October 14, 2026 – Municipal Affordable Housing Trust – Video & Transcript
October 14, 2026 - Municipal Affordable Housing Trust
all right 5 30 i'm going to call together meeting of the whaling municipal affordable
housing trust on october 14th um not reading all that i gotta read this part right
pursuant to chapter 2 of the access 2025 this meeting will be conducted in person
and via remote access and according to the applicable law the meeting is only remote
access no in-person attendance by members of the public media community the meeting may be found
watched remotely at ww whaling mass public body media information
in attendance we have mike sadie mary auntie susan weinstein and jacqueline
esperito vega i have that correct
um
um
um
the first order of business is review and approve the minutes from march 3rd
going way back i thought they were good they were brief move approval
great do i have a second
um we have a second from jackie um roll call vote uh mary yes jackie yes
yes susan
yes
and mike yes great um then also next is the september 15th uh minutes
i had a couple of things um one is where it says review and approve payment of invoices
it says thank you the invoice from act 2 was reviewed maybe we can put the nature of the
expense okay i don't remember
it's done
there but um it's a lot to get around
we're probably gonna do our best here
there maybe a couple more minutes
or two?"
part one of the
we're hoping the
we're hoping the
and then
where are we starting from in the title
uh to me it's the top half of the calendar
uh where we started from in the title uh to me it's the top half of the calendar
top of page two. It says update on 12 Hammond Road and I just thought we should add and to 12
Conchituate Road. Okay. Yep. Great. Any other edits? Nope. Move approval as amended. Great.
Do you have a second? I'll second. All right. Roll call, Susan. Hi, Chris. Yes. Hi. I was just
about to ask for the edit you made. I'm so happy. Excellent. Joining the meeting is Chris Reynolds.
Excuse me. All right. Roll call vote. Susan voted yes. Jackie? Yes. Chris? Yes. Mary? Yes.
And Mike? Yes. I did want to note though that at the end of that particular paragraph,
it did say that Chris wanted to...
discuss potential development at the next meeting of the Housing Trust.
So it'll be the meeting after the next meeting, apparently.
Guilty as charged. See? I read them.
All right. So next item on the agenda is the appointment to the Housing Production Plan Committee. Can somebody give me an explanation of what this committee does first? Every five years, we need to do a new housing production plan for what used to be DHCD.
And it is part of the whole 40B thing. And we're coming up on another five years. Last time it was like the Barrett Group or something like that, that did it. And the thing that the... The town really relies on the contractor to do, besides the writing of it and pulling up all of these annoying demographic details, is facilitating the input from the public. And so they have various sessions so that people can weigh in on what they think the priorities for the town should be in terms of... Accommodating different types of housing. So they'll have two or three public meetings type thing? Usually. Usually. And Robert Hamill wants representatives from the various boards. Susan is going to be on the committee from the Housing Authority. Jean Milburn is going to be on it from the Housing Authority. So that's two next door on Concord Road.
Yeah. Mary, would you be interested in participating? Well, Jackie had indicated an interest. So... Jackie, you still up for it? Wow.
I mean, I can give it a shot. Why not? Okay. I had lunch with Jean Milburn about it, and we're fired up. We think this is important. When do these meetings take place? Don't know yet. Oh. First, are you on the committee as well from the selectman standpoint? I actually don't know. I have a question in about... There's a bunch of so-called liaison positions that are up in the air right now. But if I'm not on the committee, I'll come to the public thing. Okay. Well, I was just thinking... We don't need three of us there, but Jackie wants to be there. Right. Yeah. Then I would move that Jackie be the trust's appointee to the Housing Production Plan Committee. Second. Mary seconded it. Roll call vote, Chris. Okay. Aye. Susan? Yes. Mary? Yes. Jackie? Yes. The most important one. Great. Thank you, Jackie. Great. That was the primary purpose of tonight's meeting, so that's good. Matters not reasonably anticipated by the chair. I guess the only thing I wanted to bring up, Mary, can you just make sure that now the minutes are done, that the minutes get to the appropriate time. person in the treasurer's office so bills get paid? Yep. Great, thank you and unfortunately no update on 12 Hammond because the Land Court still has not deregistered the land and it's still an ongoing process that's infuriating. Habitat still remains interested and ready to go but until the lands deregistered we can't record the condo docs and get ready to sell and transfer the deed to them. Continue to push the law firm that we've hired to do this and hopefully have good news at our next meeting. Could you interrupt me if I'm out of order or just going down a bad path? Don't wait till I'm done but is there some reason why I shouldn't bring this up in the concerns and issues section at the next select board meeting and just hear what you have to say? what other people who are lawyers and maybe a lot smarter than me think about it. It sounds like you guys have done good stuff. The money's there, the plans are ready, everything's set, but a bureaucratic debacle that even the people perpetrating it probably want to try to fix. Yeah, it's the land court's state bureaucracy that one of my projects for my company is tied up in as well. If anybody in your network or the Board of Selectors network have any kind of pull at land court, great. So it's your fault, Mike? What's that? It's your fault. My fault, yeah. Yeah, that'll look good in the minutes, okay.
