good evening gentle we are here calling to order first item is to remind you about belmont drives electric which is to join us for a ride and drive event on sunday september seventeenth from one till four pm at the general middle school good you can test drive electric vehicles they'll be several dealers and local owners with electric vehicles available to check out and to test drive pre registered the website or just show up your chance to experience and compare today's modern evey's to plug in hybrids at the same time this can be community information fair as well with goals and benefits for adoption of electric vehicles and belmont community tables with information on all matters of conservation and food truck from phoenix grill eat clean drive clean music games and more giveaways for test drives including a free weekend rental of a tesla model x which is the big expensive older ones so w w w dot com what drives electric dot org or six one seven to yes i also want to mention i have a moment of silence if we could for today being september eleventh and also for the victims of hurricanes harvey and are my own particular was we sit here at the electric light board we're fortunate to have electricity when a lot of people don't we can have a moment of silence for that before we begin  thanks are first two items on the agenda is to go into executive session and then we'll be coming back on some other items including the acting general managers report discussion with the edward j collins center and public management proposal and for a few minutes and discussion of delinquent accounts policy so we're going to i'd like to get a motion to go into executive session to conduct strategy sessions in preparation for negotiations with nonunion personnel and to conduct collective bargaining sessions and contract negotiations with nonunion personnel so on the regular agenda craigan next item is acting general managers report ok to begin with and just like to inform the board we're doing our part as part of the hurricane or we've  re evaluated to find out if it needs to go longer or if they'll send them back if actually also been reached out to through a p p a to send crews to st thomas virgin islands and possibly st john's in the virgin islands but still ongoing trying to famous trying to figure out what they can do that due to the devastation on the island and of course we have to maintain some semblance of a construction group back here so we can send everybody as much as they may like to go down there so that was the first course of action second i just want to provide an update on where we stand with our large substation project over the last actually all of the month of stations from of a source lines to our new substation the blip on substation those planned outages went very smoothly all customers at this point as of august thirtieth served from  we had a few customers call in just a notification overlap or confusion there but that's you know it's an inconvenience to the customers that might have been notified or not notified but outside of that and so that's what they were serve from prior to that and now what we did is we remove those six lines from of a sauce and we reconnected those two blue pond so there's still six lines feeding the substations they're is discussion on edward j collins center for public management proposal both almost like governance and then also general manager search process i guess for those who are unaware we had discussions before regarding whether we would have the column center out of you mass boston  perform a governance analysis and provide advice on how to run the light department light board and such and we would then sent out for proposal and received proposal back and now we're going to talk about whether whether or not we were going to do this and if so whether they were going to do that and how they were going to do that and if we were going to pay for how much you mean my feeling is that it's been a bit as i thought about it since we last discussed it it's been sort of there's been a lot of change with the li department both obviously now i'm the chair and we've got craig and things and we've been doing the cut over there's a lot sort of going on i'm not really i guess looking to create additional any chaos or any change until things sort of settle out a little bit the other thing is i'm not so sure whether the problem has been the governance in particular or something or the people who are involved sometimes you have to send it in a filibuster you know everybody's mad at it when the party that's in out i mean it's like we have to do this now we can do this governance thing at any time if we decide to do it so i don't know particular problem with the light board as it is though i think that i have as an idea if some if we were to make a change would be we stay the li board and then you add let's say to other people which would be the chair of the l back in the chair of the energy committee and that we have a five member like board of which the majority is elected we point the people to the all back and unity committee we don't pick their chairs so there's a little separation as to who those other two members are interesting to try and then but they elected parties still have the control so you've expanded it brought in some more expertise through those chairs however we still retain the control that's something that i think would be maybe a reasonable way to do it and i want to argue  money for it either coming up with that idea but if that goes then otherwise i'm not exactly sure that there's a whole lot of change that needs to be done because in a lot of the personnel change and the other things that we've been seeing i think you've been very positive this year i'm feeling  them that's an interesting thought