the june twenty sixth and wind richard's town meeting member and actually a neighbor of my wife and i had with him his wife iraq and we died suddenly in a sleep in ellen pointed out to me that its a vigil tomorrow night in response to what has taken place in dallas and other communities throughout the country i also think it's important for us to have a moment of silence for the police officers that were so murdered in dallas and it's part of that you know just a reflection and hope that reconciliation can occur between the law enforcement community the african american community and this violence needs to stop now and this country hopefully can find a way forward because  m and sunday at noon on the tennis courts at the beach treats it's a new game came from the west coast it's a lot of fun and a number of people are playing sometimes we have up to twenty  it's not specific to any particular event i just wanted to mention my mom says my dad's passing has been participating great deal the lot of the committees and programs at the senior center to be treated center and i just have to say i'll say th publicly that the programs are just absolutely terrific she has found a home there and i think we as a community continue to support our seniors in town council an agent and never been vocal there's a wonderful job with me to strengthen flex there there's meditation there's forum mention this at one of our community announcements on issues that you seen you can seniors in our community have to deal with and i did she's meeting with the members of the board of see a way that she is going to come meet with this board sort of talk about some of the things that belmont citizens forum who is going to be publishing seven days in belmont suggestions for august and i just want to make sure the board was aware of this project and to encourage activities and awareness of striving to and we're asking by readers will be more to we're striving to advertise more some of the things we're working on and your progress we're making we're not perfect on that but we're hoping to expand our communication to the  served as its chairman since that day whereas for the past nineteen years roy has dedicated his time energy in expertise to protecting the benefits of the retirement system members retirees and beneficiaries whereas roy helped guide the investments of the system growing the system more than eighty six million in two thousand and sixteen and transitioned it from ownership of bonds and stocks allowed on a legal list to a diversified portfolio whereas roy served as president of the math juices association of contributory retired doesn't want to two thousand and three and they continue to serve on its executive board in his capacity as past president and extended that commitment to service with the national conference on public employee retirement systems whereas rory through his service on the bo and retirement board and through these other offices was active in committed the passage of legislation in policies at the state and national levels the straight and public return it systems in protect their members and whereas roy remain vigilant in protecting next month i want you to join us here perhaps going where you can do in that five minutes that we have are six minutes for the public hearing  i believe that is that speaker working that he's in front of him there and i think this all started working on the driveway yes in front of the savings bank so that that work is progressing i've had conversations with the contractor just today to finalize the schedule to begin the paving work the first step of the pagan work will be the milling of the existing roadway we expect that we're going to nail down a schedule tomorrow and we expect to have notification out to the merchants in the residence of the community i'm hoping wednesday of this week at the latest it's looking more and more like next week is going to be the day so to start the paving operation which is the milling of the grinding of the of the center the first layer that's correct when we plan to do that but as i said i mean we started we had more conversations today we expect and they'll be scheduled out tomorrow but it's looking more and more like it's going to be next week during the day ye last i post the schedule of the website and e mail it yes so we have it we have the e mail distribution to the merchant center will also do a nine one one town wide so all the residents will be aware of this activity going on to go through the heart of the please patronize of businesses so access that it's my understanding that even though we're getting a lot of questions about the progress of the construction of the town center it's actually a couple of weeks so in other words my hope that the project be completed and of july very early august may end up sliding to mid august but that the you know the hard date that we've all discussed internally is this project needs to be complete by the end of august did probably also makes sense to remind ourselves of the work that was done under the street which is just as important as the worst so what did you all do under the street well the fdic well the first operation that occurred in the senate was the replacement of the water mains  public works managed that project national grid came in behind them and replaced all the gas mains so there's no gas leaks from the town center that's correct on on the project itself that we're managing in community development we've improved a lot of the storm drainage in the center and we've repaired sanitary sewer in locations where needed help with that was needed as well comcast has also done a significant amount of work in the center so you know from a utility point of view from an infrastructure point of view he till it has been a hearing so we have a public hearing that begins around this time it's about thirty seconds before six to review and approve application from shine squirmy food inc doing business as shines to transfer ownership of the wine and beer liquor license currently held by j d j business experience and all that twelve years he work in a staff is basically the restaurant he used to own in alaska also have the alcohol license served alcohol license served alcohol beverages as well of twelve years of that he has experienced you know serving alcohol and also running the business as well so he has experience both on the operation and also not doing a lot of internal renovation it's going to basically remain the same same number of seats yes right but just to change of name yeah maybe a change in the concept although it will sure to approve the issuance of the common picture a license for the shines may foods and doing business as shines under the condition that the establishment paints the proper the appropriate sign off from  water sampling for the three away clean water projects that we've been doing the last several years which is necessitated by an order that we are under from federal and state t v i wanted to just briefly present to you some information related to that proposal as you're aware there was another article in the boston globe recently about the condition specifically of wind brooke and i wanted to talk just briefly about the  the next step in the next phase of our operation and talk about a couple of things that we're going to do different this time around in an effort to be a little more expedient about eradicating this problem once and for all i put an asterisk next to once and for all  hand side represents the outfalls associated with the mystic river watershed just by way of explanation of how we go about doing what we do i want to focus on this dock area here ok this darker area here is outfall number ten and so what i'm about to explain to you it applies everywhere