October 14, 2026 – Capital Improvement Planning Committee – Video & Transcript

October 14, 2026 - Capital Improvement Planning Committee

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Okay. We have to call forward to the Capital Improvement Planning Committee, October 14, 2026 at 6.30 p.m. We're in the Wayland Town Building. This meeting may be recorded, and if recorded, it will be made available to the public on WACAM as soon as possible after the meeting. The public will be excluded from executive sessions pursuant to Chapter 2 of the Act of 2025. This meeting will be conducted in person and or via remote access in accordance with the applicable law. If the meeting only has remote access, no in-person attendance will be allowed. 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. Public comment should be limited to two minutes per person. I will review the agenda. At 6.30, call to order. 6.35, public comment and members' response. 6.40, review and discuss any recently submitted or revised departmental capital requests. 6.45, review and discuss additional capital closeout responses, if any. 6.50, meet with Town Manager and Finance Director to discuss the draft CIPC report. 7.45, discuss revised draft of the report. 8. Potential vote on approval of the draft CIPC report. 8.05, update on succession planning. 810, review and vote to approve minutes of October 13. 815, discuss content of CIPC meetings between submission of report and annual town meeting. 825, discuss dates and time of next meetings and 830 adjourn. And I believe we have the finance director on screen. Anybody else is... Town manager on? I don't see him online. I know he's on his way to get on, so he should be on momentarily. We just not go through the first couple, I think, in terms of any recently revised or submitted capital request, departmental request, I'm not aware of any. Anybody else? No, but I will, Nick sent me an email. I just, that came after all Brian emails, so I have to go look at it, so we may have. Ratings that I'll sub into a pen itself. Okay. Any additional information on capital closeout responses? No. At this point, I guess, go ahead. Ask Brian a question. Sure. Brian, do you want someone on the committee here to send you the capital closeout status updates that we did receive? Yes, because... I'm not sure I received any of them. They didn't copy you on any of them? I didn't look. What department heads would have? Which department heads? DPW facilities. And fire. Fire department. Were the ones that responded. I'll forward them to you, Brian. I didn't realize they didn't copy you. So I will. I'll forward them to you. Okay. Thank you. And just again, in the same vein, Brian, Kelly will be forwarding you once the report gets submitted. Final copy of an Excel workbook that includes five tabs, one for each year that is the same format that you use in your capital workbook that reflects all of our recommendations. So you can do with that what you want. It might allow you to make your job easier in terms of putting your Excel workbook together. And the other one Kelly will send you is A consolidated Excel workbook with all the detailed CIPs and some tabs that roll it up into consolidated five-year tables. Yeah, so that will roll up to the tables that are in our report. That way, if you're trying to cross-reference anything, you'll be able to follow. You should be able to follow where those numbers came from. But the two things should match because Brian and I have been checking. His tables against my tables along the way. So I have a question. I did get a file from Brian. It must have been a week ago. An Excel file, basically, like he just said, my format that you guys resend. Has anything changed since last week? Yeah, there's a couple minor changes, so I would just use the one that Kelly sends you the next day or so. Yeah, and I'll send it tonight, but I don't know that it was amazing. Yeah, I think I moved to be consistent with the tables that Kelly put together in the report. I moved a request that facilities had submitted for middle school fire sensors. We moved that under the school. List of the requests. And so in that spreadsheet, I realized that I hadn't done that. So on this final version that she'll send you, I moved that. And then I think I added a description that I forgot to add. And I think the town beach roof got moved from like 2030, Brian, where it was in your plan last year. It got moved by the department manager to 2032. And I tried to put little annotations on each. Line item that was different from your last year plan. So be it a new addition, increase, decrease, you know, went from one year to another. Just to give you a roadmap of what happened. And there were actually very few, I think maybe three, that we actually moved. Any other movement or generally increases or increases all came from the department managers as part of their CIP submissions. Whereas last year, obviously, we moved all sorts of things all over the place. So anyway, hopefully what you have is 99% accurate. And I just want to make sure you didn't get confused when you looked at the report versus that workbook. So I'll text Michael right now. Maybe he's thinking to get on. I believe the agenda may have said. It does say six. Do you want to do the minutes while we wait? Yeah, we can do the minutes while we wait. I told you it would be the shortest set of minutes I did all year. He's here right now. Oh, Michael's here? Okay. Yeah, I was having difficulty. I had to come in through the regular link and not the panelist link. Well, welcome. I might turn the backlighting on a little bit better here. So I guess in terms of how we want to proceed on this, I know we sent you a copy of the report on Monday, a couple of very minor changes to nothing substantive, I think I'm correct in saying. So I guess I can start by asking if you guys have any questions, comments, edits, observations. I mean, I have some, but I'll let Michael go unless he wants me to go first. It's up to you. Brian and I have been talking about this all along. I've participated in a couple of meetings and I've watched some on the replay and I appreciate Brian O'Herlihy's updates in minutes that we get on a weekly basis. So we've been following along. I'm looking at it and, you know, it's very thorough what you provided us on Monday, Brad. I appreciate that. We've also been talking along the way with our department heads and, you know, Brian and I have noted that there aren't too many serious departures from where, what was approved last year, the remaining four years of the capital plan with the finance committee. And so, you know, we plan to reach out to The school superintendent to remind him that he's going to, per select board policy, let them know that he wants the debt exclusion. You know, there were some changes, as you're aware, that came up specifically with IT. And, you know, I talked to Mike Fay about some of the changes in his budget. But overall, we didn't see, you know, in our informal conversations, Brian and I, we didn't see a lot of drastic changes relative to last year. And it seems to be, you know, with your new format, people... Seem to adopt to that pretty quickly. So overall, I don't have too much to say. Brian and I talked a little bit about some of the funding mechanisms and how there's some minor changes. And I can let him speak to that later. But overall, I appreciate what you've provided us. Yes. So thank you. So, I mean, unlike last year where we saw and you saw too, 19 new projects come into next year's budget. We didn't see that this cycle around, although there are some. New items in most of those are really, a lot of it is the IT department. So really the biggest year you deal with is the next year. So I'll just, like Michael said, I think you guys did a nice job. There's really not at all a material difference between what we did last year and what you guys come up with this year. You're faced with these new projects coming and they want them in next year's budget and you got to decide. Can you afford them? And are they necessary? So a lot of the questions that Michael and I have really are going to go back to the department heads and just get clarity. So, you know, in the first year, for example, on all the vehicles, you know, we will ask, will they be trading in a vehicle? You have in DPW, there's two, there's $60,000 for the engineer and there's $150,000 for F600. Typically, we want something traded in. We want the VIN number. We want the old truck to come off the insurance. We don't want to be adding fleets. So that's something that we'll circle back on. You're also going to be using $500,000 of the real estate money to fund, I believe it's the Route 20 redevelopment design, if I'm reading across correctly. That was funded differently last year, but you guys want to use the real estate. So that will require time meeting. To take an earlier article ahead of the capital budget to actually move the real estate money back out of the Snakebrook Dam account. So that all works. The other one. Say that again? Brian, before you move on on that one, I think, you know, I'll express what my opinion was on that. And I think others were similar on that one. And I think there was one project we used cap stabilization for. The idea, I think it was the library, something called library, library grounds. Our opinion was like, we understand why those are wanted projects, but that there just isn't enough room in our usual funding sources. So if, right, there isn't a desire to use real estate funds or to use capital stabilization, those are the two projects we put. sort of lowest on the priority list based on the input we got from the department manager. So if there's reasons that those funding sources can't be used, right, that was sort of our, those would be the first to come out of the plan from everything we talked to. So just to share that insight. Yeah, and staying with that one, typically what we would do, we would talk to Tom Holder. Last year, or it could have been the year before, he got $250,000 for this same project. And that amount of money is still pretty much open. The question to Tom would be, if we give you the $500,000, are you really going to get to the project next year? Or is this going to be another case where we get to the end of the next fiscal year and all of a sudden we're sitting on... $750,000 of unspent money. So these are the things Michael and I ask. We support these folks doing them, but we want to put them in the year that they're actually going to get to them. So that's something we'll talk to Tom Holder about. Do you like us to respond as you go along here? Do you want to get all your questions or comments out? The other one, mostly just comments, like the cybersecurity, it's up between, it's between Levy and free cash. The total is $850,000. There's been enough discussion about that. Brian, that is one of the changes we made. We moved that all to Levy and put, there was a DPW truck. That was in Levy that we switched to free cash just so that all the cyber would be in one bucket. That was one of the changes between the version Brian sent you and the one we're going to send you tonight. Yep. Yep. So again, more questions that, you know, we asked that you probably have asked too. It's the next one would be. You're using $275,000 for the library grounds and taking that out of stabilization. So if we take $275,000 out of stabilization, the total outflow in fiscal 28 for that account capital stabilization will be about $600,000. So we're planning on putting in $250,000. So right now, Michael and I have mapped in The Capital Stabilization Fund covering the debt service, it's like $200,000 in change just to be rounded for the high school septage, a waste plant that was appropriated last year. So right now, the plan would be to put $250,000 into the account, buy free cash, take out $100,000 for the fields, which we've done in the past, and then take out the debt service, take out $200,000 to fund the debt service. If we add another $275,000, Clearly the account is, you know, it has over $2 million at this point. It's not going to be a major issue with the account. It would be fine to do it one year, but I think doing this in future, we just need to make sure that we come up with a sizable amount. The discussion has always been, what are we going to do with this capital stabilization money? It serves a bunch of points. Capital stabilization is part of our general fund's fund balance, even