renovations at seven o five roger hill dave bertie and representatives from national grid here to discuss some of the updates of what's happened in the protocol from the from the power outage that we had at seven thirty rep state representative jay barrows will be here is here to discuss the amendment to the regional wastewater treatment at eight o'clock we're going to have a brief discussion on the housing production plan initiated through the planning board at eight ten we're going to have a labor council advisory opinion opinion regarding collective bargaining at eight twenty we're going to be presented with the foxboro fire department's overtime study that's been initiated early this year last year and i thirty we're going to go into executive session to discuss negotiations with the union and nonunion personnel and also a second item deployment of security personnel and they will come back into open session just to close so mark you want to lead us in the just quickly before we go into citizens input what i'd like to do is just give a couple updates on things that have happened over the last couple weeks not for discussion but just to kind of keep every up everybody up to date and then also just to give you a little  preview of some of the stuff that we have coming up in the in the following meetings first of all thank you for who ever came to participate in the memorial day ceremony in the memorial day presentation on monday i thought it was  think we had a good showing as a beautiful day and i'm open every year just gets stronger and stronger we have founders a coming up which is not this saturday but the following saturday and there's a lot of people working hard on that  one of the initiatives that we recently started will start was having open office hours for selectman and we're doing that because trying to squeeze things in on citizens important front of microphone and camera  timing may be off and people may feel uncomfortable so as the town hall is it's not overly glamorous with space so we have found a couple slots that we will have office open office hours we're going to have at least one selectman but no more t selectman and it's for the public to command in two and two hour increments any time just to commence stay a minute stay five minutes to an hour just to bring up any issues or questions that you may have i think jenny did a nice job coordinating a couple hours  here at town hall so they're going to be the first tuesday of every month the morning session is going to be ten o'clock to noon time in the evening session is five to six thirty so it may end right before a select means meeting we have every  other every other week on a select means meeting and the reason that we have a needling session on tuesday is because town hall was open tuesday night so if there's an issue or a question we can bring iran to some of the different apartments that might be there after hours  some of the things that we're we have coming up next next session we're going to be talking about a lot of the concerts and sporting events to grant those permits the country music festival we will be doing the top managers annual review the next meeting on the twelfth and on june twenty sixth we will be talking about the following year's goals and objectives and then next next week we have a special meeting we're going to be reviewing all the packets in an interview in the town council so obviously that was that was about anyone from citizens input and if you could just just introduce yourself for the record good evening mr chairman as chairman of the conservation commission it gives me great pleasure to invite you and the general public that's the entire board to the dedication of that with your mohawk and jr memorial on the sale a property on main street the dedication will be held this coming saturday june second at area's located across the street from snow supply in the sunoco gas station for those who don't know exactly where it is i'd also like to take this opportunity to thank betty extra and members of the foxboro garden club for planting and maintaining the garden also many thanks to pete sobel and the highway department for rebuilding the fence around the parking area and looking forward to seeing you there saturday on main street thank you very much  worked very hard on that over the last year and nobody else from citizens input represents columbia gas and this is the final stage of the rebate process but because we put in all of the energy management systems within that high school that control the temperatures throughout the building give us the ability to really kind of maintain it but not have to over exert the gas pressures on to the building itself that program allowed us to apply for some some rebates and as part of that program and as part of school committees charter to basically try to pull this building together the way it is columbia gas is here to represent and give us a check for one hundred thousand dollars to go back into the general fund and this is part of what we've been talking about we had originally said we have about one hundred thirty two we received thirty two previously from national grid this is the balance of the hundred thousand dollars and when we finally achieved it where there my role tonight is to remind everybody that we took it as a charge upon ourselves and a promise to the community that the school committee would move forward with the idea of making the most energy efficient possible plan my role tonight is to shine all the light on the building committee if it had not banned for their extra diligence in doing all the research and making us aware of these kinds of programs and rebates we never would have been able to do it so the accolades don't go to the school committee the accolades go to all of the hard work and the many many hours the building committee has spent on our behalf and the children and the taxpayers  like to speak quickly but the other side of it is that they work very closely with us when we go into these programs and they actually give us of the ideas of everywhere we can go looking for and they present the different things so i think oh paul you know  that we're having them here today is as many of you know we went through a couple days is a having no electricity during storm events and we didn't want that to go forgotten and this meeting is not to go back and see what people didn't do or what their responsibilities fell short or if they're if they even did it as national grid almost with marcy read the discussions early on to come back to the board of selectmen once they felt like they had their arms around the next four or five year plan explain to the town what the protocol is for cutting trees is it skydive ground is it ten feet away is it private is it you know whose responsibility is it the towns and national grids so  recently met with david bertie shared with me some of the plans and all the stuff the national grid has been doing really from the day after the storm up till now so about it would be a good opportunity to if you just wanted to give us an update and more more so so the time could understand what's going on  and if roger if you want to come up with someone from that couple people from national grid i'd just like to run through that packet that i gave you guys real quick as quick as i can first i'd like to talk about things that have been going on since february in february national grid came in and started occasion program what that means is they took a circuit in town drove the circuit walked the circuit and identified any trees for removal that were of any kind of potential hazard to the electric lines so they took the cracow point circuit and they took the feeder lines on the truck a point circle which is an eight mile circuit that starts in grand film heads down west  what they did is they sent one there were in february early february its name was will and who walked the circuit circum a month identified what he thought was the has it hazardous trees whether they were public or private he kept in touch with me pretty much on a daily basis if he needed to know whether they were public trees or private trees that help with that when all was said and done i took a ride out when he was done surveying that circuit with him and looked at every tree that he had mocked i got to put my input in that sign and also at that time i was able to add to the list any of the trees that i had on my own list as takedowns for the town when that was all said and done on that eight mile circuit we had approximately sixty four public trees so it would be removed also in that circuit there was numerous private trees that were permitted to be removed so that was one program that was started in february and on april second that has a tree crew came into town and started doing those removals and they're still in town now and it's slated to be finished with this program next week but the middle  worked well together and if i had another issue in the meantime i was able to put it on their list and they would always take care of it after that at the same time that was going on dave going to you had one of his and come in and do an a circuit is a three four three two w one three four three two w two which basically covers the east side of town the yellow and the pink circuit on that big map what he did he came in in february and he addressed just a mediate has it hang it's broken limbs dead limbs over the wires few trees here and there and we went through basically the same process  he kept in touch with me i wrote the circuits when he was done and we looked at everything it had on these lists and i was able to give him my input and he also took some of my information and helped me out with trees on that side of town that i needed to have done that was done prior to april second it was completed in march that that f right now as we speak we're also having a full tram of the three for three to w one which i believe that w one circuit is completely done and we're in the duck three four three two w two circuit break now and they're pretty much getting a handle on that and those guys in the crews and dave keep me up updated on everything that's going on either you know a weekly basis most of the time it's it's every day or every other day i get calls so i know where they are i know what's happening so that they're doing a great job on on those circuits they're open him up bigger than they've been opened up go after that crock upon circuit the three four two four five which is green circuit which covers basically self oxbow so that's the next phase of the programs that they're going to be doing and that's a total trim even though they did the hazardous tree program down through the middle of that on the feeder lines they're going to do a full trim on that circuit which covers mills three prospects retells read on that street in that area there so if you look at this map b the time they leave town in two thousand and twelve you've got approximately fifty percent of the town either trim or a lot of trees removed on it for half a century and if you look down here on in two thousand thirteen they're going to do the three for two to four circuit which is an orange and and they're going to do the three for two for w one and then in two thousand and fourteen they're going to move up to that blue circuit which is three four we go ahead here i've been working with dave for a lot of years and we've got a really good working relationship dave and i and if he needs something when he comes into town i'm willing to break up my guys if he has a tree as a takedown can't clean up the wood or something like that then i go out and i help him with that if the same hand if i have a problem with  tree that i can't handle i can go see him i can call him and we work together and get the stuff done the same thing with it has a history program where we're like right now when they're in town you know we're working close you know in the same thing when when dave's in town so it's a win win situation here you know it's a win situation with the town of oxbow right now because we're getting a lot of the town tramp and we're getting a lot of the hazardous trees that i can't handle because april second there is anyone i've been tracking the crews that are coming into town is anywhere from three to eight tree crews in this town daily basis right now so we're getting a lot of coverage we're getting a lot of work done quick and you know and it's a good thing and yeah that's like saying the other thing is that on some of the large trees that they had to take on the big circle many of those were down that are under the why it's all right on that side of the street if there's a tree across the street that's got wrought on a dog you know that's got a cavity in it that potentially can fall across the street they'll do that too you know so it's not just right there it's it's the whole street both sides of the road anything that need