So more than happy for you to bring it up, but it's just the bureaucracy of land court, which is good to see torturous for taxpayers. It's good for the towns as well as private developers. Yeah. They're not just singling me out. Well, contrary to what you might think, you actually have a pretty good reputation from what I've heard, and if they're holding you up, then it must be back to the pilgrims and, you know, since Noah and we just don't ever do anything kind of situation. They move at their own pace. He's too good, they have to slow him down. Could you send me two to five sentences on it and I'll ask, some pit bulls, if there's anything we can do? Sure. Thank you. And please don't do any work, if you've already got the two to five, just cut and paste them from somewhere else. I'm not trying to give you work, but. Yeah, and I'll just give you a brief overview of what it is. Anybody else have anything else to bring up? Yeah, I just want to report that the audit is in process, and so I've gotten a request for some information, and I had to pull in Mary. Oh. On some of it, but they haven't needed very much from us, so. And that's going through Brian Keveny. Great, thank you. Then I had an issue I wanted to bring up. Great. I would like to have an informal conversation with somebody on this committee to propose some ideas that may be bad, and they can get killed in the informal conversation, or I can be told they're good, and then I'll bring them up in front of the whole committee. So my first question is, how many people are on, what is a quorum on this committee? Four.
Great, thank you. Four is a quorum, and we have five members right now. We have one open spot, or two? I forget. Well, the real estate person, and then we don't have somebody who replaced Brian O'Hurley. Well, what about this Nick? He's supposed to be the planning board person. He's never shown up. Munkinbeck, is that right? Something like that. Well, Chris, to answer your question, four is a quorum. We have five members. I think the charter allows for up to seven members. Great. So if I have coffee with one or two of you, I'm not breaking OML. Correct. Thank you. And I also just want to celebrate you guys for showing up. It sounds like. People aren't showing up, and you guys did. That's great. This group of four has been very dedicated. Hard to get things done in today's world, but it's been great. So it's good to have the Board of Selectmen representative again, too. Well, thank you. I share your dismay. It's hard to move a pace. Yeah. And we're focused on 12 Hammond and trying to get that going and done. But at the end of the day, that's not going to use a ton of money. So, you know, we still have quite a bit of money to put to use. It's just, we haven't been able to find any good uses for it. That makes sense. At the community preservation meeting the other night. Oh my God. I'm blanking. Dave Watson. You know anything about what he's doing? Mike? It's Watkins. Watkins. Thank you. He did call me and he might be bringing us something. Something down the road. The key with his project is he's got to be able to show us that he needs our money to make the project viable, not just to make it more profitable. But I am excited about that. It's a good sized project and it would have a decent sized affordable component. And I personally told him that if it could show, demonstrate that it, you know, the monies are needed to make the project work, we'd be, the committee would definitely consider it. And this is the project that came up at town meeting. Um, um, this is, he owns an office building next to Longfellow tennis and fitness club. Yeah. Route 20. Um, that, that was, that came up at town meeting that was approved, but without, uh, select boards support. Okay. Um, he's applied for. And maybe even have received a grant for the sewer extension, which would be a big piece of, of getting this done. Um, grant from home. I don't know. It's a good question from the state, somebody at the state level. Um, I don't know exactly which organization, so, but that would be, he's told me it'd be about a hundred unit projects. So be a nice size project and there could be a decent size, uh, affordable component to it. So that would be great. And then obviously if two, one, two constituent moves ahead, um, we've expressed, um, interest in contributing to that, to make, you know, the group home viable. Um, that's, that's the project. I want to chat with some of you informally and see if I got my facts straight.