though it's in another fund. Moody's views this as fund balance. And we just had a rating the other day. We just got our AAA rating affirmed today. And the continued criticism of Moody's is that our fund balance as a percentage of revenues needs to be at a minimum 25%. We're below at 24 right now. This particular account does become part of fund balance, unlike, for example, the real estate account. That's a revolving fund. It's not considered. But like I said, it takes $275,000 out of the account for one year, is not going to materially affect the fund of the town's position. The other one would, I guess, the other one would be the, let's see, I forgot my numbers across. The $275,000 was for The improvement, right? Library grounds. The library grounds. Yeah, so in staying with that, so the library grounds, you know, another question to my favor is we gave $2.9 million three, four years ago and only about 50% of that has been spent. So what is the spending plan for the remaining 50% of the $2.9 million? And are you really going to get to this next year? It's fine if he's going to get to it, that's fine. But we don't want to give anybody just too much to get. They head around and get done in one fiscal year. So that's a question that Michael McCall and I will ask Mike Faia. It's fine if you want to do the project, but are you going to get to it, given the fact that you already have 50% of 2.9 still out there? The other one... Just to stick with that one, the recollection is that 275 was in the five-year plan in the warrant in fiscal 28. And as Kelly alluded to earlier, as we tried to... Stay within the purview of what was in the five-year plan from a funding standpoint. That project, albeit was in the five-year plan in fiscal 28, kind of dropped to the bottom of the list. So I don't think anybody on this committee would question if your sense is from a financial standpoint, you know, you'd prefer deferring it and not using the cap stabilization fund, I think. That's probably fine. We just felt that because it was in the five-year plan, and I know you've been in the past, you know, pretty focused on trying to stay as close as one can to the prior year plan. That's why we left it in as opposed to just pulling it out and deferring it, I think. And that's a reflection of our discussion. So, and now just go backwards as quickly on the real estate fund. I think, Brian, if you go back, I think it was fiscal 25 that the $250,000 for the Route 20 design funding was approved. That was brought to the FinCom late in the process. And FinCom had to reopen the capital budget. And you might go double check, but I think the FinCom agreed to do so, but proposed the funding source being the real estate fund for that. And that was what got presented at town meeting and approved. So there was at least a consistency when we had put in that as a funding source of $500,000. And in some of these, we did ask the questions of department managers, the questions you're asking. Again, I would say if we hadn't heard them tell us that they thought they could get to the work and that there was a rationale as to why they needed the money in fiscal 28, if they hadn't given that to us, we wouldn't have put it there. So, but, you know, you guys have your own relationships with the department manager. So, you know, again, I don't think on that one, this committee would. I don't want to resist it being pushed out a year, but I know Tom Holder was pretty adamant. I think they're out with an RFQ on the street now for at least $2.50 to get going, and he made that point to us, and he felt that once that got going, by the time that was done, it would be fiscal 28, and he wanted to keep the process going so they can't get on the tip list. It's kind of what was explained to us. Okay, so moving on, the next one that we would ask would be the middle school fire sensor replacement. That went up, it moved, I believe it was maybe in 30 or 29 and it moved up to 28 and significantly went up in price. So right now it's 970. I mean, the ask in the school department and Mike Faia would be, you still have two existing Fire sensor projects open, and they're actually in the back of your report. I would ask them if they could close those out and partially fund that project, because I think there may even be a third one in 26 that we did a fire sensor. So, I mean, with these, you're between a rock and a high place. You don't want to say no to anything related to fire safety, even any of the buildings, particularly your school system. So those are the questions we would ask him. You've already had other... We asked the questions. I'll give you the answers that we got. So the $200,000 was in the five-year plan in fiscal 30 or 31. And we were told that the vendors supporting the fire sensors at the middle school will no longer be supporting them. Yeah, it's like in the life there. And their ability to get spare parts and the like so that it was both a more immediate need and they were going to have to rewire the whole school with a new system. And two days ago I asked him about $170,000 that's in the unspent appropriations and he said he still needs that for design, upfront design and engineering for the bigger project. So for the same reasons you just, raised the question, we asked the question, and that's the answer we got. Again, we didn't overly, anybody can correct anything I'm saying. I don't think we felt that we could overly push the department managers to defer something if they gave us a rational reason for why they were asking it in a particular year, and particularly because there were a number of items that When they brought things forward, like the fire sensor project at the middle school, in his CFPs, he pushed back the Volker School and the Clay Pitt Hill School alarms each by one year, even though they were in the five-year plan earlier. And we actually asked the question of, well, because what it is, fire safety, are you comfortable that the current alarm systems Can do the job. And he assured us that he was comfortable. So anyway, you know, you can bring to bear whatever other pressure you want. The extent your goal is to defer anything out of 28 or other years further. We just didn't overly press them on that other than asking the questions that you're asking. Yeah. So he gave me the same explanation when we talked. So the next one, staying with 28, is you have $100,000 for the custodial equipment. I would probably ask Christine Patterson if we can use the building use account to fund that because custodians are paid out of there. I'm just wondering if there's another revolving fund within the school department that can actually fund that kind of project. I mean, typically what we've seen in the past with these, you would think a custodial equipment would be an easy pick. Pick up a catalog and you need to order it. These things seem to linger on for two or three years before they're finally done. So that's something we would ask Christine Patterson. That's another one, Brian, that it's in the five-year plan. Again, we tried as best we could to stick to what was in the five-year plan. In fact, if you look at our report last year, pretty sure we deferred all the custodial items by at least one year. And they got... They got brought forward or left in the five-year plan that's in the warrant. So again, if you're telling us that what was there last year was there last year, but there's reasons, and I may know what they are vis-a-vis the operating budget, but if there's reasons why this year you think It's important to find different sources of funding or to defer things. That's certainly, obviously, up your alley, right? I would just say it would, in the future, be helpful for this committee as we go through our work if those are higher level sort of things that you are focusing on this year, which would cause you to not do what was in last year's plan the way you laid it out. It'd be helpful for this committee to know that up front so that we wouldn't end up, you know, potentially having a variance here between what y'all can do. Is that, again, a fair comment on my part? But I get your point. Yes, I mean, the total use of $2.2 million for 28 is very reasonable. I had actually the same amount, $2.2 million. It just was spread a little bit differently. You know, I think going forward, I do have one more, but I think going forward, I think, not to beat into the bush, but, you know, with Moody's criticism of us dropping to 24%, it's very difficult to grow your fund balance in a town because you're supposed to be preparing budgets where your expenses match your revenues. And, you know, fund balance grows when revenues exceed budget and expenses are less than budget. And that's, for the most part, hard to do. So I think going forward and particularly into the override years and also that, you know, we got the big $38.6 million bond offer a year from now. I think at least from Michael and I's point of view, we will take, you know, all uses of free cash in the future, but maybe a little bit more scrutiny. To make sure that our fund balance at least stays within the 25. I don't think we're going to get downgraded. That's not my point. But I mean, the criticism was, I believe the word sustained fund balance less than 25. So, I mean, the job in front of us is to try to keep it at 25. And part of doing that may be a more prudent use of free cash. And just the last one, I don't believe that the high school water heater was in last year's plan. A hundred thousand? Not in fiscal 28. It was out in fiscal 31 at $450,000. Okay. So they pulled it forward but drastically reduced the cost of the request. And again, we were told that's because they need it. Right. Yeah, like Michael McCall said, if you take a look at the whole five-year program that you did, all of the uses of free cash per year. Seem reasonable. I mean, if you take a look at the 29s, it's over 3 million, but the plan would be once we do 29s capital budget that's going to go to town meeting that we strive to get that free cash number below 3 million. Even the use of levy debt, even though your number is a little different than mine, there's not a material change. It's not going to impact, you know, our forecast, you know, in a way that's going to cause any disruption. I mean, it's, we're pretty much on par with that. You try to bring in projects, you know, you use the real estate fund, we just have to make short-term eating boats that transfer before you get to the capital. Using capital stabilization. I don't really, I mean, you guys just went through it. The biggest thing that the town is really facing is if you do have $16 million of excluded debt over five years, but you don't have the town building because that's still under review, that could easily be another 10 when that project or that review is done. So the town could be looking at, you know, $25 million of excluded debt asks in the next five years, and that doesn't even include. Any kind of a new school project construction, because you get $2 million in the plan to do the MSBA by excluded, that may lead to something significant that's yet not even in the plan. So the town is looking at, you know, 20 plus capital projects by excluded debt in the future on top of your levy debt. So it's a big ask, but I mean, deferred maintenance only causes this thing to be more expensive. These will all just have to take the path of being put in front of the selectmen and get the selectmen support or not. FinCon is going to have to give a written opinion or a presentation on it and the residents will need to vote it. So at least it's being published in the town that we're looking at these numbers and these are what the numbers are. So I'm glad you have the 16 million in there. Whenever this group gets done with their study, it may be another 10 million that gets added. I don't really know. But even though it's outside of Prop 2.5, it's still an increase to the residents, and it still impacts the tax rate and the year-over-year tax increase. So there's certainly a lot to be considered in the next five years at a minimum for the town. Even if we throw in the MWRE of another 38.6, that's going to be on water rates. So the residents will be asked to do a lot of decision-making in the next five years. Thank you. So the good news is that Moody's doesn't mind excluded that, right? That's in their report. Yeah, they encourage it. They encourage it. Yeah, I mean, it is relevant to this committee as this committee gets into