to be handled at the time lastly i might say that they're in all this process i think david and getting three calls and i get three calls from public the folks that are out there to work with us to get to help us trim those out because it's really significant because they're beautiful trees and i know all of these these folks are being very good about the way they can clear if it's  town reliable power here i just want to say thank you to the same brain i found that this time around the public is really response of these programs where this town sometimes has a hard time with the trees but they really because the only trees that basically the tree impact the palm to take down is something that's dead you know when it dies it's gone in this really gone and that's when we get to it but this because it's it's it's long needed for a long time and also when we go around the board quick if you have any questions not quick but if you have any questions and then we'll see if there's anyone in the audience and the big thing is this union lope which i'm assuming once we take care of the feeders this could stop any potential problems happening to  of millions of dollars are being looked at right now and we know how important it is to all the communities and we're also shifting load off of it and strengthening more feeders so we have a good plan i mean this this sequester about the union loop piece you mentioned when you did the survey the aerial survey that you found different hotspots so that is related to the actually structures themselves yes this is not nothing to do with  departments and in the national grid just so that people at home know this this isn't just a pretty presentation that you guys did for the cameras they kind of gave you a surprise visit three months ago to see how you were doing on it and you had a lot of the stuff all over the desk and you were showing me the the different loops in the different things over the five years so this this is an oh you guys been working hard in bob i was given your e mail out your cell phone out like it was candy when people would call out because this town  it sounds like you guys have your hands around the specifications on what and where and how you cut but if and when this happens again the biggest issue a lot of people understood it was going to be it without electricity and they could deal with that but they couldn't deal with the fact of not knowing and no one returning calls in a ridiculous website that wasn't giving information and you know the whole that was what frustrated so if and when this ever happens again are we still going to have the same protocol program we're starting out is a fast track assessment and this might help with that how long storm going to be is going to be multi day which is kind of what we said in the very for the first one and it was not a comfortable thing to say because multi day could be anything but i think our intent was really three four five but the eight the eight hour assessment is going to give us and they're going to be running it through some kind of an algorithm program and take a lot of information liaison to work with me so i can communicate out to the field you're liaison's to communicate to roger field so we have a connection now inside we did before but it's a real formalized connection we have we have we we've got a lot of people who are responsible and accountable that names are put on the on certain spots and we have we didn't end process review of the entire mercer sponsored program we did not just ourselves we did it with other utilities in the area and i was i've been talking to people at the state housing housing and they're still talking about getting generators and it's a little closer than we were before so that's positive in and i think chief hatfield we're going to be asking you to come back with your group on the stuff that you learned from the emergency preparedness you know the cots and blankets and all that stuff so i think we all learned a little bit and i'm glad you guys came back is there anyone in the audience that had any questions as to sieg what i'm saying is when are we going to be caught off of the work that was done for many years that we had these problems fox borrow itself had much more problems than almost any other so my question is  on this and insist that national grid catch up this year you know we're going to have more storms it's new england hurricane season starts june first so i'm hearing like fifteen or twenty percent of the town is going to be done that's totally unacceptable national grid should be deployed whatever resources are necessary so that our town is completely done it hasn't been done as i'm in done in years when they're talking about this five year cycle fox borrows itself was not done in a long time the trees in foxborough have not been done which is why we lost power people lost it for between twelve and fourteen days so when they're talking about this thing being fixed by two thousand and fifty and they're all saying that's great we're missing the point that they didn't do their job if they were not a monopoly they would have been fired when you don't do your job and then you come in and you say hey i didn't do my job for a long time but i did ten percent of my job and people start slapping on the back you know you're dealing with a monopoly it's important that we get foxborough done before october when we have another snowstorm like that or november you know work it's not like foxbor doesn't have tropical storms we may not have hurricanes every year we get wind storms every year we get northeasterners every year so the fact that this that they're talking about two thousand and fifteen just to get foxborough done i really don't think that's acceptable and i really strongly urge the board of selectmen and the town manager to stay on top of this stay with the d p you i can guarantee you i'll stay with the d p i can guarantee you that because i don't think they did their job they're still talking about private property each eastman that national grid has inherited from massachusetts electric and all the other utility companies that have been here before gives them the right to pass and repass to maintain their grid so if they go to someone's house that has a wire that important to other people not just to themselves but to other people and they don't want to treat tributes to bad they have the right under their reason to go on there and trim those trees so they should be wasting a lot of time with that that's something they have a right and an obligation to do but i would strongly urge you to stay on top of this because you know if we have a bad storm and two months from now and you're not in the fifty percent that's done i can guarantee you that people in town who are in the other eighty five percent are going to be pretty unhappy just like they were last year thank you and i will use the opportunity and i did say them i said i was going to go back to the storm and i'm not going to do that but moving forward and mr siegel linda and i went to the d p you hearings we testified mrs siegel is there so he has been following this and i think that the questions have merit if you can just kind of why we have you at the table so we're not asking you back six months  after another storm how do you address the question of this is a from two thousand and twelve to two thousand and fifteen it's three more years before you get to the south wrentham substation feeder where if a storm comes in june you wrentham station done that's for maintenance but are all these stations ready if the storm hit aside from the maintenance but is someone gone through all these and make sure that they're up to speed now during and understanding is going to be a cycle for trimming later think this is my first meeting since we elected elected so please and also would like to say thank you to leo potter who spent the last five and a half years with the sewer regional sewer study group who's recently retired and what you get was stepped in in his place and roger comes with a tremendous amount of knowledge and experience and we welcome him but but do certainly want to to thank you so tonight i just want to bring you up to up to speed with where we're at with the regional agreement in may of two thousand and ten the governor signed legislation creating the agreement in the sewer district and we have been working since nobody's signed the dotted line yet we don't anticipate that happening for another couple of months but everybody's been working diligently creating an operating agreement  a sense of when we hand this off to the regional district that will have representatives from each of the three towns that there's some history there's some sense of what the committee head in had intended because quite frankly i don't think any of us now in that capacity will serve in that region district and one of the things that we had discussed was the ability for the three communities to set their own standards in connection fees if you will both a lot of additional infrastructure that doesn't exist now mansfield's go to more of a mature system and will be doing more increase flow for certain areas of town without necessarily new connection piece but fox now we've just prepared a draft that will go to the house of representatives for passage and then on to the senate and then on to the to the governor so dave i don't know if you want to add a couple of key communities the option committing anything that i give you the option to use which means connection fees to help you cover costs for the wastewater treatment plant expansion  going forward there's a lot of case law that's out there i'm not a lawyer i'm an engineer reviewing that case law and talk to people who have been through this have been challenging through it sometimes so the recommendation typically has been if you actually get special legislation that would allow you to specifically news connection fees for this purpose  will also still always still have the as it says in the legislation the ability to use other assessments betterments or privilege means all of you may choose to do your cost recovery you know roger hill now in the water that since it's so important to the district moving forward that this would be the best thing to do where we already have the special legislation in place to get this is been a project that i guess i started david i think was the second person i met when i got elected in begin serving in two thousand and seven to talk about the needs of the three communities and the fact that  also rely on sewer in areas of town that are not can be successfully sept you know so our industry our opportunity growth are commercial based which i think everybody talks about be interesting to see what is the outcome of the master plan study and i know mark you talked about years ago what's it going to do downtown if we're able to add capacity you know what's the value of downtown what's it going to look like so we get that back from the planning board i think that will give us some clear direction as to what we can do i know the town of mansoul field is anxious to get started they recently completed a five year plan with dr mullen from the university of massachusetts on our commercial conversion if you will from warehouse to people and things in our indian that sort of stuff and we've seen some growth in the industrial park which benefits all of us is it is a region you know we've got some of the lowest unemployment rates in the state and new england with we seem to have survived our housing and schools are doing really well we made some public investments as well as some private so things are happening so this is an important piece as we move forward in the next twenty twenty five years davis been working very hard rogers got the information on to face this initially i think we were trying to bite off more than we could chew but we've rolled it back completed the acquisition of some land for recharging norton and we're working on another piece so we'll have that done as well so with that start that's our story we're looking tonight if possible for the board support i know this is a little out of your bailiwick we have absorbed commission waters or commission however i think it's important as i file legislation that i can hand three letters to the clerk and say i have the support of the leadership of the community as well as the water and  you you seem to always get to the dance and foxboro and similar things and credible amount of work and it's it's frustrating we just can't get there in this to put up piece of legislation of the name and i know there's a ton of work and i appreciate that you've done great work on this depended on sewer so it's you know that the rates aside this getting sore in our arms around it is critical to what the planning boards don't which is in fact what the town is giving them and put on that piece of it well all of that repeatedly in the previous