in the watershed but just by way of example i want to show you how this works so this is the larger area here ye of back up there you go thank you ok so here's a here's a blow up of that area ok what i've done is i've put a ring around a sub catchment area within this larger drainage area it's it's entirely coincidental the neighborhood that i captured here so i don't want to to raise anyone's eyebrows i have no idea whether or not there's anything wrong with this neighborhood anything right with this neighborhood this just really is a nice nice clean some catchment area for me to demonstrate so phyllis if you can go to the next one yes joe does catch but i can explain that on the next slide ok so  right there ok so what this is this is a blow up of that neighborhood and this ring that i've drawn captures the entire storm water system in this one area it all drains down to one point a manhole located right here here's albert out here is purley street this is brighton street ok so there's one manhole here that captures all of the storm water flow in this sub catchment area this is indicative of the storm water system in belmont every one of every every area or involved one has some type of sub catchment area that can be whittled down to problem within that the area then right there it does correct so what we do then is once we determine that all fall ten has an issue we then go back up into the entire watershed and start now rowing down where the possible sources could be the way that we do that is we look for catchment areas such as this we sample at this location here if this location here the coming from albert ave if this samples clean then we say ok this entire neighborhood this entire sub catchment area is clean we check it off and we move on ok and we keep doing the systematic testing in the  watershed until we locate areas where there are issues let's say hypothetically we tested at this manhole and it came back dirty we would then from that point move our efforts into the catchment area continue a testing program until we finally whittled down where the source of the contamination was coming from what i want to stress this evening is in the past we may have sampled this manhole once maybe twice came back clean and we said ok this is fine let's check it off and let's look let's look in another direction with this new with this new proposal i have from stan tech our consultant what i've asked them to do is building capacity for us to be able to revisit areas that we sample here and it's clean they go back on august eighth they sample here and it's clean in the past we would have said ok this catchment areas clean what i'm telling stan tech to do now is go back there in september or october sample it again because one of the theories i have is that the timing of some of this stuff just hasn't been favorable for us and that we specially if you're talking about a property that may have a toilet that is illegally connected to a stormwater system you really have to catch somebody using that tor that at the right time to capture it in the sampling of a location and so what i want to do is i want to increase our odds of finding that by sample lng multiple times in one location  right this small area this is a significant job for us i mean this is almost so unless we decide to have a comprehensive financing plan to redo all of our senior tory sewer system this entire neighborhood how do you go to work backwards from this mind that there are fifteen plus one sixteen out falls that we are starting our testing from my little example here was focused only on all fall ten but if you go back to the original mao that was the one that was tested correct this proposal we are testing all of the l falls in mr goble watershed because we want to make sure that we haven't missed something something new has been propped up or in the case of all fall ten we want to start our inspect our inspections again to go back up into that watershed to find out what those were the sources so mark to answer your question you sample this manhole here and it comes back dirty right now you move up there's another manhole here you'd  one that one comes that that one comes in dirty but let's make it simple that one comes back clean how many minerals need to be tested is many as it takes to find the probably presumably if we if we if the test results of an f minus something's going on have already spent a couple of million dollars anyway in this in this area mitigating clean water issues so we've already found problems and i've already fixed them but there are problems still remain and that's why the testing bears out that there are still issues which is why we continue doing what we're doing the asterix i mentioned before you're never done with a program like this because even though it at a point in time we could sample all of these outfalls and they could all be clean we previous samples didn't show it as dirty i'm saying that previous samples may not have shown a certain sub catchment area to be dirty what also happens is you know in that larger watershed that is  ten as you continue to investigate in that watershed you find places with where there are problems and you may make assumptions that ok this must be the source of all of our problems let's fix it test it again see if we got it difficult point is that the point of making tsunami is that there is a problem because we've got it absolutely i mean isn't there isn't a problem i mean there is a problem right because we we had a failing grade and that was tested at a time that perhaps in other times it would have been a passing grade but the point is that a caught it when it was thirty and therefore it's failed and so there's got to be something that's going on here in the watershed for our fault then that's causing the problem and react the logical absolutely that i have a couple questions on the mystic river waterfall you know i can't answer that i can tell you that we were made aware of the problem in one nine hundred ninety eight one nine hundred ninety nine that timeframe there was a day it was no briefly is the boston harbor and the pollution in the boston harbor the recognition that there were certain communities that would you recommend polluting boston however once e p a felt like they got a decent handle lot at least the source of those problems and there was some plan to mitigate they took another step into the watershed and captured communities like medford allenton belmont it was sort of that we were sort of the next step in that approach shifting to the pollution right so now there there are if i may there are other communities in in this watershed who when these tests take place they get a passing grade no i don't know off the top of my head bear in mind when we when we get a failing grade for when know that that represents one out fall out of fifteen million or so there are other all falls out of passing so other communities may have the same situation where they may have one troubles and i'll fall but they may have other all falls where they're passing i really don't know the details of the other community and then how much does it cost to test and now and in one of these locations i don't know individually that the proposal that we have from stan tech for this first round of act of this next testing is seventy one thousand so not a one thousand for all of them or for just number ten that's for all of them that's for all of them including the increasing capacity to be able to go back and retest other outfalls i'm sorry other  sampling points manholes and then could you describe i know you said how ten would work so you would test it on august first and then test it again ten days later and if it was clear in the past you wouldn't come back to it for a year is that