Okay. Whatever we want them to do the maximum number of the beds. Um, yeah, I mean, you can bring it up now, Chris. I mean, there's somewhat familiar with it. Have you read the RFP or heard of the RFP for it? I've not read it. No. Uh, so there is a, there is an RFP out for, um, buying or more likely leasing, uh, the property and then running it as a group home for cognitively challenged, uh, people. Um, one of the things. Thorny or issues about it is how many, um, disabled residents notice. I did not just say total residents, disabled residents. It would have, um, and the one argument is just max it out because we need the beds. And another argument is, uh, do something. Um, that's a little under the max that makes it very palatable to the butters. Because as soon as we show that the butters are happy, we're going to be able to do this again at another property we have our eyes on. So that's the thing I wanted to listen to you guys about. Uh, and then I have, um, spent about four years meeting and with, and going to places that might actually execute the lease who run facilities for people with cognitive challenges. And, uh, once it's clear, and I think it is about to be clear, uh, that one of the respondents is probably, uh, best for the town and best for the residents. I was hoping this group would get behind it. The bad news. And what I just said is I'm making a little joke here. I don't see it costing a lot of money. So I appreciate your point. You've got money and you're wisely looking for places to put it. Uh, I don't think it's that kind of thing. I think it's more of a, uh, organization and own thing. I have got over 20 volunteers who want to help build a greenhouse, help get art in there, help do cooking classes there, help bring in people who aren't disabled. As you probably already know, these facilities can change a whole town. Even if, you know, if you're not going to be able to do it, you're not going to be able to do it. You're not going to be able to do it. You're not going to be able to do it. You're not going to be able to do it. You're not disabled and nobody in your family is. And you feel like you have nothing to do with the issue. It's still, I've seen this over and over again in more than one town. So it could get quite exciting. Susan, I'm sorry. RFP responses are due in November. Sorry. Jean Milburn is the good person to talk to. She was on the 212 committee. And, um, dissented report. And she was the. Sort of outlier in wanting more, um, more higher numbers. Yeah. Jean and I are, I'm going to claim her, uh, good friends. Her husband's appeared at the Wayland festival, uh, several times. Uh, she and I text and email a lot and she jokes that I had a higher attendance rate at the 212 committee meetings than some of the members did. And I'm in her camp. She wrote a beautiful section in the final report called, uh, minority view. I think it was. And it was, it was well done. Well, I, I think we tend to go with her minority. Yeah. Good. Yeah. But the, the density issue is largely resolved, right? There's nothing we can do about it at this point. Cause I was also in her camp of, we should do more there. That's a big piece of land. It's good soils. Like we can do more there and, um, but that, that went nowhere. Um. And as I understand it now, it's largely that's water under the bridge and it's not, can't be changed. Is that not accurate? Uh, I should be careful and say, I don't know. What I do know is, uh, over the four years I've been looking at this, I've come across other pieces of property with owners who'd love to do a similar thing. They just want to see it work. And I'd like to hop on that. That's what I want to get my fat. And one of them is actually nearby. Uh, and then ironically, another one. Um, uh, used to a, but a fellow who used to live here in Wayland and is now a senior executive of DDS. So a lot of dots are aligning here. If we, if we do this right, and it's a win, win, win, people come away happy, which they should, um, this isn't going to cost the town a lot of money. It's a feel good project. It already passed town meeting. Uh, we should be able to, um, oh, it's so fun to use this phrase in a positive sense. We should be able to cookie cutter this. And, and show that people are happy. And if I could say one more thing, the other thing that has come up a lot in the four years I've been looking at it is now, and then people say absurd things to, to cast dispersions on it. One of them that you'll hear is that you can't have two home for disabled citizens within a certain distance of each other, and that you can't have more than a certain number of people. And, um, if you talk to DDS, uh, they're not furtive about it at all. They're quite upstanding. And they'll tell you, they make accept. All the time there are somewhere between 120 and 240,000 people looking for maximally 60,000 beds in the state. And it's probably lower than that. They're doing everything they can to, to make room. I had no idea those numbers. Wow. That's, that's great. Yeah. I mean, that'd be great. If you have other properties, when, when you feel free to identify them, or there's an opportunity to make an offer on them to do something like this, please let the committee know. And I know all of it. I know myself and several others in the community are in support of these group homes, and would be thrilled to do more of them. Um, Mike, the answer to your question, I think, is that the board of selectmen or I'm sorry, select board, um, could decline all of the, uh, all of the proposals and, you know, reissue a different RFP, but it's probably not likely. Yeah. Yeah. So, no, it's not totally locked in, you know, there's, there's no contract signed or anything like that, but it does appear to be practically locked in though, because if it doesn't, if it doesn't proceed, there's an automatic 40 B in the, um, in the measure that passed a town meeting. I mean, Susan's got a point. They could probably get a way out of that too, but I think practically it's locked in. I mean, I think it, it is not necessarily a 40 B because. Yeah. It's a 40 B. Um, but, um, I think, I think that the, uh, the language, I think, was along the lines of, if there's going to be any commercial development or, you know, any development that it needed to include affordable, they didn't have, they don't have to develop it.