programs that we try to when we were going on the residential areas we didn't have information on the planning board i think is doing is vitally important to us for a picture of what we need the you letting us know when hearings take place well we're hoping that we get enough juice after being in there for three terms that i have to go through the hearing for us that we can do now but i'd be more than happy to every command and again i hope that the committee can communities well if there are any questions this was a little tricky getting there the person piece signed actually of the three towns and then this is just simply no amendment that your attorney public duran's just did working with both me and children foxborough and then the folks in norton have a different counsel they he signed off on it and was comfortable with it  and writers background and easton along with kevin's and but yet easton has been at the table they would be treated as a customer through me and feel so we've been carrying one hundred one hundred twenty five thousand gallons a day to sewer that five corners one of six one twenty three and bring it up tax incentives for very simple structure projects under secretary bill leckie so now we have kind of one stop shopping which you know we're hoping is going to be more effective but we have s r s f s r after monies  that we potentially could qualify it zero percent but we need to get this done with the window as you know close and right i mean we keep saying that and here we are year five but seriously the cape  poised to introduce a regional system and that means some of the criteria of this legislation was passed three years ago so we really need to get done soon we're hoping for the plenty will report and get some sense either going to their meeting to hear something or them coming to our meeting to hear something in what is a lot of acronyms here but what they've been working on is you've all heard the term forty b when somebody wants to come in to do a housing development in the town as a whole doesn't have ten percent affordable allocated for that housing ten percent of the park housing stock if a developer wants to come in there they can take any say we want to put any man of the units on in there in the town really doesn't have a voice on it because it's a state regulation that they passed the chapter forty what the playing board is working on is a program where we look at the town as a whole come up with plans on our all of where housing should be what the numbers are so we can kind of put our arms around it so if and when a developer comes to foxborough and tries to do a forty b we go into this program it gives the zoning board some teeth to say it doesn't fit in our master plan so i'm going to read something real quick this is what i us from what i kind of explains what it is the housing production plan is a communities proactive strategy for planning and developing affordable housing by creating a strategy to enable it to meet its affordable housing needs in a consistent with the forty b the h p p regulations became effective in two thousand and eight when the deep was department of housing development promulgated a comprehensive permit for low and moderate housing the  regulation is contained in state law if a community has a d h plan approved by h p p and is granted certification of compliance with the plan a decision by the zoning board of appeals relative relative to a comprehensive forty b has basically hasn t so the question is do we want the planning board to come in front of us after they've had these discussions and presentation by the state group i thought it would be better if we went to their meeting and that way we can listen and ask questions and it gives pauline a night off and gives us a little more synergy so the meeting is scheduled for june twenty eighth at seven at the  ago actually had time leading and dick i've got a complimentary copy for you with your name on it to could raise the question on the town meeting concerning collective bargaining and how the process works in a sort of thing so  had committed to having labor council to take a look at how the town manager acts compares to the general by law and basically what this is and i just read one paragraph that sort of really has the heart of it the by law there's a general by law provides for the board of selectmen to appoint a five minute management bargaining team each member meeting certain criteria although h r manager would have the qualifications of fill more than one of the positions the bylaws not express the required that the top manager be on the team in sharp contrast the time manager act gives the time manager  negotiations unquote there are no requirement that the time manager include any specific positions or individuals on his bargaining team losing him to the decision whether and to what extent to consult with labor coun or all of the above reasons it is my opinion that the time manager act of two thousand and four modifies if not effectively repeals the bylaw collect the bargaining provision this means that the time manager of the guidance of the board of selectmen has the authority to determine his management team if any for the negotiation of collective bargaining agreements and it's signed by leo pelican or labor council it's a lot more extensive than that i just summarize the your opinion two notes one is that there are many many instances where the by law has now been superseded by the manager act a lot of the authority that previously under the bylaws accrued to either autonomy the straight or and predominately the said at some point the by law really needs to be rewritten because there are many many places where the bylaw conflicts with the manager act and it continues to provide great confusion fact i was just deposed in a  terminations case involving a past employee in boston week before last and the attorney was quoting from the bio on and i returned he had to remind him that's no longer operative that provision has been replaced by the town manager act and again it just highlighted the fact that we've really got to take that by law or an amended because it's just providing a lot of confusion the  personal my law committee for its part has expressed a great confidence in a desire to see that work done and it's just we just haven't gotten around to it because it's a bit it's a large body of work the while are very very large and it's going to take a lot of work to make the two documents consistent i don't want to just talk college town council labor council visit would be a big big bill so it's something i'm hoping a charcoal director can do once she gets here and i'm hoping that will be later this summer so that's one thing now is a practical matter what i wanted to tell the board is that oh yeah i had a couple questions for sure there's a lot of he's got them so it kind of this does tails a little bit into what we had on the before when you say amend the by law there is also an opportunity to amend the top managers strong time energy zach so i think we had talked about at the last mean of putting in effort so we understand if the attorneys are in front of the judge and i was just talking with kevin about this and i've gone to the m m a website to see if i could find any type of you know resources as a starting point you know whether it was speakers bureau and i didn't find anything there so  i think maybe we'll talk some more and try and figure out you know the next step in terms of how to get someone to come in and speak with us on the topic and you know do do i think a good presentation that would help us see like highlight some of those things for us because i think that again when you look at the government study that was done that led up to this change in two thousand and four there was a lot of good rationale given for why this approach was taken so you know i think it would be important for us to have all that background also i'm actually headed tomorrow afternoon to the spring time managers meeting so while i'm there i'm going to find out do we still have the speaker bureau who's on it who's the chair and if i get that information we do so have a relay that to the rain and then she can make the arrangements you know top that off but you know the thing i want to tell the borders as a practical matter and i think leo makes that point in his memo the provisions in the old by law were to have a team basically that conductor to go shay sions as a practical matter that's exactly what i do know i don't do that because of the  do it because that's the the way i've been doing it for a long time so usually the folks that i have on it the chief financial officer the department head for the contractor doing so that would be either the library director and he would have a director the fire chief or the police chief and then i sometimes try to have a nonaligned person you know a department head has got nothing to do with it that's a little more difficult because they're also busy and if we have a management in turn to have the management in turn on which is invaluable because he or she is learning and at the same time they're doing a lot of research for its comparative stuff which is you know super good so we have a bargaining team which very closely mirrors what the old by law had anyways and i thought she had in parameter setting session with me before i start bargaining and i say ok what are you thinking about for next year for color if any what do you think about of areas that we want to go after i bring the department head and sometimes we do that jointly with the school committee and you folks know what i'm talking about because you've been in those meetings jenny i don't think you have yet but there will be coming up soon and we have a discussion about what it is you've got in mind and i take from that sometimes you vote sometimes you don't but i always get a consensus of what you're thinking that gives me a program or you know range limits to what it is i'm going to go shape and then i come back and brief you know occasionally if it's a lengthy one less occasionally if it's a quick one and then finally i bring you back the agreement and say ok this is within your parameter it's outside of it here and in the board has to formally vote to accept it or not and the union has to ratify so a lot of the elements that were in the old by law were pretty much doing  although it's not a requirement that we do it that way and so that's something you should be aware of because this manager's style is to do it that way but you could have a new town manager in years h my short experiences on the eleventh hour and we have a town manager department head a union wrap and telling us something there's no insight from the selectmen of who's stretching it a who's so i think my preference would be to have a selectman in there say nothing but listen and observe as you're in turn would you give us some insight should things go wrong at the eleventh hour and i and we don't just decide tonight but that that was what was behind my question sure of that because it's kind of similar to liquor hearings where you're not supposed to hear any evidence before you vote so i want to be sure that there wasn't a problem legally used to do everything was not the right way i don't know we don't know not to speak at all or answer any questions just observe and can take it and then once you have the answer to that question if it's no it's not there's nothing more to time but if it's yes then i think the next step is we need to have a discussion about that in executive session and between the six of us talk the pros and cons of that i'm not sure if that qualifies for executive session if we're talking about yes a strategy or discussion of bargaining it absolutely qualifies yeah oh yeah obviously didn't well you know i just have copies made and put in your pockets again  didn't exist anymore that there's nothing that i read in this and i'm not an attorney i don't hold long lectures on the issue is however town meeting made a decision that we wanted  people to do the negotiations we now have the town manager right which is taken to say he alone makes the decision and i don't believe that was the intent of town meeting i think the issue  much as all of us have discussed now for two years the bylaws and the t m j don't agree in many areas and this is still one of you know if the town meeting after tomorrow for had an  article in which said we're going to liberate the wage personnel board because then i don't understand the town meeting action as it is a town meeting form of government but we are a town meeting form of government that by law was passed by the people in general terms and the thing is i think both exist and we need to clear this up as far as the bylaws just on this item but several other items so if you go through the process i think section six of the t d m a is probably the most important and he quotes it here that there's nothing