we would come back to it will come back over the next sampling over which would be how many years it all depends on how long it takes to get from that first sampling program through construction and then you know with no it's not ok so is it was a good seventy one thousand dollars a year in the soup to nuts here start to finish five years is probably a decent number five to six years or so we only test once every five consider the the globe report to be the equivalent of a spotlight report you know i mean i just don't think the journalism is that robust but you know they have a point  and so we're saying that we have kind of a five to six year rotation here where we we test we fix and then we go back and test again but somebody else testing in the interim is that what we're experiencing correct and you know i'm not trying to be silly about this but is it kind of like a random drug test in the sense i mean is  did they don't tell you when they're going to test of that we can go out and look for ourselves in advance that's correct and do they test every year or every five or six years they test every month i don't know what's the point well i think you know we need to get ahead of this problem as you're suggesting right in one way to do it is to figure out how much  cost to test another way of doing it is to know how often they're testing so that we don't you know continually get surprised if that's the way to think about it every time you know they much i don't know i guess the point is we need to increase our testing but we also need to find solutions right so in solutions cost money correct the point i'm making to you claim is that it just seems just a significant task even though just to our fault that you talking about a fairly significant area that we have to investigate that could take years you know months if not years to investigate terms of who is who has only hook up what's causing the problem down to the sub catchment that's going out fault right away so this allowed this contract allows you to do further testing and i guess the larger point though is not only do we have to do testing we need to figure out a plan to address it  ten but the other all falls and eventually on the charles river watershed itself right now yes from what you don't know what you're up against in terms of the remediation challenge and i don't know that until you do we need more testing them right but the point is i think them testing should inform you and others members looking at this in terms of what is necessary to address this problem that's going to be significant seems significant nature to me that was such a just the investigation alone and it's a significant effort absolutely i mean look bear in mind the last two go arounds we've done yielded construction projects in total yeah approximately five million dollars and so if we hit this thing as hard as i want to hit it and we get lucky with our investigation and we discover all of the sources we could be looking at a construction mitigation project here somewhere in the order of four five six million dollars but we need to know what the absolute mean because to our goal has to be not mean you know we have to test but i think the logical conclusion is that we have a problem we would have gotten you know whenever the all false test if it's a monthly testing for the past three years there's an issue right and i know we've done a lot to address it and we've come a long way but clearly you're not going to get that kind of a grade or get dirty water unless there's a problem doesn't just happen right now i don't think anyone disputes that that's a problem i will say this i don't see any value in testing monthly  ten tomorrow when it comes back to already i've got many months of work ahead of me to try to find out what's causing that split that problem i can keep going back and testing our faults and every month i'm still going to get the results we've got a problem it's easy that it's easy to do the testing and say there's a problem but the testing funding here at least seven thousand perhaps we need more right to go back and do sub catchment here but this is my neighborhood right and hopefully but but you can't just stop there because it's going to eventually have all this entire area  some illegal hookup here or whatever and other issues but that could just be one of other issues that attribute to it right that's right when we get a problem like we have a ten is that sewage or is it storm  sewage finding its way into the center of the storm or so it's not phosphates and things like that it's it's sewage the other thing is if do we have access to the monthly testing results i suppose we could ask because if that's the case i mean i don't want to be too clever but if if the state or the feds are testing every month maybe we don't have to test we can we use their testing in india find out what it problem and then glen gets to figure out what of the various it's sort of like the end of this pipe and then what's flowing into this pipe this is an enormous section of town that could be any number of contributing factors to that  final and results it's right well this is we get the results but i mean it doesn't help us solve problems going backwards right isn't it still correct that if if they're just testing a vision of the if they're just testing the outflows that that we could use our money to test upstream if you will that's exactly what the state yeah you know but i think to jim's point is that you know it sounds like you're suggesting we can skip the first round right at the outfall and just going well if they're testing monthly why do we need to retest with their testing we don't trust their testing  i don't like you know i can certainly ask i don't know i don't know how stan tech would feel about putting their their sort of faith or their reputation on someone else's work especially when that would be the basis of of the beginning your report and they would identify locations they would identify when they sample i haven't seen that report this year and i actually wasn't there the last time i looked at all i found and all that e p a sent to me was a summary table of locations and communities in their grade they didn't give me any of the supporting information and so frankly i don't know when we tested our offices in october in advance of the presentation we did for the board in january but i don't know if they perspective as to let the community know you know this is we've decided to move forward this contract this is the plan with this contract you know work our way back we're testing sub catchments and just to let them know that we're making progress in trying to address the issues that make sense it does but i i think there are a couple of other things we can do one is i don't concerned about the fact that we don't test the charles river watershed and less i mean we don't mean i don't buy that last time just but i think as a community we do not want to be polluting downstream and it seems to me that there are eleven outlets on the charles river watershed side and i don't understand why we would want to test them so that we could see where we stand i mean you know in the absence of information we don't know what's going to second point is that i think we have some committees that as you say get concerned people involved in the same way that traffic works in the same way that some of these other committees do we can we can try to get on top of this i don't think it's something that you know that glen can necessarily do from his desk i think it requires more more attention from other you know other desk in addition to you that what i think you know and i think you know the idea and i'm just suggesting consideration i think that the goal has to be that we don't pollute