a bit more time is spent on the long-term planning. I think Brian would be helpful. I was going to do it myself, but I've run out of time on this committee, I think. It might be helpful for them if you could take the, in our report we referenced the least costly option for the school projects that they're looking at, which is $518 to $560 million I think we put in there, over a period of 10 to 15 years, and those are inflated dollars. It might be interesting for this committee to see a hypothetical debt schedule. And then bring that down to a per average household or median household. And there's probably nobody better to do that calculation than you. But those are probably some pretty serious numbers. And, you know, it's one thing to talk about half a billion dollars, but it's another thing to bring that down to, you know, what does that take a $20,000 tax bill up to? So I just throw that Brad out for, as you get into the longer term planning part of this. And is that really something, not necessarily Brian, but hillside, is it hillside? I don't know if the hilltop right would do on a projection of the debt schedule because I think it very much plays into right. How other debt is retiring, but even with, if I remember correctly, what other debt is retiring, which the highest is the biggest thing that'll retire, you won't come, right, you won't, it won't come close to covering the kind of numbers that the school was talking about, right, that was only. Less than $60 million project to begin with. So it's not going to open up enough space to fit into the debt schedule. Yeah, I just wanted to, I just really wanted, and I can do it. I mean, I just wanted, and I may do it anyway to appease myself, but I just want to see if it's like $2,500 or $5,000 to the average tax bill. I mean, I really don't know, other than it's going to be a big number, you know, combined, as Brian said, with the... 38.6 million impact on the water rates, which as a percentage are going up a lot, but as an actual dollar amount, once you're a fairly large water user, those are relatively small bills compared to the real estate type. Anyway, Brian, I think my point is that there may be, depending on who the two replacements are on this committee, and I'm taking nothing away from the three people that will continue in there. their acumen on Excel and financial modeling, but they may need an assist on some of these types of analysis that they might want to do to be able to present at some point in their long-term planning. Yeah, I agree with that. I think that, you know, Kelly and Brian going on, they have certain expertise in various schedules, and any additional assistance we can get from you would be really greatly appreciated. Go ahead. I do send all this to Hilltop after the capital budget's done, and I know Brian O'Herlihy is. is, you know, has access to those files. So they do give projections on projects that are just in the plan and they do that routinely. We are issuing bonds next week and it went from, they told me last week that AAA Moody's community paid four and a half percent on their interest in coupons and I just got an email today that we might be paying four and a quarter. We've been carrying four and a quarter in the plan. Now it's down to four and a quarter. Who knows what it's going to be next week, but at least it's not starts with a five. So they do all this analysis for us. And, you know, it takes them about two or three weeks to get it all done with their staff, but they do a nice job with it. So once this capital project is done, it's important that I do that anyways, because I got to get a read on the override number. I got to determine what the tax impact is going to be. For each one of these projects, typically for a project, it's usually 10% of the debt. Not always, but like, for example, the $200,000, $202 million on the feasibility. Well, the life of that is five years. It's not like 20 or 15. Not everything's 20, so they map out, you know, each duration of the loan and, you know, they use a certain interest rate. And, you know, Brian, in that file I gave you at the top left, you can actually change the interest rates from whatever they have. So it's easy to do. So just to follow up and finish, I do all that. Yeah, I think that the slight difference in the ask there, Brian, is... It's for the stuff that's outside the five-year window, right, what that's going to look like. Town building, although when you compare it to the schools, the town building seems like a bargain. That's a way to sell it, right? Well, we haven't started the town. Building Working Group, we're hoping to get that going pretty soon. Mike Faia's got a couple things on his plate, and I know the select board's still hoping we'll have a report for them early spring, but as Brian and I were talking, that might take, you know, even if they come out with a report, it probably wouldn't be in time for, you know, to get before town meeting and others, so we wouldn't probably be looking to put anything in the capital plan for that, probably until FY29, depending upon what some of the recommendations are. I just wanted to draw your attention to, there's a table, which I think, Brian, you cited, well, maybe you didn't cite, there's a table, I think it's 14 in the memo, that contains five or six, seven items that are requests that we did not include in our recommendations. And I just want to make sure that you're both aware of it, just because I know it's a select board. Project, the Route 20 South Landfill Reuse. The plan, last year's plan in fiscal 28 included a half million dollars for the Route 20 South Landfill cap restoration, which was a misnomer. It really wasn't needed for that purpose. It was really then and now this year that we've talked to Tom Holder and at least we took it upon ourselves to re-describe it. As the Route 20 South Landfill Reuse Hyphen Design and Planning. So it was intended to be upfront money for a project whose scope is yet to be presented to us and whose estimated cost is yet to be presented to us. And I think for no other reason at the moment than that, we didn't feel comfortable including it. And I'm not sure honestly how it would have ranked. compared to some of the other items that are in the plan other than we did talk about it and we, you know, we at least one of our members, it's not here, mentioned the proverbial, you know, wants versus needs when compared to the IT need, compared to the fire sensor need and some of the other larger items that are in the fiscal 20 budget, even if we had been presented with More information on that, whatever's intended for that project. I'm not sure where, how it would have fared, at least in fiscal 28. The chair of the select board had reached out to me a couple times, asked me what its status was, and I told her each time I didn't think we were going to be recommending it for those reasons. And she said, well, can we provide information? I said, you can always provide information to the committee. And so... I think I mentioned, Brad, don't be surprised if over the next month, two or three, particularly if the select board say, hey, it's not on the plan. And if Michael, it doesn't find its way into your plan, although I'm sure they have your ear, but it doesn't find it in your plan. They can always decide they want to put it in as an article, right? And if it goes in as an article requesting capital money, that will also have to come back. There's only through this committee for a recommendation. So I just want to make sure, particularly you, Michael, that you weren't blindsided that when they get the report, some of the other members may not be aware that one of their, I think it's, I don't know if it's on their priority list or their goal list, but I certainly know they put a lot of energy into that potential project. And we just didn't, we didn't have the information and I'm not sure there was room. At least are available funding anyway to address it or bump it above other projects. We had information on the potential uses, like we had the report on what the things that they might consider, but that's not a scope of an actual project, right? Which path they take. It's similar to town building. The scope's not defined yet of the actual project. And it may be that just because we have to get our report done by the 15th, and there's been a lot of other things going on, that it just didn't get the attention. The request was put in by Tom Holder, and as I said, it came in again originally as related to the cap at the old landfill, South landfill, but Tom told us that he doesn't need it for that, but he wanted it in there for this other purpose. And then I think the other thing, and that is also in the memo, but the 5.4 million that was effectively in the plan that's in the warrant, albeit I refer to it as below the line, was in the text of the FinCom report. The 5.4 million for town meeting, that number has been around for two or three years, I think, Brian. And it had, you know, we had gotten more detail on what What made up that number we got from Michael Faia last year, and he pulled out, or we asked him if he would pull out the roof-related component of it, which was a couple million dollars, and then come up with a phasing plan, and last year's budget included the first piece of that phasing plan over the gym, and the intention was that we would have A little more than 700,000 in fiscal 28, but that wasn't really in the five-year plan. It was in the warrant. It was part of the 5.4 million, if you will. So we think there's a little double counting going on, but by the time you actually get around to getting a recommendation from the visioning group, our guess is that... The overall number is going to probably be closer to putting aside a gut rehab. The overall repair number is likely to be more towards $6 million anyway. Could I just ask about the roofs? I'm sure this came up in 31 and 32. You have excluded debt for the district-wide roof replacements. 4.2 million. And then in 32, you've got Claypit Hill, Claypit Roof for 4 million. You know, I think we did Loker maybe five, six years ago when we got MSBA reimbursement. So when we get the 31 and 32, if these are still in the plan, hopefully we get MSBA reimbursement to bring down this number. Because, you know, we did get it for the Loker school about five, six years ago. So once we get to those. You know, to the extent that they get traction on the application to the MSBA this next spring and that they get into the process. And that process moves along over a period of a couple, three years. Our sense was that they're likely, they're going after, I think, an elementary school initially. Not sure which one in particular. But they agree that if they're well on in the MSBA process and possibly even under construction on a new elementary school, if the funds happen to be for that school, you're not going to spend money on a new roof for a building that's going to be torn down, right? So I think that, and you know, Brian, as you get further out in these five-year plans, and who knows what it's going to look like when you guys do year six through 15, the numbers get pretty loose. I think this is meant to say if we don't do one of those projects, then these are coming due from a plan. Yeah, and if we don't do, even if we do do one of those projects, when it necessarily happens, could be. Right. You might need some patching and other things. Right. So I think we planned for when we think scheduled replacements are going to happen based on the feedback of the department heads. Obviously, if there's a big replacement of schools, that should shift priorities among the school building projects. Yeah. And their ability to get, Brian, your point, their ability to get MSBA reimbursement for repairs. I don't know whether that is impacted by them also being in the process for funding for a new school. I don't know if they're separate pathways, and you can go down both at the same time, but you can check with Kirsteen and sort of Brad, this committee, when the time comes to be looking at those, and to Brian's point about possible reimbursement. I just don't know if you get precluded or not. It would make sense that you would, frankly. Yeah, there's limited pot of money. Is there anything in the report, since when we're done with you, we're likely to vote in approving the report and authorizing Brad to submit it to you, Michael. Is there anything in the report you would prefer not be in the report?