Um, Notion, didn't you? Yeah. I was, I was standing next to you at that point. I remember that. So good. Good stuff. Anyway, there's exciting stuff here. One of the groups that came. came in a really nice fellow and a nice lady who were just so committed and wonderful this is work inc in case you want to look them up a great great outfit 70 million dollar budget a year and they they set the standard for other organizations that are aspiring and the ceo there said you know this is just wonderful towns don't come forward to do this they don't do committees like this asking people what do you think and what should we do and that is exactly what wayland is is doing um and my experience in this town is there's often some trouble getting from lip to glass and doing things right and and getting our pencils out and um that's what i want to speak up about i want to make sure this thing really clicks because if it does we can just go do another one right away i've got a backer in mind who's told me i've known him for years and i believe him he wants to do this 10 times before he dies and he will put up the money so that's right we just got to get our ducks in our own i'm sure you all know people like that too it's just they just want to see a good situation that's greased and organized and ready to go there's another effort going on in um local street um where there's a right where local street uh makes the turn and alden comes down and that's a boarding house and and he is working on um
a project there for people with disabilities as well yeah yeah yeah the the trouble with chris for us is always identifying the land um yeah and so to the extent that you started starting to target some stuff it's great and keep us posted when you feel free to talk about it yep they've just asked me not to talk about it if i were free i'd talk about it right now i just want to get my ducks in there i want to make sure i'm not wasting our time understood so great great that's awesome that'd be fantastic so all right anything else when should we meet again um let's leave it open because until we have something moving on 12 hammond or i need on another future project um there's no point in meeting so um unless we want to get together and uh chris what was it in the in the minutes that you want to talk about uh what i just did oh okay yeah all right uh that would be great um uh another question i just wanted to ask you I just don't want to pretend I know a lot about this. I've been studying it for an intermediate amount of time, which means I know what I don't know when I know enough to be dangerous. So I'm going to get out my maps and chat with people like you and Mary and Michael and Jackie and we'll, once I get over a little bit more ignorance, I'll pop up. All right. Well, good. All right. That being said, then I guess I will move that we adjourn. It is 5.54 p.m. I have a second. I'll second. Great. We'll call those Susan. Yep. Chris. Yes. Jackie. Yes. Mary. Yes. And Mike. Yes. Great. All right. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, guys. Have a good night.
Guilty as charged. See? I read them.
All right. So next item on the agenda is the appointment to the Housing Production Plan Committee. Can somebody give me an explanation of what this committee does first? Every five years, we need to do a new housing production plan for what used to be DHCD.
And it is part of the whole 40B thing. And we're coming up on another five years. Last time it was like the Barrett Group or something like that, that did it. And the thing that the... The town really relies on the contractor to do, besides the writing of it and pulling up all of these annoying demographic details, is facilitating the input from the public. And so they have various sessions so that people can weigh in on what they think the priorities for the town should be in terms of... Accommodating different types of housing. So they'll have two or three public meetings type thing? Usually. Usually. And Robert Hamill wants representatives from the various boards. Susan is going to be on the committee from the Housing Authority. Jean Milburn is going to be on it from the Housing Authority. So that's two next door on Concord Road.
Yeah. Mary, would you be interested in participating? Well, Jackie had indicated an interest. So... Jackie, you still up for it? Wow.