downstream it's a difficult topic but you know things are difficult and i think we can take a couple of steps to ameliorate money i don't think we have the ability to do both the talking we're talking testing and tracing fifteen hour falls at seventy one thousand we have another eleven that we would have from charles river watershed  you know my guess is that would push that number closer to ninety i don't know i just look at the permitting becomes effective july first of two thousand and seventeen at that point we're going to have to formulate a plan for the state and federal government to test all of these out holes i have i just feel like we are already know we have a problem we should try to solve that problem before we discover another problem that's just my personal feeling  as far as the committee this is not storm water management this is this is clean water after a storm water management is your storm water before it gets into these systems so it's a little bit of a different animal  just i i heard something about what i would describe as time of concentration which is a measurement of when a drop of rain hits the surface of a catchment area and eventually discharges into some sort of a storm drain system and then i heard a comment about storm water i don't believe the two are related and i don't i don't really know what he's trying to say is because of the additional development on the hill are flowing down to training right there's more to part of your service and therefore less resistance but that's opportunity for the water to get absorbed right but if but that that overland flow that she'd flow would be a surface water problem not a groundwater problem also with the the adoption of ice storm water by law a lot of these developments and even the uplands development that wasn't captured under our storm water by law but still had to mitigate storm water on their property most of these new developments have to put  already the bylaws you get more shortens the time for the water to come down in then what happens is the basement flood in is that where the isn't that where the sewage in the storm water but that w ter that water would be captured by a drainage system catch basins and other elemental biological but i'm just saying even i mean why even though developed even existing on our roadways catch basins would catch that run off if you built a house and didn't have anything to your storm water when that rain water hit your roof came down three year period your roof drains and then oh you know if your lot was pitched the right way that rain would end up in the street and that water would eventually be captured by a catch basin it's not going to go into your neighbor's basement unless for some reason your roof lead is pointing through that to their basement window but go back to the question and what would flood the base in this area when well i think that the biggest issue with at it so it's a low lying area to begin with which means the groundwater table is naturally high there's a lot of clay in that soil so you don't get a lot of good drainage characteristics out of that soil i think it's a natural condition i don't know necessarily that that overland is affecting what's happening underground and what's happening is the areas that are allowed to for it to infiltrate the rainwater are capturing that water through the ground into the groundwater system and because of the soil conditions in the elevations in the winter of neighborhoods that eventually is causing some of them to flood now also terminology for years we heard about properties that were flooded in the winter neighborhood what we came to find out through through a lot of our investigation was a sewer pipe backing up was being characterized by some homeowners as being flooded so you really have to pay attention to exactly what you mean when you say flooded we did a six million dollar book neighborhood to bypass flow around that neighborhood to help i don't know thirty forty fifty properties in that neighborhood that were getting chronic sore back ups when we started out in that effort a lot of them were describing the situation  see what a small portion it is of the light blue lines of sewer pipes any one of which might have some kind of illegal hookup right so your challenge mark of scoping the magnitude of the problem is is great and this five or six year cycle of investing on the order like last time that in the last five or six year phase that was about what hundred thousand dollars or so in sampling which resulted in detracting two and a half million dollars worth of projects so that's the ratio you do one hundred you know one way to think about it is you do one hundred thousand dollars a test and you get two and a half million dollars of construction projects why look for more construction projects if you can even afford the two and a half million all at once so that's just the way you're thinking about it i would point that out to you the question i would have is why this circle why this neighborhood what do we know that increases the risk that this neighborhood is a source of problems is it arbitrary you said at the beginning it was fairly arbitrary is there a number of miles of pipes is there a number of toilets in this area  completely random i thought i made that right i'll explain it again i'm just wondering now i understand that it's completely random that it's at the outer edges of the blotter shed i don't know the reason i chose it was because it was it was a very simple area to capture leading up to that one manhole tributary that comes out about ten this has sub tributaries in a way and he's just partial ing out each one so i just think it would be great if stan tac and the department could could assess not just the ease of sampling but the risk that there's a problem in this whole outfall ten catchment area for instance we have a school with many toilets concentrated in one area we have a school up on until we have you know places where there are more toilets per square mile of drainage then other places that if we could clear them would be clearing a lot there are a lot of different ways to think about it but i think this is a reasonable approach to take and i really appreciate the public presentation here and the amount of information one's been giving me with my endless questions that's really great but i would like to understand when how citizens can help because there's a whole bunch of citizen science that e p a is supporting and you know can we dip into catchments and you know and can we help in some way can we help publicize because the root cause of some of these problems are things that homeowners don't already know about are there ways to publicise that that citizens can help with while the engineers are working on finding and fixing problems and so those are those are some of my comments and i also appreciate the g i s system  layers that have now been put up on the website so citizens can find how things drain in their neighborhood and just start to get an understanding of things like that so i think this is great i just i just i do it for a few magnets is right for me it just seems to it's testing there so it's having a you know we we have a plan but have we have a plan that we have to build upon sort of moving forward understanding full well that it's going to cost money as your loan you know zero interest loans that no interest lo we can tap into things of that nature at the at the last two programs we took advantage of d p s two percent borrowing program i think i think the testing is a is the first step in the gym so that are somewhat c m e i think that's absolutely correct but i think beyond that mean for the board you know working with dave and phyllis terms of what's the next step mean that