I don't see anything in the report that should be removed. I think you guys did a nice job on it. So I would say it looks great to me. Oh, I like it. I mean, I get used to seeing, I know you did the new format and I asked, but I think, you know, you can follow it. I'm used to these spreadsheets where you see the years vertically, kind of like what you send along, Brian. But your appendices are easy to follow as well by the years, what's laid out and by the department. It's listed both ways in the tables and the reports, so you can see the flight department in column, by year in column. You just have to turn your head sideways. Yeah, I know. I think it's very thorough and it's easy to search for things. Yeah. But those are good suggestions. The numbers are the numbers, how they get presented to ultimately this committee as time moves on. I think there's a, it's good to be consistent year over year just because people get used to seeing things just like in the war. People get used to seeing it a certain way and you change things up and they get confused. So, but, and we did ask, I think you put that in our portrait, we did ask. Department managers, how they felt about the new CIP form. And I think in general, the feedback was positive. It was actually quite positive. I think they liked the format. They liked the fact that Kelly was able to have a lot of stuff pre-populated that saved some time. It was a lot more effective for both sides. Yeah. And we will, right, when you're done and the meeting finishes, right, we would plan to do the same. thing, but earlier, which is to send back, based on what went out in the plan, send back those same projects, right, already pre-populated for the department manager. So it should be, and several of them acknowledge this, it should be a lot less work for them next year to do, or this coming year, because They did a lot of work on it. They knew they were going to be starting that same starting point. I will say, right, given the time frame that they had at the end. of the day. They didn't fill out everything, right? There's still possibility of room for improvement in information that they provide, but I think it was a very good start and we were very pleased with the department manager's contributions to improving the process. And we did ask them for their input if there were any changes or suggestions on the form. And of course, we remain open to any suggestions. One other thing, Michael, just again, so you don't get blindsided by department managers, and it's in the report. Last year, we got some requests, some of which we dealt with and some of which we deferred related to recreation related projects. Be they CPA-funded every couple of years, or hopefully CPA-funded every couple of years, playground renovations for longer term, 2032, 2033, another athletic field at the middle school. There's a couple of smaller items, and we reached out. We didn't get anything this year, or Michael Peia took things out that were in there, but we didn't get any response, to my knowledge, from the recreation director. So, you know, just so you're aware, we asked, we reached out, and if there's a complaint that somehow those projects aren't in our report, that's all you can do, right? Separate thing, you know, Brian and I were talking about this and I brought it up to him again earlier. You know, there hasn't been that much deviation and, you know, we don't see any major issues with this. Given that, Brian, you're currently on the Finance Committee and Kelly, you have a background. I was... Hoping and assuming, I guess, a combination that you, as you were going through this, were looking at it through a lens of the Finance Committee that what you've recommended to us, hopefully, you also felt would be meeting approval of the Finance Committee. Is that fair to say? I would say... In the vein that we used what the Finance Committee approved last year as our guidelines for how to lay out this plan in terms of spending in each category? Yes? Yep. If you were asking me relative to the policies that the Select Board approved a year or two ago? I would say no, because some of that spending exceeds those felt ways. But I think I raised that last year when we issued our rate. We stuck to the policy guidelines last year, and that's why we were lower in a lot of areas. So I would tell you, if their belief is still consistent with what it was a year ago of what was affordable, then yes. But if that view has changed. Then I think that that could be an issue. Okay. Oh, thank you. Can I get back to the topic that Kelly's talking about, the thresholds, as well as the FinCom criteria, which was not printed in the FinCom's report this past spring. It was there in a number of the prior years in terms of, Brian, the thresholds of the ranges of free cash and money debt. Ambulance funds, et cetera. I'd ask Carl Barnes to put an agenda topic in the next few weeks to see if the current VidCon wants to revisit those criteria. And I think to Kelly's point, in that same vein, and since we include it as an appendix here, I'll probably raise the capital planning policy. Criterias or thresholds as well or parameters, whatever you want to call them. Just so that the FinCom is, you know, if they want to stake out general thresholds so that everybody knows where they might come out or how they might look at things, I hope that we'll have a discussion with the FinCom in the future. Just so you know, I hope to answer questions but not... Bobby a result one way or the other on the capital budget or five-year capital plan on the PINCOM. But the fact that I'm likely to vote in favor of submitting this report later tonight, they can read into that whatever they want. But I only speak for myself. I don't know, Michael, where they're all figuring to come out. But the good news is from a... process standpoint, since we look like, it looks like we're going to meet our deadline. We've been, I've been, Carl's asked me in each meeting to spend a little bit of time on the capital planning process of what the CIPC has been up to. I've shared the minutes with them as background. And I think the next step when this report is issued is Carl's going to ask everybody to read it. And I suspect. Have people come prepared to ask questions. And so my expectation, Michael, is when you submit to the FinCom your budget and five-year plan, the likelihood is Carl's going to ask me to do a side-by-side and therefore we will have spent a fair amount of time on what's coming out of this committee already. And hopefully then we can just focus our attention on things that might be different. And therefore be done right with the capital budget as you'd like us to be done on the FinCom by Thanksgiving or early December to get that out of the way. But then that all depends on when you guys are able to pull together what you're going to submit to the FinCom. Can I ask about the Route 20 landfill again? Are they going to be asking for design money or design and construction? That's what they attributed, that's what Tom Holder described, the half million dollars was needed for upfront design, additional planning. He wasn't overly specific, which is part of our problem. I really think whoever is leading the charge on the select board on that potential project probably really needs to decide what their plan of attack is, if any, for the upcoming town meeting. And to be a bit more specific as to what dollars are needed for what, because Tom really didn't, other than being a good soldier and putting it in, he really didn't, he wasn't involved in the details. Yeah, okay. So we just have to wait and see if somebody cements it? Yeah, I think you'll work with the chair of the slackboard to just figure out. What she thinks the board wants to do once they see this plan, which again won't be a surprise to her. I just don't know. I don't think she's been necessarily giving updates unless individual members have been reviewing our minutes or watching our interesting meetings. Although Mr. Whitney did join one meeting. He did. Just again, for Brad's benefit going forward, then Michael, I assume you will, the extent that there are. Anything new that might find its way into your recommendation, I assume you'll keep Brad in the loop on that so that if it needs to go to town meeting, it's kind of first. Yeah, it would have to come back here first because it has to be reviewed by you by bylaw before it can go. And then Brad will also be keeping an eye on other submitted articles by other boards and committees and our petitioners, just as we did last year, particularly this CPC, to see if there are any other articles that have capital-related requests, and that would likely result in an addendum, as we did last year on a project. Yeah, I mean, once we get to finalize this... You know, plan, particularly 28. You know, Michael and I may come back and say, you know, we, you know, we support the $2 million, but not in the quote, omnibus capital budget. We would prefer to have it as a separate article. So those kind of things may arise because maybe the residents want to talk about what this $2 million is going to lead to. If you put it in an omnibus budget, you may get a lot of questions on the floor. We have it in an article. Okay, good. It's already an excluded. And I alerted, since I'm the school representative designee anyway, I alerted the chair of the school committee that it was based in part, Brian, on your feedback to me about the fact that this debt would have to be repaid in five years and that you therefore wanted to see that outside the levy. I think I've heard her say at least at one school committee meeting that they're anticipating that they're going to need to submit an article and request the excluded death. But again, as you know, there's timelines and processes, so you need to make sure that they... I sent an email this evening to the superintendent and the business manager reminding them they have to request... Bob, that the question be placed on the ballot to the select board to initiate that process so that you have the FinCon review and everything. And I'll remind them, we have a financial planning meeting, I think, in another week as well. So I'll have everybody there. We can discuss it at that time, too. Thanks, John. Need to talk a lot? No, other than a nice job. No, again, I was going to say I want to thank all of you for your efforts and what you've done, Brad as the chair, and thank Brian and Kelly for their service on this committee. It was the first full year. You had the rushed year last year, and so this is the first. One, according to plan, coming in with your deadline being this week. It's a lot of work. I know that. And I thank you for the recommendations you made. And then Brian and I will look at it. And as you've indicated, we'll probably hear some requests from select board and others. And if that comes to pass, we'll come back and visit Brad with whatever comes in. It's in the report, but if Brian and Kelly were invaluable, it would have been frankly impossible to do what... We're doing without their assistance. But you're going to be able to do it. Don't worry. There's a lot of institutional knowledge there. As I alluded before, they both come with the Finance Committee background. So it's good. And they have the knowledge. That's, in my opinion, the value of having the Capital Planning Committee because you have people with expertise. They get to look at it rather than... You know, always falling on the town manager and the finance director. And, you know, we we have a lot of things going on and don't always have the time to devote the attention detail that you folks do. So having you pour over that and make recommendations based off the last year's plan is very helpful. Don't be surprised if you see two AI clones sitting in here on this committee. John is training them so that you don't need humans. Yeah, that's right. They call it Brian. Is that what they're called? I don't know. We'll name the agents.