I mean, I can give it a shot. Why not? Okay. I had lunch with Jean Milburn about it, and we're fired up. We think this is important. When do these meetings take place? Don't know yet. Oh. First, are you on the committee as well from the selectman standpoint? I actually don't know. I have a question in about... There's a bunch of so-called liaison positions that are up in the air right now. But if I'm not on the committee, I'll come to the public thing. Okay. Well, I was just thinking... We don't need three of us there, but Jackie wants to be there. Right. Yeah. Then I would move that Jackie be the trust's appointee to the Housing Production Plan Committee. Second. Mary seconded it. Roll call vote, Chris. Okay. Aye. Susan? Yes. Mary? Yes. Jackie? Yes. The most important one. Great. Thank you, Jackie. Great. That was the primary purpose of tonight's meeting, so that's good. Matters not reasonably anticipated by the chair. I guess the only thing I wanted to bring up, Mary, can you just make sure that now the minutes are done, that the minutes get to the appropriate time. person in the treasurer's office so bills get paid? Yep. Great, thank you and unfortunately no update on 12 Hammond because the Land Court still has not deregistered the land and it's still an ongoing process that's infuriating. Habitat still remains interested and ready to go but until the lands deregistered we can't record the condo docs and get ready to sell and transfer the deed to them. Continue to push the law firm that we've hired to do this and hopefully have good news at our next meeting. Could you interrupt me if I'm out of order or just going down a bad path? Don't wait till I'm done but is there some reason why I shouldn't bring this up in the concerns and issues section at the next select board meeting and just hear what you have to say? what other people who are lawyers and maybe a lot smarter than me think about it. It sounds like you guys have done good stuff. The money's there, the plans are ready, everything's set, but a bureaucratic debacle that even the people perpetrating it probably want to try to fix. Yeah, it's the land court's state bureaucracy that one of my projects for my company is tied up in as well. If anybody in your network or the Board of Selectors network have any kind of pull at land court, great. So it's your fault, Mike? What's that? It's your fault. My fault, yeah. Yeah, that'll look good in the minutes, okay.
So more than happy for you to bring it up, but it's just the bureaucracy of land court, which is good to see torturous for taxpayers. It's good for the towns as well as private developers. Yeah. They're not just singling me out. Well, contrary to what you might think, you actually have a pretty good reputation from what I've heard, and if they're holding you up, then it must be back to the pilgrims and, you know, since Noah and we just don't ever do anything kind of situation. They move at their own pace. He's too good, they have to slow him down. Could you send me two to five sentences on it and I'll ask, some pit bulls, if there's anything we can do? Sure. Thank you. And please don't do any work, if you've already got the two to five, just cut and paste them from somewhere else. I'm not trying to give you work, but. Yeah, and I'll just give you a brief overview of what it is. Anybody else have anything else to bring up? Yeah, I just want to report that the audit is in process, and so I've gotten a request for some information, and I had to pull in Mary. Oh. On some of it, but they haven't needed very much from us, so. And that's going through Brian Keveny. Great, thank you. Then I had an issue I wanted to bring up. Great. I would like to have an informal conversation with somebody on this committee to propose some ideas that may be bad, and they can get killed in the informal conversation, or I can be told they're good, and then I'll bring them up in front of the whole committee. So my first question is, how many people are on, what is a quorum on this committee? Four.