if it if one hundred thousand as you say emory results in two point five million dollars worth of need how do we fund that you know we don't have it within our operating budget so how do we how do we go about this in a logical systematic way there we're addressing the more significant issues first as a priority which is challenging because you get a sort of work you way back in actually where this thing goes over and you know and how do we sort of fund that over multiple years that's affordable for this community or if i just want to point out that rather than a working their way back what plan instanter doing is working from the outside a lot of people or of years and i don't and one of the things that struck me you mentioned doing some of your testing in the poll and i think that is a very important thing because a lot of folks are away in the summer time and so the sources of jad things happening may not be happening in august but that's a great point when you were going to use fam pull in october you've got everybody back schools are back open and you're much more likely to sample real problem at that point in time so i think i just want to emphasize that i thought that was a very good move to do that sampling hours when people would be home using the bathroom facilities right right right yeah we've considered all that's a fair point so thank you yes sue bass precinct three yeah this is very exciting and i'm glad to see it happening so for years for our seventy one thousand dollars which comes out of the sewer rates right it doesn't come out of the capital budget or anything that's correct they're going to test results of the sampling at the all falls will dictate where we go from there the manhole on brighton street and that that was all just an exercise to illustrate how how one goes about trying to narrow down what the source of contamination of where the source of contamination is that example of that manhole in brighton st could be any number of places within a particular watershed area oh i see so but you really do already know that and so there's this big problem of how do you so you aren't that so the seventy one thousand dollars doesn't cover doing mark neighborhood or any other neighborhood in that section no it does but the number is intended to cover all of the sampling that would be necessary in that number is based on past experiences where some of the al falls have consistently tested clean adding additional sampling rounds to try to give us a better opportunity to catch problems you know that's the number that we're at seventy one three possible with that we have to amend that and add some additional capacity but we really won't know that until we get into the original testing but let's plan to meet me then everything i would say just to help leno because he's just buried phyllis can you i'd love to just i think it's really important because this has gotten so much press that we you know publicize as much as possible what we're doing this is a great initial step perhaps you could have bobby help on that you know post to the website or d p do you know the community of elements website or are you the facebook of social media that we use in terms of what doing the testing you are performing just to get that information out into the public and you're just too busy to do well yeah well you know what and i think we can lean on bobby to help with some of that that and you know what we would welcome his assistance as can we i would say that i spring than they would be but the houses around the lake from this wood system so this might have something to do with the same thing here you're runoffs considered when you're going to you're testing because of the frozen ground ok thanks  impasse and others that contribute to the dialogue here we should come and thank you so much we have more traffic advisory committee recommendations to place four way stop signs truthy feet from lexington street on either side i'm assuming or no parking seventy of the twenty i'm an old odd numbered side so need to walk us through that chamber street so you want to just run through this quickly for us sure i think you have slides here too  are just you know just to help people get oriented and there are some statutory construction around our ability to place four way stop signs that's correct you just put them anywhere that's correct so i guess in general terms germane to the four intersections that we'll be discussing there is a federal document known as the manual and uniform traffic control devices that manual governs just about everything that is related to traffic rules and regulations signage pavement markings traffic signal stop signs it really it encompasses everything that's traffic related so within that manual there there are warrants that have to be met in order for a community to install a four way stop approach so that it in my capacity as the town engineer my evaluation of these intersections as is done through the prism of the requirements in that manual i just want to point out that selectman williams says the as the traffic advisory committee liaison from the board came to me about a year ago and said you know he just came on the board and he had just come into a conversation on a four way stop that had been discussed and we had a conversation about it in jim said you know there's probably other areas in the town that would benefit my bills or titles i told him yeah and i said well there absolutely are but we've never really proactively gone after them and jim kind of made a suggestion well you know signs are not to be used to mitigate speed ok so if anyone out there was thinking boy i love to put a stop sign at this particular point on my street because cars are traveling too fast that is not an accepted or an appropriate use of a stop sign and that's why the manual has very specific warrants that have to be looked at when you're considering a four way stop approach and so the first one up here is lexington that beach in burnham and by the way once again germane to all intersections traffic advisory committee held public hearings invited the public hearings a series of public hearings to talk about a lot of different issues on lexington street this is really the last piece that that is left out there for us to address and this is the request to make this a four way stop intersection it meets the warrants a couple of ways one there are visibility issues there's a stone wall in this corner there's a stone wall on this corner makes it very difficult for traffic traffic coming up to lexington street to see cars coming out of the side street it's equally difficult for traffic on these side streets to see down lexington street because of that obstruction at this secular intersection between february twelfth two thousand and twelve and july of two thousand and fifteen the street the the laws governing how you construct accessible ramps didn't allow you to have one ramp to serve to cross walks so the further down the so it was and it was pushed down because there were there were at the time there was an obstruction on one of the sides of the road that didn't allow us to place it in closer to the intersection part of the work in making this a four way stop approach we are going to eliminate this cross walk and move it back up side it's you can't see it from this graphic but as you're coming down lexington street heading towards waverly square there's a drop off in lexington street the gray drops if you're a if you're at a location back here you can't see that walk across very well it means that you don't have a you don't have an area that has been designated as a crossing point so you can cross anywhere your any able bodied person can and can make that protectively speaking cross walk is telling you that