Well, thank you. If you have nothing else, we'll move on to our next topics. And as Brian said, in all likelihood, we'll probably go ahead and vote to approve the report this evening. NFS case, we'll be sending it to you tomorrow. Well, thank you again. Thank you very much. Thanks. Next is reviewing any other... Edits? Or any further discussion on the report? I had asked Kelly, I sent out the final version last night, and I noticed when I did a test print or a test preparation of a PDF document this morning, and I saw some kind of faint lines on table 8 and 9, so I think Kelly's going to figure out how to get rid of them and send those back to me. Did you say there was another? Oh, you want to talk about the rankings from IT? Yeah, I'm putting, so I fixed the lines, and then I, that goes just so you know, were embedded in as gray borders from the original version of that spreadsheet, which was a town spreadsheet from, right, it was used in the FinCom's warrant, but because they used grid lines, it must have not shown up. So I got rid of those. IT sent their rankings. I'm right now just moving, working on putting them into the spreadsheet. The IT director did raise a point worth discussion over future, which is he found it confusing. That the overall project rank, the one where we were asking them to rank their projects right from one to whatever the project, last project was, that high priority there is one, and as opposed to our criteria-based ranking, high priority is a high score. I sent him back a note and said we'd discuss it, but I did point out to him because I think he was thinking that Overall project rank was supposed to be a one to five, and it's not because he's got some of them, he's got the same number on them, right? So I wrote him back and just explained like that was supposed to be, you know, if you gave us all the same score on criteria that you were going to put yours in order. I think, and I'll take it as an action as I clean up this, the files for hopefully the start of next year. To elaborate a little bit more in that description of exactly what we're looking for. It says it, but we can probably make it a little bit clearer. Right. We can think about it. Or literally, maybe it's not on the form, but maybe in the transmission or something. Or maybe there's an FAQ little document that you actually have an example. Yeah. I could work with Michael in terms of his instructions. Point that out, because he does send separate instructions. Yeah, I think we can address it in the actual instructions right next to it. And the reason being, when you put it in separate documents, we've already seen that separate documents don't necessarily get read either. But I will... I said I'd talk about it. I don't think it makes sense to flip the order. I was going to ask if you just flip the matrix up top and the overall numerical ranking below just because that way they're forced to go through the matrix first. Yeah, we could do that. I was going to, I absolutely could do that. You're about to talk about flipping the number. I don't think it makes sense to flip the order because I think like it makes sense to me that you're Highest priority project should be one, not if you have 13 projects, it should be 13, right? And I think same on our priority, we could flip the criteria ranking the other way. Describe it differently. But I think that's, you know, a little bit, I think people struggle with golf scores winning, right? Low score winning. So I think better description will solve. Most of that. I also think that may have been a product of, if you remember, when we were previewing this form and going through it, not everybody, the department managers were here. And I think Michael Faia was, and I think he did a pretty good job throwing this out. Tom Holder did as well. But I think it's just confusion that we can clarify with the words. I think we anticipated that confusion. When we added that extra, which is on top, that extra number was really there. Again, those folks that just put, you know, fives for all there. Yeah, we still had that problem, though, so I think we also need to, I need to clarify there, so like FIRE gave all of theirs the same number. And I understand the rationale, it's like they're all important, but I think it's a little bit of understanding, like, if you only had enough dollars to do one project, what would be your number one project, right? It's that. One, one A, one B. That's the instructions. No A, B, and C. You can do A, B, C, because I know what that word means, right? So with that, did Nick have a, what did he have for ranking for the cybersecurity item? Good question. Hold on, let me find it. CIP 11 had 25. We'll give you a chance to resort it, too. Yeah, I gotta find. He has it at 30. All right, so that's a bit above the 80. So that makes me feel better. And I was going to reach out to Kirsteen, but I copied her on something else, and it bounced back to me that she's away. Just because I agree, it would have been nice to presumably get a high ranking on the MSBA request. But we can't just make one up. I didn't want to contact the superintendent about it. They're going to be putting an article in and defining it. So you're going to plug those in. You'll re-sort it the way you like it, and then it'll re-send that one as well. So anybody see anything else? I ended up having to tweak a few more words, and Kelly had asked to change something about the cyber in the long-term planning language, so it wasn't specific to Wayland. And when I made the symbol change, the rest of the sentence didn't make sense, so I had to change it a little bit. And I didn't want to use the word environment. I noticed that last night, and I didn't want to bring it up. What is a good word? Situation is the best I could come up with. It is a situation. Anybody have anything else? Nope, no. So that if you're inclined to vote, then we just need to, I guess, vote. The final report dated October 14th as revised for updated Appendix F. Someone wants to move to approve the report date October 14th with revised Appendix F. Second. Second. Second. Second. Second. Okay. Friendly amendment. We add and authorize the acting chair to submit the report to the town manager prior to the deadline. So moved. Seconded. Thank you. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. That's four zero. Good work, folks, everybody. All right. Thank you, everyone. I'm just going to jump off now, but I wanted to wait for the vote. So thank you. We'll do the real vote now. Have a good night. Thank you. All right. So when I go home, I'll... Bring in Kelly's tables, and depending if I'm industrious tonight, I'll send you a final PDF version tonight, and I'll just assume, as we talked about, you'll copy all the CFPC members. Ex-officio as well. Right. Just put in the CFPC thing. And I always feel it probably would be appropriate to also copy and share the select board. And as I said, I'll forward, what I'll do is once I get your email as a CFPC member, I'll forward that with the attached report to Carl Barnes, and then he in turn can send it out before the conference meeting next week. Can we just have... Well, I appreciate that. Can Brad just send it to Carl? Brad, you can just add Carl Barnes and Copy along with Carol? Yeah, the reason only being that next year when they go to do this, that they've got the full list and let it make sure it gets to the income. So you'll be CIPC Copy with Carol Martin Copy and Carl Barnes Copy. And then once I get that from you back, even though I'm sending you what you're sending out, but just to be sure, I'll then take what you send out and in the morning I'll forward it to the town manager's office separate from what you're sending to the town manager, then ask them to post it in the subfolder that's on our quick page. So it'll be in this. It'll be in a separate folder from last year's report. Okay. So you should be all set with that available for the public. Okay. That's great. Thank you. Moving on. I left in succession planning. I assume there's nothing from since 24 hours ago. Okay. I'm not exactly sure, but when I do send in my resignation, I will either copy when I send it in or I'll forward it to all of you after I send it in. The minutes from tonight will be a little bit longer than last night just because I'd like to memorialize some of the feedback we got. You promised it would be your shortest set ever. Last night. I don't think I committed tonight, but I'd like to memorialize some of the feedback that we got for the record. Yep. And while we're on that, We can review the vote to approve the minutes of October 13. Any comments on the meetings from minutes from last night? I suppose I could have used a really tiny font and got it on the one page. I don't have any comments. I move to approve the minutes of October 13. Second? Second. All those in favor? Aye. Approve 4-0. The next thing we touched on a little bit, last night I added to the agenda, and I wanted to discuss the content of CIPC meetings between the submission of the report today and the annual town meeting. I know for me, and I suspect, John, it would be helpful to get your sense as to what we're going to be expecting between now and the town meeting. I know there's a process by which... You guys talked about FinCom has to submit their report by a certain date, and then articles come out, but you guys are much more familiar with that process. You might think of it in three time periods, so from today to the end of the year, January to roughly March, because that's when the forum will probably go off the press, and then from March to June, when the new, presumably, hopefully, the new cycle will get going. A little earlier. So, you know, Kelly, do you want to chime in or? Sorry, repeat the question. I'll chime in first. So I think between now and December, I think obviously stay in touch with the town manager just as he's moving along and putting his plan together. And then when his plan is submitted to the FinCom, You can either request it from him or if I remember, I'll be happy to forward you a copy of what the FinCon receives and then give you an opportunity yourselves just to see how much of what was recommended found its way into that recommended plan. Yeah, can I pause there? When you send the report tomorrow to the town manager as our... We're supposed to. I would explicitly put that in your email, but could you please copy us on your