Great, thank you. Four is a quorum, and we have five members right now. We have one open spot, or two? I forget. Well, the real estate person, and then we don't have somebody who replaced Brian O'Hurley. Well, what about this Nick? He's supposed to be the planning board person. He's never shown up. Munkinbeck, is that right? Something like that. Well, Chris, to answer your question, four is a quorum. We have five members. I think the charter allows for up to seven members. Great. So if I have coffee with one or two of you, I'm not breaking OML. Correct. Thank you. And I also just want to celebrate you guys for showing up. It sounds like. People aren't showing up, and you guys did. That's great. This group of four has been very dedicated. Hard to get things done in today's world, but it's been great. So it's good to have the Board of Selectmen representative again, too. Well, thank you. I share your dismay. It's hard to move a pace. Yeah. And we're focused on 12 Hammond and trying to get that going and done. But at the end of the day, that's not going to use a ton of money. So, you know, we still have quite a bit of money to put to use. It's just, we haven't been able to find any good uses for it. That makes sense. At the community preservation meeting the other night. Oh my God. I'm blanking. Dave Watson. You know anything about what he's doing? Mike? It's Watkins. Watkins. Thank you. He did call me and he might be bringing us something. Something down the road. The key with his project is he's got to be able to show us that he needs our money to make the project viable, not just to make it more profitable. But I am excited about that. It's a good sized project and it would have a decent sized affordable component. And I personally told him that if it could show, demonstrate that it, you know, the monies are needed to make the project work, we'd be, the committee would definitely consider it. And this is the project that came up at town meeting. Um, um, this is, he owns an office building next to Longfellow tennis and fitness club. Yeah. Route 20. Um, that, that was, that came up at town meeting that was approved, but without, uh, select boards support. Okay. Um, he's applied for. And maybe even have received a grant for the sewer extension, which would be a big piece of, of getting this done. Um, grant from home. I don't know. It's a good question from the state, somebody at the state level. Um, I don't know exactly which organization, so, but that would be, he's told me it'd be about a hundred unit projects. So be a nice size project and there could be a decent size, uh, affordable component to it. So that would be great. And then obviously if two, one, two constituent moves ahead, um, we've expressed, um, interest in contributing to that, to make, you know, the group home viable. Um, that's, that's the project. I want to chat with some of you informally and see if I got my facts straight.
Okay. Whatever we want them to do the maximum number of the beds. Um, yeah, I mean, you can bring it up now, Chris. I mean, there's somewhat familiar with it. Have you read the RFP or heard of the RFP for it? I've not read it. No. Uh, so there is a, there is an RFP out for, um, buying or more likely leasing, uh, the property and then running it as a group home for cognitively challenged, uh, people. Um, one of the things. Thorny or issues about it is how many, um, disabled residents notice. I did not just say total residents, disabled residents. It would have, um, and the one argument is just max it out because we need the beds. And another argument is, uh, do something. Um, that's a little under the max that makes it very palatable to the butters. Because as soon as we show that the butters are happy, we're going to be able to do this again at another property we have our eyes on. So that's the thing I wanted to listen to you guys about. Uh, and then I have, um, spent about four years meeting and with, and going to places that might actually execute the lease who run facilities for people with cognitive challenges. And, uh, once it's clear, and I think it is about to be clear, uh, that one of the respondents is probably, uh, best for the town and best for the residents. I was hoping this group would get behind it. The bad news. And what I just said is I'm making a little joke here. I don't see it costing a lot of money. So I appreciate your point. You've got money and you're wisely looking for places to put it. Uh, I don't think it's that kind of thing. I think it's more of a, uh, organization and own thing. I have got over 20 volunteers who want to help build a greenhouse, help get art in there, help do cooking classes there, help bring in people who aren't disabled. As you probably already know, these facilities can change a whole town. Even if, you know, if you're not going to be able to do it, you're not going to be able to do it. You're not going to be able to do it. You're not going to be able to do it. You're not going to be able to do it. You're not disabled and nobody in your family is. And you feel like you have nothing to do with the issue. It's still, I've seen this over and over again in more than one town. So it could get quite exciting. Susan, I'm sorry. RFP responses are due in November. Sorry. Jean Milburn is the good person to talk to. She was on the 212 committee. And, um, dissented report. And she was the. Sort of outlier in wanting more, um, more higher numbers. Yeah. Jean and I are, I'm going to claim her, uh, good friends. Her husband's appeared at the Wayland festival, uh, several times. Uh, she and I text and email a lot and she jokes that I had a higher attendance rate at the 212 committee meetings than some of the members did. And I'm in her camp. She wrote a beautiful section in the final report called, uh, minority view. I think it was. And it was, it was well done. Well, I, I think we tend to go with her minority. Yeah. Good. Yeah. But the, the density issue is largely resolved, right? There's nothing we can do about it at this point. Cause I was also in her camp of, we should do more there. That's a big piece of land. It's good soils. Like we can do more there and, um, but that, that went