in the t n a act which says that the bylaw is out it still exists so the question is does it still exist or is the attorney hedging when when he uses that terminology modifies and or appeals that's my basic months yeah yeah i know you come to just about every means i don't know if you were here the last meeting or the meeting before i think we're at a crossroads now because the town meeting in town strong town manager starting to get tested and questioned we don't have the answer because it's very complex and it makes it even worse that there's two different things sometimes at odds with each other so what we asked is lorraine is spearheading it she's going to reach out to the m m a put together an entity that either comes to us at a public meeting and educates us and it's going to be open so those questions can be asked when what i had said to kevin was he because this is a little bit of a conflict of interest nothing to do with kevin but i don't want kevin's interpretation of the strong town advantages act i want an outsider that studies this and presents it for a living to come in and tell us this is what you have a this is what you don't have and then we're going to be in a position we're there understood what we bought into some years ago and we implemented it well we didn't we want to repeal it we want to tweak it all we want to leave it alone but there's going to be a we probably have four other items that you could ask in the same issue we don't know right now so if you can just be a little patient i got to say some of the stuff you are bringing up like the next item the fire department over time study we are hearing it we are acting on it but it's a little slow so just bear with us from the lorraine puts that together and then i show it will be an open meeting at the next i want to start you have a presentation for the fire department over time analysis i think really the way out of the board has been given a very extensive memo on the subject what i'm going to try to do is briefly summarize the contents both for the board just as a reminder because you've got this back in april and i know it's probably not as fresh in your mind as you'd like it to be and secondly the public hasn't seen this it always so this would be kind of a quick review of what's in here there's nine hundred slides in and i was going to go through them fairly quickly so please stop me along the way if you want anything explained the real point of the meeting tonight is to get into the recommendations section and i had copies of that made there's two things i'm going to refer t matrix may have changed a little bit because we continually develop the numbers i don't think the numbers are different but i think the presentation is a little difference only give you those and there's some copies  a an enormous body of work this is consumed literally i would say a couple hundred hours of analysis and time but it has been very revealing in terms of what the conclusions are and some  opportunities to do some trimming of overtime i think present themselves so we talk about two types of overtime discretionary and unplanned discretionary is over time that we specifically decide we're going to pursue for some reason unplanned there's over time that's unpredictable events and it's really related to staffing some of vent occurs and we have to replace people or augment the staff to handle that unpredictable that discretionary over time covers fire training emergency service those paramedics and medic basic public education that's where the chief and his staff does simon schools and other places meetings that's his command staff that he'll bring together from time to time to have meetings on inspections that they do for a variety of reasons hazardous materials drills those are all the categories of over time that we specifically decide we're going to  undertake the three year average that you see on this chart we actually took the last three years in terms of what did we actually spend and what we found in the few look at all the categories in blue the ones that i just mentioned the three year average of over time usage in that up comprising about ten percent or in other words about forty thousand thirty five thousand dollars of the i'm sorry forty thousand dollars of the three year average expenses all those categories combined so all those categories combined the messages that's not a big part of the overtime usage and so trimming in those categories while it may be appropriate we've actually done some of that in fiscal thirteen as we talk about it's not it doesn't make sense to spend a lot of time working in those categories because no matter what we do it's not going to yield a big difference in overtime expense so we really take a look at on planned all the time now this is where ninety percent of our expenses are gone and the ickle maintenance recall when we have a vehicle breakdown and we need to bring the mechanics in one month plan basis an emergency basis one category storm coverage we have large storms we staff up with extra personnel in order to handle e heightened level of emergencies fire investigations that are unpredictable arson suspected arson cases things like that fire alarms again fire alarm comes in we of how many connections and or master panel hundred and those are primarily to businesses and if we have an alarm we may have to respond and burns the bases and bring people in the back for the folks that have left the station has this material incidence you know what those are truck rollovers we have a whole variety of stuff there and those by the way while they are know that's actually a very true statement except for the aspects that when this bill happens on town property last year for example we had a spill off of somebody's truck spill it was thrown away so it's an unknown speller and it landed safely ends up being on town property we have to pick up the cost of the cleanup in no it's not as much the the aspect of dealing with it as it's taking care of that waste huge money very expensive  a right i think i think one of the things that began when mr hay decker having conversations with me for the last two years and as randy and kevin know we do we have four of our members that are hazmat texas part of the regional team so what ends up happening is that when they go out and they respond to an actual incident in another community we pay for their overtime but we get reimbursed by the commonwealth of massachusetts one hundred percent so we have a revenue source for that and it goes into a special count and it bounces off but yes yes and you know that the only other thing that you have we have to look at is that knock on wood we haven't had very many incidents in town in the ones that we have we've been able to work very closely like we had what would waste water at one time and we work very closely with the state and everybody to try to reduce as much of the cost as we can by using our folks it also depends on the insurance limits for the entity that has the spill if it's a car accident we've got a couple of cars with gasoline spill and maybe some oil and maybe some any freeze some fluid generally speaking your own private car insurance is going to cover the cleanup cost we need to do a better job of the billing and we're just beginning to get into that but if you have a tanker go you know they may or may not have insurance out of but to cover the full expense so we may only get part of that example could be ransomed next door where they had a situation and the property owner didn't have the appropriate insurances in and basically stuck to town with the cost knock on wood we haven't had to happen yet additional categories of unplanned is minimal staffing a minimum staffing is the one that we're going to talk about the most tonight that's when we have a vacancy and we need to bring people back to meet our current minimum staffing standard us emergency recall is exactly what it sounds like there when we don't have for instance enough paramedics on staff on a particular shift who have a paramedic level incident want to bring more in and finally box and still box alarms are alarms that come in that task more than the amount of staff categories again working to try to reduce these might involve a lot of work and would probably produce you very little result so it's really not the place where we concentrate our effort but there are a couple recommendations for both the planned over time and the unplanned together these comprise some around sixteen seventeen percent of our overtime usage not a lot but there is some stuff we can do so let's talk about the categories where we're really spending the money and that's minimal staffing and box and still longs those two categories combine to equal eighty four percent of all the overtime money we've spent on average for the last three years this is where the big dollars are this is where the majority of what we look out what i want to chat with you about from the basic policy decision that drives both categories of expenditure on the six firefighter t minimum staff now is what that means are shifts are twenty four hour shifts as you know they run with seven firefighters or firefighter s so if one firefighter e m t does not report for work illness vacation whatever we don't hire back we don't have any in overtime incurred when the second firefighter e m t normally scheduled on the shift calls in we immediately incur additional expense it would make some of this is a key fundamental policy decision and later tonight under the recommendation section i'm going to ask the board to examine that and take a position to reiterate support for that because the board hasn't had that discussion in a long time it so happens that i think we collectively agree that's a good standard but it is a major policy level decision of this board should should buy into because the implication of it is we accept a lot of all the time and if you don't agree with that then i'm going to tie that's going to be a somewhat controversial decision and we'll explain what the pros and cons are but this is the key policy decision which informs eighty four percent of what we spen on this type of expense is caused by incentives which commit schedule staff all of that and then require additional staff the most common examples brushfires which can cause us to bring in basically everybody we can find mutual aid calls which can be again essentially the entire department of pending upon the call and that is supposed to be a multiple simultaneous multiple calls that is not an that's for folks we only have six on let's say if we have a second car accident we've immediately got to strike a box and bring in more personnel because unfortunately we don't have the ability to necessarily decide who is going to come because we don't get a huge response so we may get more than we need we may not get enough but that's basically the nature of what we have to deal with shift staffing now this is the category the far and away is the predominant amount to a number of three year average expense for overtime in the fire department fiscal ten eleven and twelve off your chart was four hundred forty one thousand of that two hundred ninety five thousand alone is this category so this is the big category this is seventy five percent expense right here what a shift staffing again seven firefighter e m t shift is our minimum i'm sorry is our normal six minimum so if you have seven is the normal complement and one is out for any reason the very next reason somebody is out causes us to bring someone in and over time what are the events that cause us vacation leave personal leave sick leave injury on duty and massachusetts fire police officers are not under workman's comp they're under special law chap want to have enough that provides them a occasion when we have typically disciplinary charges pending we may put somebody on administer paid administrative leave pending completion of the disciplinary hearing pending an investigation pending a court proceeding whatever  so that's about so all these other categories which cause us to have to engage a shift staffing contributing to shift staffing is all these other reasons as well so if somebody is out for a box or still warm i'm sorry somebody is out for vacation and already down one firefighter and then we get a box alarm and it's a big mutual aid call and we've got six on but we need you know twenty people over in mansfield for a five alarm fire then we can have a huge amount of all the time incurred in order to bring in people because we're having to combine events at the same time and that is not uncommon you ask how much do we have  not for twelve year to date is how many i was three thousand three thousand seventy five and that individual is back now correct yeah i just saw it but you know as we have one of our members that is gone gone off to be a blackhawk pilot cut we don't cover his leg we cover for a percentage of the differences