plan? Oh, yes. And if he doesn't, then Brian will forward it, but he's making it a part of the process. And so that, you know, that hopefully will give you some feedback as to how this process went this year. And then from tonight through... January 15th. Again, just be on the lookout for incoming capital requests that haven't yet been considered here. You'll either find those in the town manager's plan because department heads give them other requests, electors give them other requests, other committees give them other requests, or between December 15th and January 15th articles will get submitted that might have capital-related requests. And those you'll be able to find on the town's website under the town meeting. section. They usually post them all up, you know, roughly a little after January 15th. And, you know, the committee, as we did last year, I think at a committee meeting, you'd kind of talk amongst yourselves, except there were three, four, five, as to whether you feel that they meet the definition for having to be reviewed. You might recall last year, we had a back and forth about the The Orchard Lane property as to whether that really fit with something that we have to review. And if something does, then you'll have to deal with it at the meeting and issue a recommendation. I think when it says issue a recommendation, it would be we support this, we don't support it, or we take no position. I don't think you need to feel... And it would also be helpful for any addendum to be with and posted up online on the committee's website. And so the public has access to it before town meeting. And so there's, again, for process purposes, if a capital request comes up, we prepare an addendum. I assume the process is we send it to the town managers, just like we'd send them to court. They do just repeat the same actions. They need to invite, let's say, again, some board, let's say the select board puts in an article, graph article for half a million dollars for the top financial. Even though we talked about it, we kind of know it's out there. If they're going to specifically be asking for it, their article will likely have a bit more language. You probably want to schedule whoever's heading that up on the select board to come in and present at one of your meetings just so you can ask questions and ultimately decide what you want to do with it, right? And maybe the same with CPC. Last year, there would have been a pretty sizable. article that we likely would have entertained, which would have been a request for improvements to the Kachituit ball field. CPC deferred it at least for one cycle. So it's possible that one may come back. So again, CPC on their webpage, I think applications have to be submitted by like mid-December. And they post those on their webpage so you could go and look at least at the applications. It doesn't mean once those are discussed at a CPC meeting between December 15th and January 15th that they're necessarily going to find their way into what's being recommended by the CPC. But if you don't mind doing a little advanced work, you at least could get a sense of what might be out there and then just decide whether you want to wait and see. And you can watch. You could watch the CPC. The CPC meetings obviously vet their applications, and so they'll be asking all the questions you would likely ask anyway. So either a member or all the members could kind of watch, you know, either one or two meetings that do that. I did that last year. And then the same thing, you could always invite. You know, whoever those petitioners are, whatever, in to meet with you. If needed, if you can't, if you're not getting the answers from their other public meetings. Yeah, yeah, as I said, I think CPC does a pretty thorough job vetting their stuff. So I think once you get through the articles, and the capital budget's likely already been dealt with by the FinCom, and hopefully before the end of the year. I have some reason to reopen that capital budget, which has happened in the past, that might pop up in January or February. Your work as to anything going to town meeting is probably done. Actually, it falls under this category. It just reminded me of one thing that I never did get around to doing is we're so focused on getting the plan done. So I don't think any of you were at the town meeting last year when the... It was a snafu of the capital budget. Anyway, there was a member of the public that attempted to amend the capital budget, increasing the line item for IT-related spend. And I went up and made a point of order that that increase in that request hadn't been vetted through this committee. And the moderator consulted the town council, and it was ruled out of order. The motion to amend was ruled out of order. And I felt kind of bad that somebody attempting for the ultimate legislative body didn't have the ability without getting tied up in a bureaucracy. And so I had drafted some language myself and passed it along to that particular individual. So I felt bad, you know, maybe you might want to consider doing a petitioner's article. I provided to the select board. And then there was a, I had another issue when the article was, the bylaw was first brought to town meeting with the language and how it related to, it appeared that petitioners that were looking for capital projects had to come to this committee, which ultimately town council opined was not the case because there's a state statute that Stockport has to. You know, has to put petitioned articles onto the warrant. Therefore, they have to come to town meeting. And I tried to get the language changed at that time and didn't get any traction. So I have, I think, two different sets of language that I drafted that I really haven't done anything with. I'm not now planning to do anything with. But as a committee, if either both of those issues rose to a level that since you're governed by the bylaw, you felt You might want to take an interest in. You could always ask me for the language. You could always send them along to the select board and say, we as a committee would like you to consider putting an article in to make these type of changes. Well, let me see. There's a petition. Again, I'm not sure exactly how the process works, but there's some petitioner that wants to have an expenditure of some money to capital expenditure. Are we supposed to, uh, opine on that? They don't, they don't need to, under the bylaw, Town Council opined at the time to, uh, the question that was posed to them that, um, that petitioners really don't need to abide by that particular provision in the bylaw, which talks about, you know, I was intending to suggest the language to be changed to boards or committees, which would therefore leave out petitioners or alternatively put in other than petitioners, because there's just another state statute that requires the petitioned article to be put on the warrant. Select board can't not put it in. And so there's no way to block it from getting to town meeting, whereas the bylaw for this committee, nothing can be brought to town meeting unless it's passed through this committee. That's what it says. So there was that conflict. And so I just felt that if changes were to be made to that bylaw, that it would make sense to clean that up, to make it explicit, even though the town council said, don't worry about it, because it would be repugnant state law, a different state law. So another question, say, say, for example, let's use over 20. As an example, the town manager does not include Route 20 in his recommendation to FinCom. And if FinCom then says, yeah, well, we're going to include it, then are we supposed to opine on that? I would say yes. I'd say it's unlikely but not impossible. Well, it's happened. It happened with the Route 20 design study where it wasn't in. The submitted capital budget originally and got brought to the FinCon late in the process. And, you know, the FinCon had to then make a decision. Do they want it in what they're going to recommend the town meeting? Because ultimately it's the FinCon is recommending the capital budget. Well, that was before this committee was formed. Right. I guess my question then is if there is something that FinCon comes out with that the town manager hasn't come out with, then we wouldn't have a plan. I don't think it matters whether the town manager does or not, and I'm a little bit unconfused, Brian, because I think it matters whether or not we've seen it, right? We could not recommend it, and then they could go ahead and recommend it. That's fine. But it has to come through the process. Any board or committee, and I think that would include the FinCon. Did something that they typically don't, which is to put something into a budget that someone comes and lobbies them on because it didn't get in either recommended by this committee or to the town manager or the town manager to them. They certainly taken things out or recommended things about as they did last year. And what happened last year, the town manager said, well, let me change what I gave to you. So they were then in sync. But... But I guess my example may not have been good because we have actually applied on Route 20. We just have to see it. We don't ultimately have to take a position. We took a position last year on the Holiday Road, Orchard Lane property. Yeah. But we all needed to see it. So using that as an example, right, if that ultimately we didn't recommend it, we put it in our, you know. Purgatory. If it ultimately got recommended, that's fine. We saw it. We stated a position on it. I think the issue is when projects come up that never went through the process, right? And the question, right, Brian, I agree with town council. I think we're covered in that a petitioner's article is not subject to that. And we ask that question. Informing the bylaw as well. So we did discuss it because we knew that that would be a problem. Certainly, if you clean the language up, I just don't think it's required. And does cleaning the language up fix the problem that you spoke of, which I don't know that we specifically contemplated that. On-town meeting floor makes, yeah, someone makes an amendment. I would argue that a town resident should be able to do that. We did not address that. So I don't want to get too deep into the weeds on this. I'm always suggesting that between now and window opening December 15th to January 15th, one of the things, at least I've