it'll it'll directly impact that question from a succession standpoint i mean next week we can talk about this but you know i watched this as the media being described right brian's doing the minutes right like this is where ai becomes like hey like why are like i mean what he puts down is you know much more facility but as we take over and try to rebalance the knowledge with effort can we use tools like that we don't know if we have that answer but yeah i think i think april method took over my job of doing the minutes and i pretty sure she's been using ai okay i think it appeared like it was a little rough getting going because it was just kind of a dump so she uses the way cam recording and then you transcript and then yeah and ai pulls out and i think it got i haven't read all their minutes but i got i had a sense that they got they got a little bit better uh over time but it still requires um hopefully you all review the minutes but it still requires people reviewing the minute but ai is not perfect you have to what i learned last week is you have to tell it not to hallucinate yeah i mean the the rest of you might want to be thinking i mean i'm happy to keep doing the minutes it's not that big a deal for me it takes time but and and yes i could probably figure out how to use ai and speed it up a little bit but i i kind of do them as soon after the meeting as i can because i literally don't have to review my notes that closely because she kind of can remember what i consider to be votes and highlights but uh someone else you know some committees will rotate that around each member except for the chair uh but um it that my experience with that though is it ends up in minutes minutes inconsistency in the minutes and the way that they're done and inconsistency in what gets posted so back when i first joined fincom that meant that that was some minutes got posted and some minutes didn't get posted yeah this isn't easy here's brian's minutes for the last year please replicate these results with new data we're done yes right but the open meeting law requires within three meetings or 30 days whichever is the latest you have to approve a set of minutes and uh what kelly's referring to unfortunately and they had an outside minute taker on the fincom before i got there and it was just sure things are getting behind because of the work schedule and uh if you miss it if someone brings an open meeting law complaint yeah problem so i just i didn't know what i was dealing with so ai would be a good way to in brian's absence that's what i would do i would take the recording run it through ai i think you could give it the previous minutes as a structure right you have to tell it not to hallucinate you can tell it i hallucinate no ai hallucinates right only use right only use what's said don't infer don't right oh okay gotcha yeah yeah yeah i mean if someone wants to practice that uh as we get into the summer months uh while i'm still here that's fine um you were a minute taker don't tell it it's a court reporter because then it'll give you every okay some committees ended up spewing out literal literal transcripts which you really don't need to do yeah probably satisfied but i listen i do always have it's 2026 there were as long as the recording is available it's all there right and so it's it's a lot of time i know it's what we have to do but it's a lot of time invested in something that was in was created in a time when that didn't exist there was no recording maybe one day the state will change a lot of say if there is a recording your recording your minutes can say you can document the boats and the minutes can say see recording and it really there's no reason not to do that well so there are every once in a while the meeting recording fails oh well yes those fail once in a while when you're the minute taker and you're like i'm gonna go look rewatch rewatch that section oh wait it's not there it's not there you're like oh i really needed to see that um okay we've had enough discussion on that so can we move on to reviewing to vote and approve the minutes of april 29th all right so the minutes you should have in front of our redline version which if if we vote them don't need to be voted as an amended set because they're your original version that we're reviewing if you have other edits and we'll have to do a motion as edited but uh in my email i noted that um i didn't realize there had been an amended agenda for the last meeting uh to change the link and i didn't realize that either um i didn't look did that last agenda also drop the topics i doubt it because that email okay so i'm good on that item no and it and just make sure that the last agenda and i know you mentioned it in your email i had submitted it with the wrong date on it yeah that got changed and they fixed it but they fixed it before they posted it right or did they post an amended because when they sent me back a note to say they posted it they told me it was wrong and they had fixed it yeah they fixed it when they posted it it it wasn't right so i got back to them again and they reposted it they just posted it without the corrections they had the right date but they didn't so they took that one down they now have up there the correct date at the top they have the correct uh revisions highlighted so i think we're set on that okay and so uh you'll see in my red line version that so i had to change that because i wasn't aware at the time that there was in fact a an amended agenda and then i did have to go refer to the tape because uh i misheard