because of the unit contract but dots it's not all that big because he's an officer where it really got us is on the time and a half to fill his position while he was gone while he's away his any ability to hire a temporary employee of the fire department first of all the union contract has the members get the right the first right of refusal and so that would be a negotiated item and that i would answer is yes maybe and it's one of the things to talk about on the recommendations because it would involve it would involve collective bargaining for sure ok we don't have a unilateral right to do it i guess that's the best answer and so to give you a flavor for this one vacancy per shift equals three thousand three hundred sixty five days that so many ships would cover twenty four hour shifts times twenty four hours is eight thousand seven hundred sixty hours so here's what we're working with we can have collectively with all categories of unplanned absence eight thousand seven hundred sixty hours of absent time with no overtime implication following me over seven firefighters on shift we don't have an overtime implication till we get down to five so if one firefighter was off every shift it's eight thousand seven  hundred sixty hours before we incur all the time for all of that so that brings it from six to seven five zero they just bring you from seven to six so one firefighter per shift always shifts it's twenty four hours so it's three hundred sixty five days one year so you have one it goes from seven people down to six right so we can have we can have good evaluations automatically fund that to bring it back up to seven no we hire back to six not seven but we can have without seven that seven person if that seventh person is absent from every shift we could have eight thousand seven hundred sixty hours of absent time before we incur all the time and what i'm going to show you is why this doesn't we give we took all the vacation that carly our firefighter e m t s of are now remember that's a sliding scale depending upon use of service so the more years of service the more vacation you get right now this year our firefighters carlyon staff would get four thousand four hundred sixty four hours of vacation time that's divided between all thirty two believe members some get more some get less but the total is four thousand  hundred sixty four hours when they all get four days per year of personal time so if you multiply that times current staffing that's one thousand sixty four hours of absence allowed for partial time holiday leave firefighters in massachusetts for statute not collected by your human can take certain holidays off or they get paid for them and work if they take them off then we have to fill back the chief did an analysis and we found that a certain percent of order take the day off the rest work it and get paid especially double time and a half straight trip straight time but for those who take it off we want to have the holiday we've got a back fill potentially back fill with overtime so that adds up to one thousand and one hours from now that's an average number that's not a hard number that's an average number  even if someone's not taking sick time or not taking the holiday and somebody else is filling in forms they get a pay that person if they're not taking the sick time is it to the crew it or do they lose it at the end of the years as they are cruelly through and there's limits on how much they can accrue but we're going to show you how is it time in taxes to remember is eight thousand seven hundred sixty hours that can be vacant before we incur all the time and it doesn't always happen neatly like that but this is theoretical we can have one person per shift off the entire year and there's no overtime in cars that's eight thousand seven hundred sixty dollars but watch what happens car leave benefits that i just showed they cation personal time and holiday time adds up to six thousand five hundred twenty nine now that we know those i was are going to be taken follow me because those are benefits that no one is not going to  so we've only got two thousand two hundred thirty one hours of all the time before we begin i mean two thousand two hundred thirty one hours of time before we start incurring overtime that's only ninety three chefs for any reason ninety three twenty four hour shifts for any reason all those other reasons sick time i o d military leave all out so if we have more than ninety three ships we start running up the o t bill so let's take a look at what has been the case for the last few years here's the categories you don't duty military or even administrative box alarm and then etc because you've got all these other categories feeding in there too but these are the primary year it's broken down into a lot more detail in the memo in terms of how many i was per person and all that sort of thing so you can refer to that for more detail injury on duty this is people who get injured in the course of being a firefighter t for the last three years it's average one thousand eight hundred eighty three hours per year and ministry of leave has been two hundred sixty three hours per year on average military one thousand twenty five hours per year and it's actually that number does not include what fiscal twelve was because at the time of this writing we didn't know when that individual was coming back so we didn't include twelve so that number is probably six or seven hundred dollars greater  and bereavement was ninety six hours a year that totals five thousand five hundred eight i was on average for the last three years that those categories have caused firefighter mts to be absent from work so remember we've only got twenty two hundred hours after we compute vacation personal leave and holiday thank you we're only go those are absolutely sure around census we've only got twenty two hundred i was left before we begin incurring all the time and what we know is if for the last three years on average we've incurred five thousand five hundred names so obviously we have three thousand two hundred seventy seven hours shortfall just considering those few categories and that's one hundred twenty one thousand dollars cost at a time and a half or straight time and a half now that's a theoretical application and the reason we had never happens is neatly is that because we don't have one firefighter per shift out we may have three on one shift none on another shift five on another shift one on another shift so it's never as neat but would what we're trying to illustrate here is that if the fire if the personnel in the department take their vacation their holiday leave and their personal leave we've already used up almost all the time that we can have out before we begin incurring and that's because of the six officer minimum staffing requirement because we can only drop we could only have one hour before we had all the time it would make the back to slide just real quick something that we impose late in just so you know the biggest component of the admin is when we had a new firefighter that we had to go to send him to recruit school for twelve weeks that's that's the big one out of all of those the biggest expense that has really impacted the fire department budget is i o day because we had some severe injuries and i can talk about that in great detail and a military leave very many and then because those categories have no budget line there's just we just it and that that minimum staffing so i think that one thing i will say is that since i've been here randi skylines in town has allowed me to expand our tracking and showing exactly where all the fines are going we've gone from having i think it was used to be eleven categories up to nine thousand categories now and but those are some of the things that we've found is that these things happened but we don't find form we don't we don't we don't plan for the weeks of the year average but you've also implement know we're going to we're going to talk about that right now but the important thing to take away from this analysis and it's done in much much more detail i mean i've just given one thousand slides i think thirteen pages or something the important thing to take away is that because we have a six officer minimum staff and we run a seven person crew regularly we can only have one person per shift out before we begin incurring overtime that is the big driver so if you have enough time in the contract which firefighters have a right to take and that adds up to three quarters of the time that we have to give off before we incur overtime and then you factor in sick time and i would be in all this other and it adds up to a lot more than what we could have opted for incur overtime you can see the nature of the problem that's what we're dealing with now we can't you notice on your chart and a minimum staffing you've got all those categories of leave here's what we can tell you today but here's what we will be able to tell you a year from now the nature of record keeping in the past and this is pretty much universal has been when the first person who calls in for some absence calls in there just recorded in the leave category when the next person calls in the over time is charged to vatican and now the over time event was actually caused by the combination of the first event which brought us in six seven to sex and then a second event that brought us from six to seven so let's say the first firefighter mt on the ship calls in and says i'm sick i will be on we've now gone from seven to sex you know all the time a second person calls in and says i'm going to take a vacation day we're now down to five and we now have to back fill one person out over time the event that cause it wasn't the vacation it was the combination of the b cation and the sick time evolve so what we're going to start doing on july first and we've got a gigantic chart that the chief was prepared that's going to take for every single shift in every single person exactly what events cause the overtime to be incurred one year from now will be able to take all these categories will be able to tell you exactly how many days of sick leave actually cause over time how much vacation how much holiday etc because member person can be out sick and if that's the only vacancy on the shift in all the time but if two people are out sick over time so right now because of the nature of the record keeping we can't tell you what of events are actually driving it what we can only tell you is sort of on a gross scale is how many days you can have people out is on many days we them out we know this is what drove our over time next year will be able to say very specifically what did we do so what's going to happen now we're going to track it every month each month the chief randy and i are going to sit down we're going to produce a report that will be a lot less numbers and this will be basically there's a fiscal thirteen budget as you can see in that column here is the amount of overtime we had for the month of july here's what caused it and here's how we're tracking against the budget amount so we've got three hundred fifty five thousand three hundred two dollars budgeted we've got it allocated into a few categories and we're going to track it against those categories and we're going to see as we get into the year we do in and where  we get into trouble and what's causing it so we're going to give you a far far better a much higher level of sophistication in terms of all the time usage and we've been able to do before that tracking combined with these recommendations is going to produce a good result full thirty two people times on a one one person works how many hours in a year oh basically every week turns out you know it looks like it's forty eight hours because it's a rotating schedule it works out to being forty two hour work week every week so forty two times fifty two is what it would be that would give you the average total amount of hours before you apply all the leave categories which would reduce that number in  falls day on two days off a day on five days off that it's an average of forty drawings per week per year that's the average that they just they all look different yeah what happens here is that it goes by there is how many years they've been serving for the community nearly out of the twenty eight members twenty six of them if i'm not mistaken are right max that means they've been with us for a long time they get their maximum vacation nake it their maximum they all get the personal leave they all get the holiday leave so you have twenty eight people and some of them are basically you'll see their sick leave some of them maxed out on their sick leave and some are not so the sick leaves a moving number but on a vacation personally the holiday leave that's all standard numbers and and some of them are different because they've been with the community for a long period of time what i was looking at was just when you