that's a safe place to cross i'd have to look at your might i have a sense that there's something on this corner that prevented us from getting a wrap and because you can't just drop across work without the accessible ramp ok my sense is there was there was something here  is the basic park reservoir generally middle school is in this location here the  middle school no no in that and you know what it's funny that you say that because that's one of the issues with this intersection is that the motorists who travel on oakley road when they get to this intersection are they feel like they need to stop because just the delay of is on this leg of pace and road there is actually a dangerous intersection sign which is to me is also sort of historically a clear indication that there's been issues with the intersection and so our proposal is obviously  to put a stop lines in on both sides of the road make this a four way stop maybe relocate some of the stock lines that exist to make the visibility a little bit better i want to point out there's been some some requests over the years to have a crosswalk in the location in this sort of this side the proof section where we problem is this is a city of cambridge property this is a driveway that leads up to the reservoir property is really no good place for us to obstruct the visibility issues with the reservoir of the the stone work and the stairs that are in this location here makes this a very difficult sight line and also this vegetation on this corner that makes a line's very difficult this is another intersection that has a dangerous intersection sign on one of the approaches a lot of near misses at this location as well just like i said just like another obvious location to look to make safe or you know i happened to be there at the top the late this was discussed u k and there was a there was a gentleman who lived in one of the corners and in he he spoke against this for a reason which i don't recall but i think it had something to do what was shared with the natives right which wasn't really true because i had the information i presented to the committee that night so the committee was really hearing the fact he had it at the same time the neighborhood was but in deference to the gentleman we did discussion is clearly wrote it's way street if you like that that's in this location here this is a tough traffic i apologize that's a difficult area to say yeah you know but a year or so ago where they're coming down the hill there that's job but you know what they take their child seriously and i wanted to use points and all briefly this is from the vision twenty one report and i wanted to point out that within this report there under the heading of areas of greater focus there were two goals for which a majority of respondents indicated the town was performing not very well the second goal which is the the one that relates to us here this evening but tommy see the poor evaluation regarding a cop accomplishment was we will manage traffic through and around town to ensure the train quality of our neighborhoods and safety of pedestrians and bicycles so i just wanted to point out that efforts like what what we just did with a four way stop approaches the redesign road and the the better channeling and better management of the traffic through that two and a half mile corridor the work that's being done in belmont center interpol road the focus on pedestrian amenities the focus on bicycle accommodation i just wanted to point out the nexus between the vision twenty one report and the expectations of the residents in the work the traffic advisory committee still you agree jim please pass along our thanks to the tac for all their hard work on this you know was coincidental ok it was just sort of a journey let's face it but i want to score four square miles not a very large community in terms of land area and so if you identify the areas that you feel need to be addressed if they just happen to a fall in the way they did but being in the position is posable for chandler saint we had a resident brain an issue before the traffic advisory committee the traffic advisory committee held a public hearing to get the neighborhood important there were a couple of issues of concern here is chandler street and the diagram here here's lexington street there are a lot of vehicles parking all day on chandler the first issue is that they were they were parking so close to the intersection of lexington street it was difficult for vehicles to get out of chandler on to lexington because of the visibility it was difficult for vehicles to turn off of lexington and get on to chandler because than that the intersection was bottlenecked with cars parked on both sides at additional concern that was raised was with the all day parking channel a street had become very narrow and there was at least one bit of testimony describing how an emergency vehicle had difficulty getting down channel street one day because there was such a little room between the two parking lanes and so the traffic advisory committee recommendation is to posts or signage fifty feet from lexington street on either side where there would be no parking this is very similar to a measure that was taken on burnham street is the other parking meters you know up north we're not sure i mean we suspect that that may be part of it but nobody was i think was really able to say conclusively whether it was or wasn't there every day except for we can't know there's even but there's even issues on weekends well you know what else and the other second more street here there were already restrictions on sycamore street chandler street is here and then burnham street is up here so we know one of the things that tac talked about was that if the source was commuter parking are we going to be pushing them you know which onto another road the thought was there's already restrictions on sycamore street burnham street seem to be far enough away that that wasn't going to be a consumer walk right right and so  not talking about our here just talking about with well away from the road it's to park it's our restricting parking within fifty feet of lexington street on both sides and then on the odd numbered side of the road which is  go down to the town lie town line cuts through something like this and then this is this is what its residents are going where the presidents are fine with that traffic advisory committee any time they take an action like this they have sort of a six month trial  period if there's any negative feedback already other comments or concerns that come in they will really look at the issue six months they've completely blown it we have the signs taken down if everybody seems to be justifiably that we deal with it so you know they haven't done that yet no waiting for your authorization to be done that's clearly aimed at the commuter parking than if you say no parking between seven and ten but that means you can't get there and commute someplace else yet i think that there would certainly be captured i'm not sure if anyone else has parking there i don't know the name one co y said commuters but you're right i mean ok that time restriction there what about an foresman when you first put them in to do do they go i'm the engine at the beginning i'm going to assume that the police department would handle it the way they handled the restrictions on sycamore street which is that the residents would call they may have a patrol car that goes by periodically but by and large they would rely on the rez somebody signs in town them to know parking to mean it's really challenging i signs going to be because we seem to be having a number of different colors like dark blue you know you know i'm talking to something you know like i'm glowing of simony