seen the PINCOM do relative to the biologic governance yet. And when I was on the Municipal Affordable Housing Trust, we also did it. We looked at the bylaw that governed it and found there are reasons to want to go back to town meeting and propose some changes. Since you're governed by the bylaw, if there's anything either that we're required to do that you think is questionable or whatever, or the two things I raised are just examples. Committee, Board or Committee, I think you can actually submit your own article. It's usually better to coordinate with Select Board and get them to agree with your changes because they're going to oppose what you're proposing. It's just a harder path forward. So I'll stop there, but I'm just saying if you're looking for things that you don't want to wake up on January 16th and say, oh, It wouldn't have been nice if we were going to change our bylaw to do X. Well, yeah, I guess my question is more focused on what should we be looking for that you're required to do. Yeah. So I think we've talked about those. And so once, as I said, once Mark comes and goes, I think relative town meeting, you're kind of done. And presumably you're starting to, you know, gear back up. Planning for the next cycle. And then I assume between now and ongoing, you're going to have more discussions of how do you start building out your process and thoughts about longer term planning and information collection. And probably a good thing to plan to have some discussion somewhere before next. You know, April, May, when you're getting around to starting to gear the process back up about collecting open capital, coordinating with the finance director and the time manager on how best to collect that information. Those kind of process improvements, as I said, maybe there's some tweaks to the CIP form. But probably the most important is to reserve rooms. Figure out how many times a month you want to meet and reserve the rooms all the way out to June 30th. I think you're set through the end of the year. Of course, I've got to bring the dates. Kelly, through the end of the year? I did it through the end of the year. Okay. Yeah, so the... Do you have the dates? Yeah, I have the dates on the calendar. All right. It's November 4th because we are doing the next one. Yeah. Why don't we discuss that? I know we discussed it a little bit yesterday just to make sure we're on the same page. So the next one is at 28th, and John, you're not available. Correct. Okay. So 1028 is off. Yeah, we're taking 1028 off. 18 was questionable. I think we have a room the 18th of November, but you're out, right? We're going to meet the fourth. You're going to meet the fourth. The next one on the calendar is the 18th. And that one I'm out. So we're going to delete that one. So I need to take that one out. December 9th. My birthday. Oh, you should definitely meet on your birthday. Absolutely. I'll bring cake. Not a problem. Okay, so are you available on the night? At this point, yeah. We'll have meetings before there is to confirm, so that's on. No, and the next one's December 23rd, which I hope you can cancel. It didn't sound very promising. Yeah, so I would say cancel out. I think we're probably going to have a trigger on that, yeah. Yeah, I mean, the meeting that you might have the town manager to recommend a budget would be the 9th of December. And if it wasn't available then, but he told you it was going to be, you know, two or three days later, you might have to decide, you know, how much of a jump do you want to get on? Maybe it's just the members are looking at that and coming repaired at the beginning of January to dig into it along with, you know, whatever articles start servicing. So, Kelly, you did not do anything in for 2027. I don't recall that I did, but apparently I put it on my calendar. Yeah, I put it on my calendar. Yeah, I don't think you did, but I didn't. I didn't, and yeah, the only date snafu that we've already gone over were that we had shifted November because of availability within the town, but we'll change that again. We had done every two weeks on Wednesdays, other than if there was a holiday. So that our next meeting will be before. So the minutes will reflect by that you'll be checking into that with the town manager's office about preserving rooms? Yes. Through June 30th? Of next year? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I was thinking until the entire year. Do they only go through June 30th or they go through calendar? You get to ask them. Yeah. I would, if she'll, if it's open through calendar year, I would just go through calendar year. Yeah. Yeah. And I would. I would recommend you go ahead and book every other week on whatever if you want to stick with Wednesdays. And then you guys can have a later discussion about frequency and where you want to take them out. But it's better to book now. Yeah. And again, it's up to you. We've met in person, but there's a bunch of boards and committees that need just Zoom. And it's just... You usually have the pleasure of the chairs and then the members weigh in. Some of the boards that do just Zoom, I prefer it personally, but some of the boards that need Zoom just find it easier if they're dealing with like the planning board, dealing with plans and things, just easier to share. But we've done all right sharing. I have documents here. I think I prefer in person, and people have participated remotely, and that's worked out fine. I tend to kind of, I'm not here, I'm not in the right time zone, so it doesn't matter. But you're better off having the rooms, and then you can always decide. I won't be here, but I prefer in person because I'm at home all day. Well, then you can come. Come on. Guest lecture. Guest lecture. It's kind of under the succession planning item, but figuring out, talking to Carol Martin, trying to figure out how to move along, finding two new folks. Obviously, I'll be communicating with Erin, given some of the school committee and given her three months heads up, so I don't know if she's been... Actively looking for someone to represent the school, so. Yeah, I'm not sure how much looking. Same is true for finance. Yeah, I mentioned to Carl Barnes a couple times that, you know, if anybody on the FinCon knows somebody that might be a good candidate, so far no names have surfaced, so. Yeah, like I said, I'm not sure how much active working has occurred. Yeah, I agree. Which is problematic. As for my, have you gone through your last time? So for my list, you're not going to be surprised if it hinges around things we can be doing process improvement-wise. From my personal standpoint, what I aim to do, and I've said this before, is to clean up as much of these files and make them as good as they can be. So there are things I had to do that weren't automated because I needed to do it faster than I could have automated it. I want to get those in as good a shape as I can. And then it's depending on who wants to take up the mantle. I'm happy to sit and walk through them. I'm going to try and put as many instructions in as I can. My word of advice, John, to you, since you're a proficient user of AI, is if anything doesn't work, it doesn't break. Throw it into AI and ask them what's wrong. And usually it can tell you pretty quickly. My favorite is that co-pilot will do things wrong. And then when you say, hey, why did I get this error message? It will say, oh yeah, that's not the right way to do that. And then it fixes it. So, but there is help there. Specifically, I aim to add The functionality which I had previously created but added into this newer model that creates the warrant articles, the write-ups in the warrant with the hope that that will avoid what happened last year. I know with you on FinCom it won't happen again anyway, but just making sure that the language is coming directly from You know, copy at least. Yeah. I will give it to both FinCon and. Copy, Carl. Yeah. I'm sure I'll be handling capital. No, but I know you'll proofread it. I'm going to be focused on that issue. And the plan this year is to send those, whatever is going in the warrants, going back to the department managers before it was in the warrant. Which it used to do that. Yeah, it just didn't happen last year. Okay. That's great. Yeah. So that'd be a separate tab or how would you structure that? I haven't decided yet how I'll structure it. So there is an element of not trying, the spreadsheet's already pretty big. It may be similar to the way I did the departmental forms, so they each got their own, but there's code in there that says, okay, where do you want to take the file from? It might be something like that where it's a new file, and it says, where's your final? capital file, and you feed it the final capital file, and then it creates the, just because. Yeah, I try to do it myself for a different reason, and anything beyond 200, what is it, 256 characters, you can't do a normal search and bring it over here. You have to write code to get the text over. So I ended up just cutting and pasting. You might recall you sent out to everybody, I think, a file that just had just the descriptions. Oh, yeah. It can do it if it's, it can't easily if you're copying a cell, but it can if you're copying the whole tab. So I'll figure it out. So I have work to do there. I want to try to get this as close to. Reusable as I can. And along those lines, hopefully setting up the functionality once you have a final capital budget from ATM to then create next year's CIPs. I haven't quite conceptualized how that's going to work, but I... You can hire me to prepopulate for it if you want. Yeah, or you can have Brian prepopulate. But just trying to get all the pieces of the process connected so that they work, but that there's also there's breakpoints in between, right? So that I found when I was doing this, right, I've replaced ITs in here like five times and I stopped using the macro to do it because I was like, I don't, like I've added so much to the file, I don't want to screw that up. So I'm just making sure that there's like You're not screwing up the process along the way. Like this is going to be our final report for the first go around. You do it another one, right? But it's separate and protected and you're not ruining what you did before. And at some point, once you do that, which we provide your plan, it might then be expanded out, you know, up to year 15. It's all going to be a data collection.