take you know your mandatory coverage hours are really your vacation personal holiday so you've got sixty five hundred hours in total there i was just trying to understand you know how many f t's does that translate into because you have to remember it no matter what why how many hours as an individual firefighter end up working once those leave categories replied i don't think we know that number now but it reduces the total forty two times fifty two it reduces a very substantially obviously in that we have some folks that will take the overtime and some that don't and so it's very it's a moving target on each individual we can when we did the analysis of looking at exactly everybody's are on time with what we budget we are eighty nine high end in with that flexible position from seven to six  we're still eighty nine hundred dollars short in that and budgeting for that account forty two it's forty you know it actually averages to forty two if you figure it over a year twenty eight moving sometimes you might work this week one day and then your next day by day that's another calendar week because it's a rotating schedule you have to look at the amount of hours they work in an annual year so it comes out spokesman can you just come to the table if there's a bunch of recommendations is thirteen and all but you guys do the heavy list lifting with the looking at the numbers before we get into the recommendation so we can just hear your input small morning and we welcome the competence the patient we've got a pretty good brain trust there so we're going to get the reports of them which includes the recommendation and all the numbers and i think the chief and randy and i look forward to some f ther discussions with them because they've probably got some ideas that maybe we haven't thought of and so we certainly would like to go through that so here are some very specific recommendations for you first the six firefighter minimum shift staff should be reviewed now this is the policy decision that drives seventy five to eighty percent of the expenditures change them six five find a minimum staff and you drastically al numbers so that policy decision has not been visited by this board i'm told and quite a number of years i have the advantage of sitting with the chief in private with randy and going through why we have that staff policy but i don't think the board has heard it and i think roger should take a moment to explain to you why we have it in the void should whether you do it and i do you do it in the future the board should reiterate or indicate a change now before roger does that i will tell you if you reiterate if you say basically yes we're happy with the six firefighter shift great and we know that that's the standard but that means a lot of this overtime is going to continue to be incurred because of those simple numbers i just showed you on the other hand if you want to take a look at altering it then you have to understand is only a couple ways to do that you can look at seasonal altering in other words you take times of year when you roll the dice and you say this time of year we have fewer brushfires or we have fewer chimney fives so we're going to try to go with a five minimum staff i will tell you right now that the very first time that that doesn't work i e somebody gets hurt somebody gets killed whatever there will be people who'll be claiming and blaming this board for that person's injury or death and you have seen it happen you saw it happen and have rolled not too long ago i have been making this decision as a top manager in other communities and of gone through those accusations over and over again and i will tell you  is not a pleasant place to be i tell the board this as a preface to the to this discussion on this topic so that you understand what the implications are because it is very much a guessing game there are general patterns of usage but you can't say at any given moment what's going to happen this is emergency services so we can say the month of blank is a relatively quiet time not a lot of brushfires knowledgably five people out of town and vacation let's drop to five man and as soon as we do that bang the next day we have three car wrecks and whatever it is a car with that right o i think that any time that you try to use any type of braf to short  anything is dangerous especially when we're in multi fashion that we have not just we're not just a fire department we're not just an e m f service we're both and when you start looking at all the curves they they overlap it's way too dangerous and  think that it's been pretty clear in the two years that i've actually presented to you folks that i've been trying to get to eight and to drop below six is dangerous for this community and i will never support that and then you end up having to call in mutual aid at what point does it make is there any consideration given in to calling in private ambulance support  think right now first of all mutual aid is only called then when all of our assets are being deployed somewhere that means that we have to medicals going on and we have a building fire and we have more resources that are coming in from other communities and that is at zero cost to the town vice versa when they have something we go in assist them at no cost to their town right now if you watch what we've been doing for the last two years with  seats and answering the questions of is it beneficial for us to be running the amp in service versus a private i think that it's been obviously seen that to back it up with a private they they're going to want they want the whole thing supplementing it they're going to still want the whole thing it's still going to cost a town for their contract as they want to make they need to make a profit i'm trying to look at it though as an alternative to additional over time well i think that profit yeah i've actually done a study on this several times in other communities and basically here's the dilemma the reason fire departments took over e m f service years ago is because fire departments by their nature sit and wait for an event to happen so a lot of what a fire department does old days prior to a mass was the the you know the cliche of sitting in the station watching t v that's not very accurate anymore because what happened is fire service very crudely recognized that if they continued with that kind of a model the public would get impatient so when we can't afford have people sitting around doing nothing they said hey we're going to take over e mail service member the old days when i started in management the police did that and weren't terribly well trained it was first responder training so over the years we've engaged fire department pretty much universally to take over your message has gotten more and more and more sophisticated culminating now with the town decided to adopt the a less level of service advanced life support towns don't have to have ls a lot don't but we've made the decision we wanted what is it gets you what that gets you is a highly trained professional paramedic on your doorstep typically in three to five minutes to put electricity on your heart to get you going again that's the critical thing american heart association stands to have four minutes because that's the window in which application of electricity is going to save your life or not all the other events that can happen you get more time to take so we've adopted that standard now here's the implication because a fire department by its nature sits and waits for events to happen we have people that sit there waiting we can afford to offer him a service at a relatively cheap price because we're double duty and  both firefighters and they're e m s so they're waiting for two events to occur a private ambulance service waits for one of them to the the medical event because they're not firefighters so all of the private email services work on a regional basis not a one time basis and basically what they do is a try to position crews in different places to maximize the amount of day to minimize the amount of don time for those crews and maximize the response time but because of the nature of it no on minister bill or private e m s is much slower response times in general the minister believe based systems because of the regional nature of it there are a lot farther away and there redundancy there back up is not as robust as ours is but we pay a price for that and that price is some of what you're looking at but it's a conscious decision of the community makes when they say we want to a less service we want that high level of paramedic service but there's a big premium you pay for it so in towns that did privatizing it there was a universal experience because the company can't make enough money to pay those crews to sit there  they have to require the town to make a payment to them to make up the difference and in every place you see it brockton has a bunch of other towns that do it there's the receipt of the ambulance money from the insurance company like that and there's a premium the tiny terrorist i i don't think privatization is one of the recommendations because the question was just asked was it i'm not suggesting that we privatized the ambulance services i'm just saying here we have a situation where outside supplement that's all that and case because with supplementation the delta between the cost of the crew and the number of ones you get becomes astronomical as well that use right with the companies will say is either you're going to pay us a huge amount of money to standby all we want all that is i'm just suggesting i don't know like does the mass general i building have their own ambulance support is there some i'm just suggesting it's something to look at as you try to get out thanks to that i think that  when they're out and we can accommodate we get ok i'm going to suggest this because we've got thirteen recommendations if we spend fifteen minutes on each one we're never going to get out here kevin want to go through and you probably have to bite your tongue let him go through all of them a step further i think at the end of this exercise i'm not ready to vote recommend on any of these i think you just absorb it and have it come back at a second meeting kind of an executive session and pick it apart a little bit but it's nine i know we can have discussion on them but what i'm saying if we discuss each one ten or fifteen minutes it's going to go into a second later that sort after that with the recommendations what i'm suggestion is of kevin if you can just go through and you go through whatever things that sticks out number of collective bargaining agreement provisions sick leave vacation benefits which if those were lower there would be less overtime now that is a decision at this board house to make as a label program or if you want to negotiate alterations to any of those benefits i will tell you we haven't done a formal comparison but i do have the benefit of seen having seen a lot of these i don't think our benefit levels are on the line with other communities  before you would consider going after any of those my suggestion would be let us do a survey if you have any interest and i can see you for out a line but i don't think we are so changing the collect a binding agreement as you know is a the chief should submit submit budgets as the plans as part of his budget these are planned discretionary overtime so instead of we spend whatever on them the chief as part of his annual budget some it's a plan and so she is going to do it over time training his own to do with public education and as part of the budget process we review that in the board has its recommendation i mind the outcome of this and we set a number on the piece of paper in the budget and the chief knows that's all he's got he doesn't anymore if you look at in the report you'll see the does a fair difference between what was budgeted and what was expended on trying to do is i'm trying to get a chorale on the plan stuff so that we don't spend more than we budget is ace is a specific policy he makes certain decisions in order to do that and that drives this average forty let's see it's an average of seventy thousand dollars a year in cost so you should review that and make sure that you're comfortable with all those parts of that policy and agree with the chief in that regard unplanned categories in general should be budgeted and we tried to make sure that we don't go over that she's done an excellent work setting up that master spreadsheet and we're going to be tracking those now and following up i'm seven chief has started a very good program of sickleave analysis and i won't go through all the details with you but if you look in the body of the report you'll see that he's already done some good things what we discovered and it's completely typical is that in general the personnel in the fire department are not using a lot of time per five five there are a very few