kelly i thought we were going to be meeting tonight at the council on aging center on andrew's app which was in the first draft i sent you so i changed that to what you see in the craft it's redlined other than that i have no other revisions anybody else have any questions revisions no no can i get a motion to approve the minutes so moved motion to approve second take them take them take them take them that's good yeah i'm gonna have to put a remedial school on um on that there's a take the one orange was bleak all right we're gonna have to do a roll call vote uh brian yes brad yes john yes liz yes kelly yes passes five zero zero all right and can i get let's see can we talk next meeting so we talked about earlier i will offer the thursday of next week and it's not the tuesday if i can get them in here um and send your note letting you know what they said otherwise we're looking at the following wednesday which is the 27th okay which is our schedule already um and then the meeting after that uh is the one brad you are going to have to chair right that is the 10th yeah yeah okay so the next meeting we'll talk about how the two of you will coordinate an agenda at least for the 10th meeting where you want to we'll coordinate an agenda yeah next at the next meeting we'll coordinate an agenda and um i know you're just trying to figure out a date to meet with the town manager finance director is the tribe board meeting anywhere on the horizon no um the vice chair was on i don't want to say i was giving him a little a little bit of time because he was on he was aware so um vice chair of income okay yeah they're they're going to be doing a reorganization monday night i assume of the select board so yeah new chairs and they may yeah may be the same party members coming yeah on so i will i've got a list for the current chair of the select board so i will so right now our prior our primary mission is how do we get to a point where we can get the next cycle going and that tri-board meeting i think it's important yeah we get to try to set a new baseline and go forward but i don't know what us from we got stuff to do and it doesn't stop us from getting going yeah because we got a lot of work to do and we can incorporate the results of the tri-board meeting along the way i have you charge at a topic yes um in the assignments i had the assignment of figuring out like his status of capital assets in the town maybe we can have a discussion of how to approach that with who since and i also have to get lives now that time meeting is over yeah kelsey yeah let me make one note just because i saw that they voted down of the town manager said no to actually making the committee to do that study unless i misunderstood that it wasn't a committee it was a petitioner you're talking about the petitioner article for yeah creating an asset inventory yeah that was voted down because it was someone from the blackboard said that's kind of what this committee's supposed to do and our town staff supposed to do yeah but one thought i have and i i didn't hear back from her that petitioner conceivably she has an interest in in processes and planning and and obviously had enough interest in the town having a active list of assets that um um um maybe she might have an interest in this committee um who was the petitioner uh carol plum okay that's what i thought it was um so that goes into the succession agenda item yeah yeah i just figured i mean i don't know what it began to talk about it but it fell off well and i think in the order it fell off because of the order of the things that have to get done it and even it's big yeah it might to that point um because again i think she put a lot of thought in and i think it i think it it is i think it is on point with that item as i wonder whether we might think about on the agenda inviting reaching out to carol inviting her in maybe to share with us her view of why she what she hoped to get out of that article just because i think there's a lot of stuff that that was baked in there that probably should be getting done yeah and that um why why reinvent anyway just a thought she might not want to do that okay i can you're just trying to filibuster till 8 30 what else can fit under the agenda no i do have a clarifying question so i i we had talked about you know not engaging with kelsey until after our town meeting but did we actually give either michael or kelsey a heads up that i will be reaching out to oh no i'm gonna i thought i'm gonna do okay all right then i will to follow up on meeting dates and to ask him or to let him know that that's what you're planning to do yeah maybe just let him know yeah we know um but if he comes back with a hard stop let me know but otherwise we'll just assume that you know he'll be notified and then we'll get started there okay and uh liz um probably send it around but i'm going to send you the excel spreadsheet workbook that i put together that resulted in the tables for open capital that were in our report just because that you might want to look at that as we're going to need that information again which is kind of what your work would be working on right yeah so um i'll send that to everybody and i'm sure i'm sure i offload this stuff yeah okay okay yeah two more minutes we don't have to stay until the adjourn time all right can i get a motion to adjourn so motioned and a second second second uh sorry uh head i'm gonna go around the room uh all in favor brian yes liz yes brad yes john yes kelly yes that passes five zero zero and we are adjourned at 8 27.