is that there are rules about you know the front of the train to approve placing no parking here to court of signs on chandler street fifty feet away from the intersection of lexington street and no parking between seventy and ten am signs be placed on the odd numbered side of the elementary and secondary education whose name escapes me at the time you know tim he was there to answer any questions we may have we also had a representative  against the minuteman high school building project because those nine towns along with the second sixty six decker in towns in effect voted for it now the six decker in towns have declared within the revise reach an agreement that they are leaving the district so from their point of view but the new husky was great  they don't have to pay for it leaving the district and perhaps they will have an opportunity to send students back and what i took you waited to all that was there was the focus was clearly  in supporting the revised regional agreement we have decided as a community we did not want to leave the district that we wanted to remain in solve the problem at hand from the chapel point of view and sorry i want to give just some background for everyone here but  and you know i felt confident the time we felt confident time that we be able to work with the other night night communities that remain to solve the the capital project issue and unfortunately that hasn't been the case that the nine remaining towns feel very strongly that they should move forward with a six hundred twenty eight student facility even though almost maybe a little more than half or half of the students that will be attending at least from the moment projections will be from the member towns the other half will be from member towns we did have an opportunity to ask the gentleman from the department of elementary and secondary education whether in or not in fact that once we were to move forward on this revised regional agreement that nine member towns that were just continue to send students to the school would affect be compelled to pay some amount of capital fee for the building project so  support our efforts to encourage nonmember towns to join district for example waltham is looking to establish a occasional education program in african convince them to join our district rather than build their own and watertown the same  strongly that they wanted to move forward with this building project and we became also clear to them is that belmont least the representative there and also our tom meeting support a couple building projects i feel as though this is  an oversized project that it's twice the size of the need so the decision at that meeting was that the only way forward because right now there's no authorization to borrow because fifteen towns voted for the debt one voted against it or go to a district wide vote so now it's what we're faced with that's why our town clerk is here to talk about what is involved in a district wide vote that's now scheduled for september twentieth two thousand and sixteen from noon until eight p m correct on let me just further state that the way they were vies regional government works that if this well if the town as a as a voter to poultice is not a tummy vote this is just all the rest of the registered voters in town can vote on the twentieth of the sixteen member towns vote for the building project and then we can move forward considering some of the votes in other towns at the time meaning level you know it's likely least the representatives of the minuteman high declared already that the district white vote will happen now on tuesday september twentieth at the polls under the state law that allowed this district which is chapter seventy one i think sixteen and you know better than i  indicates that the district alone gets to decide how this vote for the death of course and so that means that they get to choose the places they get to choose the hours and they get to choose the dates and so they have chosen september twentieth from noon to eight which is a tuesday and they have declared that they would like to hold the election at one location in each one of the sixteen towns that are still members because the other member towns of the six are not leaving yet they're still on the hook until two thousand one hundred place and every time that's correct belmont traditionally votes in seven locations and eight precincts which are with about eighteen thousand voters and many of the other towns as you indicated are expecting very slow turnouts from what i've heard from the other town clerks because they think it's sort of a rubber stamp this is an interpretation of course and more of a rubber stamp what their town meetings already have voted and many of those have already held contingent debt exclusion votes associated with those time to try to they already have to take six or seven of them have already been for have had these kinds of votes said they've added into their town elections so for belmont this will be the first election related to the minuteman building so the questions that sort of rush to us are when do we need to make this choice and it will be by advice of the board of selectmen to the minuteman district and david gill the tennis traitor has asked me to disputing that since i'm the most familiar in terms of running elections and when we need to when we need to advise them and how we come to that choice those are the two reasons that i'm here tonight first minute man has indicated to the town that they expect answer from us by the twenty second of july and that is not a big deal if we're allowed to have seven locations in a precincts we do that all the time we're running an election on september eighth which is the state primary running  however they can say yes or no the warrant is issued not by you but by them and so the warrant i have seen in various drafts of the wind as it comes through and all these other towns have picked their single places we had heard that arlington had an opportunity to hold their election at ten their usual ten will cations with twenty two precincts but then when i sent a message to the minuteman questioning them and saying we'd like you same thing  there are two directions to go one seven location is ten eight precincts by far that is the preferred option because john failon who's the superintendent schools this is very much in back of that because obviously the one location is going to involve  because in belmont we cannot guarantee that it's going to be a five percent turnout i do not know whether there will be a campaign finance committee that's created to go for and against i have to assume that there will be an activist group one way or the other both through the district and a separate from the district so i'm predicting that it could be even up to thirty percent vote and so depending on that that means that's fifty eight hundred people i can't run that through us of a single location such as this this is the room we're sitting in is a polling location i can put six thousand people in eight hours through this the numbers just don't pan out so the two sort of locations are two theories or one seven locations eight precincts we can do that no but we have to ask them whether we do that or not we have asked them i've sent them a letter particularly asking them for permission to approve that and then of course if they gave an indication i would bring it back and david and i would sit down with you and it was said what they wanted it was a decision not mine it's yours  from the request should the request for pool already came from me because i provided them a lot of the tale about what it would take to run one place because there's a lot of cost involved in that as well and so that would be the routine and we've