number of people who are using a lot of time and that's spiking the overall into some very fairly significant numbers what we have to find out for those few individuals is is this a case of family need because they 're allowed to use some of those days for family illness is it an individual in our employ who has a serious health issues and we need to assist them or is it abuse and i can't answer the question for you what i can say is we've we've just  study and we're going to get a lot into it in a lot more detail and we're going to find out if we've got an abuse problem or something else what i can tell you is that right now we've got a lot of sick leave usage and it should definitely move and a dollar direction and that is already happening item eight speaking about i o d injured on duty i think in recent years we've gotten a bit away from active aggressive management of starting about eighteen months ago we began an aggressive loss control program in the areas of i would do workman's comp property liability the effort has shown dramatic reductions extremely dramatic reductions i'll be giving a report on that later this summer we've been very very successful in the fire department offsetting the active management is the real fact that fire fighting e m t work is dangerous work and they're going to get hurt occasionally and it was nothing we can do to stop that phenomena what we can do is we can ensure that when they get injured we support them and take care of them and we get them back to work as soon as we can we get on the right kind of in one stunning example we had an individual who was out for a long period of time because that individual was not getting good advice we changed the paradigm and after an eighteen month out since we had an issue back to work eight weeks later administrative leave for disciplinary purposes we'll look at it very carefully the two times that the chief and i in consultation have done it it's been justified i think of both cases but it has to be looked at very carefully we've been using comp time at the of the study the chief has already terminated that policy that was a policy of some long standing in the department and it's frankly a circumvention of over to over time use it's using count time when all the time money is gone and what it does is it payroll while this is an unlikely event it should be studied now i will tell you right now the assumption is always there the best way to reduce over time is to hire full time people here's the fallacy it doesn't work in general because you hire someone and you bring them in at a salary whatever that is that person comes with a certain amount of vacation a certain amount of certain a certain amount of personally a certain amount of i o d a certain amount of militarily for the happen to be a soldier and on and on and on the list goes in other words all those categories that drive over time vacancies that new person comes of it so you take their salary then you add the cost of all their last time to a variety of causes you add that up and then you look at the corresponding amount of all the time shifts that they'll now cover if coincidentally they happen to be on the shift when the vacancy occurs and i can pretty well guarantee you it doesn't work in other words you don't get dollar for dollar back the salary in overtime savings it just doesn't happen once in a huge while it'll happen and that's when you basically get out of control hired to bring it up to me or you get so just to illustrate your spending the cost to bring on four firefighters is three hundred thousand dollars now that's fifty thousand per firefighter plus the cost of their outage plus insurance you know if you're spending your spending four hundred forty one thousand an average on overtime so if you spend three hundred thousand to put four people on i will tell you right now it's  mathematically impossible you will not save three hundred thousand of this all the time budget it doesn't work you know the last but we could we would be happy to analyze  know there's this four shifts so if you go to eight this for sure so that's four people in the numbers are wrong and that's the whole problem is that you're also forgetting about the eight thousand plus always you have every year because of vacation and they bring that into the equation and your so i can calm down a bit and then we can just get to the real point and the time that you mean he said because this is not being presented the way it should be and it's not intentional and she's misconstruing that's exactly what's happening so let's talk about the call firefighter and i'm ok so obviously using call firefighters on expanding the size of the parliament would be helpful it is also very controversial to do but it could potentially have some benefit at the current time  a does not allow call fire call firefighters to take shifts before regulars would take it so the career firefighter staff would have first dibs the call could only be used to augment when they don't want those shifts and i like that is that wouldn't result in any savings but it could be looked at what i've said on a number of places here including the hiring of new personnel is that i'm not making any final judgments until we've done for other analysis i'm asking you if there is areas that seem interesting here that you would like us to do that analysis in this is a huge amount of work to get to this point and now we need to kind of focus and i'm asking the board for some guidance where you'd like us to focus whether it's hiring full time staff to save or with some of these other ideas because there is savings here the only things that we are implementing we are actively involved in implementing his recommendations  seven and eight sickleave control and i o do control we are doing those things and it's producing good results nothing else on this page i'm sorry and the elimination of comp time nothing else on this page is actively being done until you give us some direction where you'd like us to go because is too much here to try to do all of it so we've got to be selective now chief some of the stuff is clerical i mean going back and putting them in different categories and  going back and itemizing things that one itemized before some of these things seem to make sense that probably should have been doing years ago is there anything on here that's so offensive to you as it as a fire chief that says if we go  direction the top's going to get blown off not to say we agree with you disagree but absolutely i think that the biggest thing is as you've already heard my statement about the minimum of six i think that is fair ball minimum and  it's even scary at that i'm absolutely willing to sit down and look at this this eight and we've been discussing and come up with strategic facts to support or at least look at it but i think that it's  important that i get every single one of you to understand what six gets you and i can have a one on one with you at any time i've got all the facts in demonstrations and i've had this discussion with a lot of the the residents of the town all right i think that the biggest thing  is that i don't disagree with kevin that there could be some savings but we have to get the budget right right now since i have been here we have been stealing from peter to pay paul out of everything that you guys have already seen the i  the numbers we have this is to cicle facts we don't have a single for that that just exorbitant through the process of payroll we've got to fix that i will tell you we've done some great programs so if you remember we were having a lot of back injuries that were taking a lot of firefighters off the job we went got the power structures at expense of the town we have any back injury since those things got here so we do do those things but the problem is as kevin has already brought out injuries are going to happen we have to budget for him we have a three year now it's just to show you what we've used in the last three years i think that's a mark that's a milestone that we can use to assist ourselves military leave we asked we have a fire fight a day i'm proud to say that he's part of the military he's doing i see great justice as a firefighter paramedic and he's also doing us great justice as a as a military soldier flying helicopters but it's time and a half when he goes out for training it's time and a half when he gets deployed all of these things we can buy for but right now we don't that zero money it's got to be exorbitant ministry of we've military leave all of these things bereavement leave of all been absorbed this year alone one hundred forty eight thousand dollars is what it cost us to cover it but again with the flexibility that one extra person we've had that's how we've tried to manage at but we these are just cannot be exhort if you want to have cost savings we have to go through exactly what the spread sheet showing you and look at every single statistic that we feel we have here for the last three years and see the areas that we're saving money because those aren't savings we're using that to exhort the redness and the other areas i would love to have a training budget i can't tell you when the last time these guys trained in firefighting skills were obligated in mandated that they have their training but you know these things have to be doubt we have a right budget absolutely they'll be cost savings because we can with all the programs that we have we can monitor it and make it right but right now it's not right and we have to fix that first and i think that the meetings that randy and kevin and i have had we've had over nine or ten of these i think we all got the clear picture we know what we've got do we've already started making some of those adjustments already but i've got to get everybody to understand that this is been a problem go on for a long time and we need to get it right in the way we do it right is with already the facts of statistics that we already have the the bottom line is very simple if you look at this chart jumps off the page to school term we budgeted three hundred thirty three thousand so in a way for all the time we spend for seventeen thought in fiscal twelve year to date we've spent we've budgeted three hundred fifty five thousand year to date we spent three eighty three we're projecting for twenty two so here's what this all tells you all these numbers three  bridges four hundred forty one thousand four hundred ninety three that's the three year average for the prior three years with the last month of fiscal twelve project that we've budgeted three hundred fifty five thousand for fiscal thirteen the year beginning july first so  can tell you if no policy changes there's no policy changes and we have the same number of average events same number of average joe d's military leaves it cetera we are currently under budget by eighty six thousand dollars will we have the same average number of events i don't know what i can tell you is that you can manage this situation and one of two you can do one of two things here you can decide to change nothing and which case i can't tell you if you run over by eighty six thousand but i can tell you run over by something i can guarantee that even if you don't have a twelve month military leave you problem you may have the other response you can make to the situation is you can say well we're going to have to be proactive and we're going to have to manage this all the time i want to have to change some things which things you want to change is a policy direction that you've got to give well what i will tell you is that if nothing changes if all current policies remain in effect and you don't direct us to do some of the things in those recommendations or other things maybe we are under budget by a substantial margin that i can tell you for sure but you had one thing to say on your last thing i want to make it also very clear as the fire chief of the fire department i don't want anybody thinking it these over time it's i  only know if it's an overtime issue because i think we run a really tight ship i don't want anybody to think that these these numbers are the fault of any member of the department i think we run a very tight ship i think that they've given a fair  know amount of opportunity of to work in this community in and give their skills to us and i want to make sure that if the direction is to go and consider read negotiating with the union be fair with them because they've been fair to this community and i think that we i think the comparisons are needed i think that you should look at and see what the surrounding communities are doing and i think if we continue to look at what the other unions are doing in this community from police highways schools so that we're fair to them because honestly there's very very little that the that members of the department have here that they really if you want to look at it control of and sick leave everything else is