nowhere. Um. And as I understand it now, it's largely that's water under the bridge and it's not, can't be changed. Is that not accurate? Uh, I should be careful and say, I don't know. What I do know is, uh, over the four years I've been looking at this, I've come across other pieces of property with owners who'd love to do a similar thing. They just want to see it work. And I'd like to hop on that. That's what I want to get my fat. And one of them is actually nearby. Uh, and then ironically, another one. Um, uh, used to a, but a fellow who used to live here in Wayland and is now a senior executive of DDS. So a lot of dots are aligning here. If we, if we do this right, and it's a win, win, win, people come away happy, which they should, um, this isn't going to cost the town a lot of money. It's a feel good project. It already passed town meeting. Uh, we should be able to, um, oh, it's so fun to use this phrase in a positive sense. We should be able to cookie cutter this. And, and show that people are happy. And if I could say one more thing, the other thing that has come up a lot in the four years I've been looking at it is now, and then people say absurd things to, to cast dispersions on it. One of them that you'll hear is that you can't have two home for disabled citizens within a certain distance of each other, and that you can't have more than a certain number of people. And, um, if you talk to DDS, uh, they're not furtive about it at all. They're quite upstanding. And they'll tell you, they make accept. All the time there are somewhere between 120 and 240,000 people looking for maximally 60,000 beds in the state. And it's probably lower than that. They're doing everything they can to, to make room. I had no idea those numbers. Wow. That's, that's great. Yeah. I mean, that'd be great. If you have other properties, when, when you feel free to identify them, or there's an opportunity to make an offer on them to do something like this, please let the committee know. And I know all of it. I know myself and several others in the community are in support of these group homes, and would be thrilled to do more of them. Um, Mike, the answer to your question, I think, is that the board of selectmen or I'm sorry, select board, um, could decline all of the, uh, all of the proposals and, you know, reissue a different RFP, but it's probably not likely. Yeah. Yeah. So, no, it's not totally locked in, you know, there's, there's no contract signed or anything like that, but it does appear to be practically locked in though, because if it doesn't, if it doesn't proceed, there's an automatic 40 B in the, um, in the measure that passed a town meeting. I mean, Susan's got a point. They could probably get a way out of that too, but I think practically it's locked in. I mean, I think it, it is not necessarily a 40 B because. Yeah. It's a 40 B. Um, but, um, I think, I think that the, uh, the language, I think, was along the lines of, if there's going to be any commercial development or, you know, any development that it needed to include affordable, they didn't have, they don't have to develop it.
Um, Notion, didn't you? Yeah. I was, I was standing next to you at that point. I remember that. So good. Good stuff. Anyway, there's exciting stuff here. One of the groups that came. came in a really nice fellow and a nice lady who were just so committed and wonderful this is work inc in case you want to look them up a great great outfit 70 million dollar budget a year and they they set the standard for other organizations that are aspiring and the ceo there said you know this is just wonderful towns don't come forward to do this they don't do committees like this asking people what do you think and what should we do and that is exactly what wayland is is doing um and my experience in this town is there's often some trouble getting from lip to glass and doing things right and and getting our pencils out and um that's what i want to speak up about i want to make sure this thing really clicks because if it does we can just go do another one right away i've got a backer in mind who's told me i've known him for years and i believe him he wants to do this 10 times before he dies and he will put up the money so that's right we just got to get our ducks in our own i'm sure you all know people like that too it's just they just want to see a good situation that's greased and organized and ready to go there's another effort going on in um local street um where there's a right where local street uh makes the turn and alden comes down and that's a boarding house and and he is working on um
a project there for people with disabilities as well yeah yeah yeah the the trouble with chris for us is always identifying the land um yeah and so to the extent that you started starting to target some stuff it's great and keep us posted when you feel free to talk about it yep they've just asked me not to talk about it if i were free i'd talk about it right now i just want to get my ducks in there i want to make sure i'm not wasting our time understood so great great that's awesome that'd be fantastic so all right anything else when should we meet again um let's leave it open because until we have something moving on 12 hammond or i need on another future project um there's no point in meeting so um unless we want to get together and uh chris what was it in the in the minutes that you want to talk about uh what i just did oh okay yeah all right uh that would be great um uh another question i just wanted to ask you I just don't want to pretend I know a lot about this. I've been studying it for an intermediate amount of time, which means I know what I don't know when I know enough to be dangerous. So I'm going to get out my maps and chat with people like you and Mary and Michael and Jackie and we'll, once I get over a little bit more ignorance, I'll pop up. All right. Well, good. All right. That being said, then I guess I will move that we adjourn. It is 5.54 p.m. I have a second. I'll second. Great. We'll call those Susan. Yep. Chris. Yes. Jackie. Yes. Mary. Yes. And Mike. Yes. Great. All right. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, guys. Have a good night.