I guess I'll volunteer for that for now. What's going on in the minutes? Let's go back and fight me for it. I mean, again, we can always cross-train each other as well, and that's probably a good idea. Yeah, and Liz seemed, on the opening office, she seemed pretty proficient in working her way. I don't know about the use of AI, I'm sure she's fond of that, but she was pretty proficient working her way. She's been pushed in as much as I am. I think she'll be also able to help out. We'll have our two new AI agents to get that help. Yeah. And I just, again, we're talking about administrative. Are you done with your? Yeah. So, obviously, again, somebody's going to pick up the minutes starting the next meeting. Probably decide to do that. And it doesn't have to be a member of the committee. Although there's not a big supply of outside health and less supply of money to pay for outside health to do it. But if the AI is getting you to a reasonable place, I think I mentioned once before that one area that I'm just not sure how it's going to be able to do it is the list of documents you've got or distributed. I just go back through. Well, the discussion meeting, because the document's been mentioned, that kind of ends up on the list. Or I look at emails, which come from me. There might be less of those, maybe. There are emails from the chair or other department heads, and so I just go back through them and look at those that have gone to all members. You don't need a list. If I send Kelly an email specifically, can you send me this table? That doesn't have to go on there. It's not a public document. It's just when it's sent to a quorum. Or if you discussed it in the meeting. Maybe we just add an action item to say, which documents should we use in this meeting? Just until we get our... Because then we can just say it's the five. It's in the recording. In a perfect world, which doesn't exist in Massachusetts or a law, you'd be able to post. Write all the documents that you're looking at for a meeting ahead of time, but the problem is you start to run into open meeting law if you're sharing things that people haven't talked about. My guess is initially you'll have fewer documents because I'm not sending extraneous stuff out. And the way I describe them, honestly, I do it just... I don't think it has to do it for open meeting law purposes. I think you literally just need to describe a document in enough detail so that if a member of the public wants access to that, they can ask the town clerk to make a request. But you've seen me where an email has come with some document attached. I've referenced both the email, the dated email, and I've even gotten so far this year just to avoid confusion of putting the document description. Parenthetically, next to some of these when we start getting into different versions. I could easily just say version one, version two, but you put as much detail as you feel you'd want to. But as I said, I don't see a way for AI. I mean, I suppose you could have AI look at your email account and pick off, you know, references that are addressed for more than three members of the committee. If you're allowed to give access to the email account to AI. But anyway, and so what I do usually between meetings is I sort of star emails that I know are going to end up on that list and then I go back and I get tedious. I mean, it's not that many emails that I see. I mean, it's not. I just don't want you to get the, trust me. Detail that I go is a bit more than most other. The board is likely probably is the only one in the planning board and the zoning board. They have legal requirements to be very specific and the documents that are part of the record. But a lot of other boards and committees, I assure you, don't list probably everything they need to. Tell my Brian AI, please run your numbers. Yeah, I think as long as we're capturing our votes, you know, regardless of what happens and then any documents, the rest we can, between Liz and I, we can hopefully have two new members. I think as I said last week, again, don't hesitate, at least initially, even if you just put a question behind me, just... I think I might know an answer to something. I suspect we're going to take you up on that. I appreciate it. I'm happy to respond. I also wouldn't wait to engage the department managers again. Obviously, working through town manager, if you guys get far enough, like, hey, we want to start talking about long-term vision, just have a discussion. You don't have to wait until town meeting. It's not really contingent on... What town meeting approves, right? If you want to get more in-depth on some projects. Do some check-ins. Yeah. Well, that's actually a good thing to bring up. I thought I heard the town manager say that the town building vision committee had not yet met, which was discouraging. I was actually worrying that they were moving at a pretty good clip and they might try to put an article in for this upcoming town meeting. Doubtful, but I think we talked about, because Michael Faia is an ex-officio member, to talk to Michael and see if you could get him to commit to maybe come every, you know, every second meeting or something just to give you, or even an email, some update of how that particular committee is going and to center's output that he's okay sharing. Anything that gives you, unfortunately, becomes a public document, which defeats the purpose of using a working group. But anyway, you probably should have a discussion with him offline just to find out where they are, what his sort of plan is, how long, report, and then commit to some sort of updates just because they'd like to see that process work its way out. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, frankly, we... The holidays coming up and not too far off. It's hard to see how the planning committee is going to get a lot done between the end of the year. No. One thing that was raised by Brian that I think would be good, you can think about how to put it in the forms for next year. We have it in there, but the point blank sort of, hey, you have other money that's been appropriated for this type of a project. And we did ask those questions, which, right, but Making sure it gets documented that the specific of like, yes, there is other money, but that money is being used for planning and design or that money is for a different building. What I'm going to caution you as you move towards town meeting is to pay very close attention to what Brian generates as surplus capital. And if that surplus capital is... Closing out projects that are similar in nature that you guys have asked the question of, wait a minute, is that just going to come back on the back end, right? Or is that truly surplus capital? Because I am a little worried about that. The fire sensors, like, you're going to close out things and then that's because it's a project that, you know. You're putting off, or is it really closeouts? Yeah, I think you'll need to ask that question before you see it in a warrant. So you'll have to get the... That's why I'm saying pay close attention, right? If you see... That usually doesn't surface until the motions are put together, which is, you know, it's our warrants are... Typically, closeouts aren't printed in a warrant, but Brian's been... Brian probably has an idea of what they're going to be. So I would just say put on your list to get to Brian Keveny sometime in February. Just to ask them, have you pulled together your final closeout list? And then you can ask them that question that Kelly asked. What's the timing? When did you say? I'd say probably February. The finance committee has even seen that or it shows up in the motions for the omnibus budget. But yeah, I know we asked that question at the start of this process because there were a number of school items that a lot of money that he sort of forced them to slightly ask them to turn back in, but they were district-wide improvements that they would eventually use. And as a result, they did have, I don't know if they specifically asked for them this go-around, but... Yeah, when I'm bored and don't have committee responsibility anymore, I can put in a petitioner's article that capital closeouts have to be detailed. I think there, I'm half joking, but there's also, that's a disconnect for me that the town is specifically asked to approve projects and funding for those projects. And then the funding can be We're turning without a similar level of transparency. I'll bring that up, but I think I mean, you know, controls the motions under the omnibus budget and what therefore goes into the warrant. So usually the list has been fairly lengthy and therefore people didn't want to take up a page or two, but there was probably a way to do it through an appendix or something that. You know, provide that detail. It may still change by the time you get to town meeting, but at least people have the initial list. But yeah, last year, I think the list ended up being on a handout at town meeting and it went up on the screen, but people didn't have it. And even that list didn't get into the what we just discussed, which is. Those projects, some of those projects were not in the category of completed or no longer needed. Again, there was a reason why that turned out. I don't know if that's happened in the past. Maybe it has. There was a reason it happened last year, just because people have put in a pretty sizable new request for their curriculum, and I think my instructor's view was no, but if you want to pay for it, then you've got to surrender. So funds that you otherwise asked. So if it's more important to you than those, which obviously it was, the client will give up the money. But I'm sure what happened. Yeah, and I understand that. I just, a taxpayer resident, I think once I've voted on something, I think that that's going to get done. I mean, if it's not going to get done, I'd like to know that. Well, you'd like to know in advance. If you do on how many floor, I presume any resident could get up and challenge. Somebody could have gotten up. And we had a little advanced warning of what it was. Somebody could have stood up and said, well, wait a minute. Why are you giving up the money for those three big school projects? You're just going to have to ask for it again. Someone meeting you or me. Not sure how many other people would know that. Is that helpful? Yeah, that's all very helpful. I'm going to go back and I'll clean up my notes. I was thinking the other day about, oh my gosh, this just feels like it's done hard. And I was like, oh, because we're doing it for the second time this year. Right? That's part of it, is that we weren't really done. There was no law. Exactly, because we weren't done yet. Yeah, I was going to go back and look and see what time, when was the date was we submitted the first report? January 17th. Yeah, and then there was a long date. And then there was a February update. And then there was a close to town meeting. Right. Is this your second year? It just feels like it. Well, thank you guys. Thank you guys so much. It's a big learning curve. We're all prepared and ready to go. I don't know how we could have, I mean, we couldn't have done it for you guys. The knowledge is... It would have been different, but you would have done something. Something. You will be surprised how much rate you picked up in the last year. It's a lot, right? You've now heard all the same conversations we have with the department managers. sense of what they're asking for. If you have any questions? Robbie? No. We know all the answers. We're glad for all these meetings. You're being able to answer their questions. Well, again, thank you. And I guess with that, I can ask for a motion to adjourn. Motion to adjourn. Douglas, you want to do it for your final time. Oh, I'm a minute taker. Second. All in favor? Aye. 940 at page 25. Another early night.