obligations through negotiations and emergency calls so i just hope everybody is fair to them and we'll discuss it one question from dick and then we'll talk discuss  in a moment but one let me talk about what been on the table today i've met with the two chiefs way back summer of ten we went through the whole thing that he had a spreadsheet with only  columns on it at the time he gave me twenty six sheets plus that one for the fiscal because we were looking at the calendar at the time so all of those categories by employee that was exposed at that time and we knew what was going on the issue that i that i see is and i hear some of this in both cabins and rogers discussion where we are not controlled you we just can't spread them out or year and i use unevenly so if you look at the numbers and i just agree with the four thousand number my numbers are over five thousand for vacation time i mean just add it up roughly thirty people four weeks vacation you know that's on a twenty eight hours you can diagram this or cross the work schedule you have one guy in vacation all the time you're if you have employees you're adding vacation time so you're adding some time that will be taken off on top of that plus the benefits plus the retirement and all the other goodies that's built in the question is can we change the builtin nature of what is there except for a second time by contract no if you can negotiate a great but the point is we have always talked and you have always talked about public safety being the essence of what we do my concern originally had nothing to do with what the o t has expressed except i could never get the right number i met with randi i met with the chiefs and we've gone back and forth for two years now i'm with them twenty two thousand on the police budget an ad is going to answer that question hopefully that this week but the point is if we are spending on this account four hundred  fifty four hundred eighty a year why don't we tell the public and town meeting it's not three hundred ninety or three sixty it's for eighty or for fifty and let's cut the regular salary account down so it's meaningful the same thing at the point i was stressing in the beginning what what what's the issue that the budgets didn't seem to work and the public safety issue and in the detail time forget the these thirteen thousand hours that are expended i don't know if yours was thirteen of the police there are so many numbers rolling around thirteen thousand hours and out of two per person you know there's six and a half people less the overtime increment that you're dealing with the point is in essence these people with the detail time there are six people in our employ that work eighty hours a week on a fifty two week basis we know they don't work fifty two ways and there's quiet times at the stadium these people are working ninety one hundred hour weeks they carry a gun a taser are there they're taking care of a stroke or a heart safety and the second issue that numbers certainly if we can work with the bargain i would say great but my point has been now for two years the game in charge well last and we we could avoid the issue maybe in another year we could do something we could have done year ago thank you wasn't done those are my main points public safety getting the accurate numbers and with the write i think would be a good idea if we digested this some more and you know maybe submitted again what we think are these potential suggestions but we think we might want to get more information on start i don't want to add to it and i definitely look forward to the station chief the current policy of six firefighters this is not a state vehicles kevin and i had lengthy conversation because as we know they're looking for you to have four firefighters on every piece and doubt what we're lucky at this point if we can get three ultimately we're always trying to get three on a fire apparatus now they only looks at fires it doesn't look at the e m s and again as kevin said if we cross chain you know and we're able to cover both of those i think day six is scary we've been fortunate i mean we have really been fortunate react at the planet i mean we're doing what you know with three thousand calls seven hundred of them a medical calls about fifty fifty when you look at the swap off but more of them have a e m s twist to it than the fire twist we do a box alarm on anything that's a high hazard high level life hazard we'll do a full recall our average is five guys show up that that's about enough to get one more truck two more trucks out counting on what we're what the actual incident is asking us to do so six is definitely the minimum and i can show you constantly why when you need a five phased commune for a reason just time it didn't work so now we do an all recall and our all recall is giving us an average of five and all those firefighters are trained in all the equipment all all of the assets that when you don't need to we still pay five yes we have a minimum of two hours of of call back when those guys show up and but even if you don't need if you feel you only need to put a call five guys show up usually but usually if we're doing full callback we're going to there's nobody in the station there's absolutely nobody in the house so that five is taking the place of the six to seven they're normally there so it's not a case do we not need them we  probably need more does that make sense i hope i mean it's not like when you have somebody on a production line that you know we need winds or twos when we have a full recall that means the house is empty and the firehouse is empty and we need to have the other firefighters come in to take either the ladder truck or another or the one of the other engines or whatever the resource that we need to go to the scene or to just protect the rest of the community so you have a recall when everybody else has gone very much or or if it's a life high life hazard for example nursing home the senior center the renaissance any place that there's a large high hazard to high school where there's a lot of people it's an end of a matter of it's kind of a matter of how much it's not kind of it is a matter of how much risk are you willing to take because when the when the when the the point when the building empties and there's no one in there if another call doesn't come in and you don't strike a call along fine but at that point and you call for me to you julie if you absolutely but if you start running into a situation where you're constantly calling in mutual aid to cover your firehouse as mark brought up you're going to have a lot of angry communities around you and that happens in multiple cases in the commonwealth and so you always want to have some encourage men to bring that they get some of the guys to come back a lot of communities have a four hour minimum  pay we only have two so we're we've been very we do we make a lot of mutually calls to other towns if we have staffed more than the other usually what we have done here nor for county is that mutual aid because all the communities are in the same type of financial situation where only being called the mutual aid if it's a really big fire or if they want to go immediately to the scene we don't back fill fire stations too often unless it's a very large we can figure out how many you know is that we send and how much should we receive you see i think before we have a full disk you know i'm one discussion on that and would like to see that because comparison surrounding towns i know that we did this study mike i gave us a lot of good information i don't know if that still exists on online and not on your pages place might be like yeah he gave us  we have the cost of what it would cost to the town if we did it step to bring it up to yeah we've got that in here we're definitely going to do that computation has been talked about a lot tonight so we'll we'll run those numbers that's not that's not real we will do the analysis per firefighter hopefully we will do the analysis per firefighter so you can will be able to give you whether it's one or two or three or four new will be able to tell you incrementally might expect remember very important you cannot assume that this new person is going to be on the staff and they're going to take the place of someone absent every single time that would be an incredible coincidence if that will occur but so you're only going to get more marginal value in savings versus the cost and we will do the analysis but what i will tell you i will guarantee for you right now is that the cost of the five five per five hundred is going to surprise you also out of fifty percent multiplier because remember we're looking at fifteen sixteen seventeen thousand dollars health plan right off the bat for one firefighter on top of th will we'll be happy to take a look at that too the swapping practice when you do this analysis i don't see how it can result in over time eventually when you do this analysis you're comparing it when you look at the overtime to the to the three year average but the chief has would we be comparing the overtime it's nice use the last three but of the changes that you're implementing going to be a substantial savings in the over to show they should again as i said if we budget everything appropriately so that we're stopping stealing from peter to pay paul and everything is up front and everybody sees the facts and that's why the three year now is this is huge you can pick away at what's causing it for example i used a i o day one i used the sick leave one those are winds that you see that there's an issue so not to not to beat it but the analysis that you're going to come forward to the next time what's on your task with you i've got to take analyze the return on investment for hiring incrementally one new firefighter e m t on versus all the time savings we've got take a look at mutual aid sending and receiving per community we to be a per capita basis and the last is the take a look at the swapping practice to get a little better understanding of how that works because i don't know if i can explain it to anybody when you're ready it's it's not that difficult in and that it was so i thought it was so moved us with gratitude second that second any more discussion follows and discussion that anybody i actually decline because that's the night that we're having the north street or the traffic parking just a general comment to the board i'm not going to recommend you not approve this but i this is the first time i became aware of how many constables the board of points and this is unusual in the number most communities have a very small number because constables are serving civil process they make a lot of money from these appointments but every one of these person because they carry an appointment in a badge and certainly the authority for business liability for the town because we appoint them  and what most communities are doing now is they have a policy that really limits it to just a few because there's no good reason for it the community doesn't need these folks we only need one or two to serve our tom meeting a civil process so the list is beginning to get a little large and there's no good reason for the community to do this every time you put a new one on it just means the business collectively gets divided more  ways and i notice a lot of these folks are not tom residents so just a cautionary note you know we might want to have a chief look at this yeah because people were just asking if we just keep appointing  you just have more and more and more ask and that means that certain body of vision did have a certain amount absolutely not and most towns are only doing three of four these days because this represents so much liability for the community  just something to think about and i don't i wouldn't recommend you not appoint this person but i think in the future we should have the chief chat with us a little bit about that you know how many do we really need to have on the list normal dates i know a lot of times you've done two things in the summer more from what i'm told than what i've gone through with you but it's reported me that sometimes you take one of these summer da out in order to give you three give yourselves a break and other times you cancel one of these because you can't get three of you together because of vacation schedules so what i wanted to be sure of what we did is we put all the dates down and we just wanted to ask you are these the dates you want or do you want to change them i just said it's not so much it's not so much the dates it's more the july august september dates where we tend to have problems what i don't want to do is work hard with set up an agenda or invite a bunch of guests and we get here and find out only to two board members are going to be present because you have three on vacation so if we know that's going to happen we can adjust i have nothing planned i think february nineteenth