already put that forth haven't heard anything back except for they are in discussions about that we were hoping to piggy back on the arlington decision but since they backed away from the island to decision we really thought i wouldn't you know i'm i'm you know i'm all for white voter turnout and there's no way to suppress the vote no than to limit the location change where people are accustomed to yes and make it inconvenient because of long lines and as a per the proposal that we put forth to minuteman to kevin the honey i'm proud to be passed along is the belmont because of our higher potential voter turnout the lack of parking and accessibility in our little four square miles that i'm not one of our existing point locations would be able to have the throughput capacity that would allow our voters to substantially be able to  vote and we have looked at all of them or i'll give you an example the one that immediately jumps to mind is hey we have two precincts already voting at the beach streets and you're with that would that not be a deal logical choice the answer to that is that if we actually had a higher turnout then even in the thirty's we could have people in pars attempting to get to beach street and give up because they can't get past waverley and beach and that's exactly what we don't want in terms of a free election system we can't have that and so that turns it into an inaccessible took ation and we could have some real problems with that and legal challenges so that's just one example there are i have spoken with each one of the major departments in town to make sure for example i spoke with blan engineer and talked to the police the fire and the facilities department and we have come up with what we believe would be a reasonable plan to have a singular location it's not perfect and is definitely has some costs and so the question that i have put on behalf of the town to the district is if you are really trying to achieve a lower cost alternative in belmont a one precinct is not your best choice hi it will be comparable if not higher so what can we do to help as the select but i mean i do think that any effort that you could put towards working with kevin mahoney and the folks at the district to say to them please do i tried to get a date certain the date that they are well they've told all the towns and that the answer must come to them by july twenty second they are running a meeting with the town clerks all of the town clerks of the sixteen communities on the twenty sixth four days different well i mean i some of the detail is is still coming together but it costs to run an election all day now sixteen thousand dollars so we aren't running it all day so we're somewhere in the twelve thousand dollars twelve thousand dollars that might be more world i mean a proportionately it's a good amount of money so the cost that we would be talking about there are those are costs such as we have to have police officers we have to have six  workers at each precinct we have to you know buy food for people there's a lot of kind of weird costs that have to go into any elections set up customer deal staff if we were to have it in a singular location in that the one obviously is the high school is the one that is large enough to do this and it would be in the field house it is not the cafeteria to be in the field that's because school is going to be in session so the biggest problem that you have is that the field houses at one end of the building in the parking is at the other so you can't let people walk through the building so you have to make other arrangements and the things we're talking about are to ask the council on aging to allow us to have the bell device which would run continuous loops around the entire building to allow people who may have a hard time walking eight hundred feet or five hundred feet from one end to the parking lot over to the their we've just finished a new floor in the field house so we need to lay down those planking  that we just did for right that we're here on a site for graduation we have to do that it means that the building the field house is closed for two days of preparation before hand the day the election the day after so we start running into scheduling issues is very extensive interest of all the details and not just one more thing is we've never run an election at the high school before it's a hope those are things that we just turn to because i think it's likely to result in a lower oh well and then lastly the biggest concern for me is not honestly costa no that should be but it is not my biggest concern my biggest concern is what sammy brought up which is there are three elections in a very short period of time and the law requires that voters be notified if their polling place is changed at least twenty days before that election so if the election changes and it's voted on on september twentieth by september first seven days before the state primary everybody in town sort of a cost right i don't i don't really know which driver but they clearly made a choice it's websites not what we need to be also very careful of they did not say as strongly as i need to is that we've been working with superintendent failon but there is no they go to one place there has to so arlington is now back in the same boat as we are now actually it has to result in lower turn on that perhaps they think that's more favorable thing i think look whether you're for or against you know the building project it's important to have as broad representation as possible from the community terms of a vote and make it as easily accessible to them as you know to to be able to express their democratic right to in fact vote for democracy if you have to to limit the number of polling places and you know and i'm sure that we'll have you know what appropriate voter turnout and representation from different precincts seniors in town i mean you know i can just well imagine you know the who you know now trying to find getting out of the high school to vote i mean yes it's just it's really unfortunate that they would compel us to do that but what is that language again the i in sixteen and there's some discussion not have transportation with it but it's up to them and they're the ones who prepare for the record i have no children grandchildren never go to any of these schools so i mean here in the interest of the children there's in this town who come and tell you what is even you know the rules how to tell not call an informational meeting to support a particular point of view but we can certainly call an informational meeting to discuss all of the issues today is there any way we can we can force the state belmont voted against that the other towns did not and so now the district has the right to have this this district wide vote in that that's what we're going to do a policy making board and you would have a certain authority that you're allowed to act within your authority to make a comment one of the but one of the most important things to remember is that you don't have the right to push information to voters without their specific a ffirmative request for it so even for example if you prepared a leaflet talking about the pros and cons you may not just send it out to everyone wholesale you may only answer people's for specific requests for that information on a one vote the laws of campaign finance that it's not that it isn't it isn't a meeting just sort of try to sway voter opinion as one terms of answering questions i think residents would have about what happens if we vote against ever vote for it and what do we do to fill it in david thoughts about what you know that's going to be a strategic discussion on talking you know things that we want to get into that we made fact meet with mr hall just to