i never thought about that i mean it's something we have to think about that's more like can like the idea i've always felt that this board doesn't have the expertise nor time to deal with the day to day sort of operation yeah i think that's so what use would say the situation is that they would be nice to have a sort of resident but how do you but then that becomes political rights and then what when instead what you have is you you say the chair of our back is a member like board as well an equal voting member correct and the chair of the energy committee which i like that idea as well and then we did that that five member board then serves as the life more interesting and that way you go to remove some of the politics from it but still keeps the there's been a number of changes with regard to the number of changes with regard to the general management should as we just discussed we've had three no one force and the board of selectmen has its turnover built in well so i think your idea may be a good idea but i would rather hear from a group that has a chance to survey the marketplace and see how other people are doing it so that if your idea is the best idea we can go yeah that's the best idea bring the report together they say it will take four months hundred twenty days and then move will know what to do  i also think that going forward we have a number of different challenges that we need the attention to and i i'm really concerned about the idea of the of selectmen doing both like the light company and so i would like to see for me for a minimal amount of money we can have columns go out perform their due diligence come back and tell us what you know what the thinking is in the marketplace in the end we of course can decide what to do and then that will give us we have four months to you know to build the stability that you're talking about still eighteen thousand dollars i acting acting when you need to do a search at some point i think we've all generally agreed and we were discussing we got to this point of hiring which i would fully support the constant need to do that through to the street for us and wonder whether in the context of that let's say we start that today a component of that perhaps is to provide some thoughts in governance not not to separate sort of things you know one thing as i think that we had i think phyllis took a look at we have her look around the different muni's to see what the others are used for common center in the search if they've never done them before because they may not have contacts in the industry who they could call upon to apply for the position there was that group really municipal resources inc m r yeah they did the town administrator sorry to do that apparently they do like department searches the beauty of this for the later part of the way yes under the statute we don't have to put it out for us you don't have to do a search for the search committee for the search group we can just pick them without having to go through them all that includes we get you so if we h to advise us and for eighteen thousand dollars for a twenty four million dollar company that has it and that's going to reset its rates redo its budget how how long does this budget done for three years we have a five year five year you know i think there's we've had four general managers in what last seven years for general managers in the last seven years we've had nine selected is that right you  again familiarity with the current statutory basis and customs and practices of belmont white conduct a series of interviews to gain use of current commissioners advisory committee members key actors opinion leaders in belmont identifying document the various forms of government of municipal light departments in massachusetts then if i how the statutory basis for unique form of government a bill might light might be created and specify options what you suggest would be one of the options to prepare a draft report for the town for paraffine a report and based on task one and one through four to support the border like the missioners in preparing a preferred option for action by town meeting you get all that for eight hundred thousand dollars that's that's a great deal it will cost us more to have the discussion without manager people they need to know what the governance is going to be if they're going to join our team so to me it's the chicken always lays the egg but you could always hire the person and then they can help us work through the governance piece or we on some more let's try to be efficiency i mean i think we could decide on governance prior to the search because if we decide that we we either hire cons number one or secondly we don't and we decide to go with your idea then we've decided and then they're going to if we have no action then we have no action and we are the light board we hire a new general manager and as you indicated reps the general manager can assist us to really read we consider governance i just think that we have to me we have to a very least i like  that the board of selectmen have so many responsibilities and duties that it's spreading you awfully thin to also be the light board and by virtue of the fact that there are only i don't i don't have i'm not going to pine as to what we you should be doing right now but i think it's worth looking into and certainly you are short of a long term it should be looked into to see we're going to what i've been trying what i've talked to a new craig about doing is taking the most recent minutes and taking a chunk of them each of our meetings and working our way backwards so these are regular session minutes for july seventh twenty seventeenth twenty seventeen eighteenth twenty seventeen july thirty first twenty seventeen august seventh twenty seventh seventeen as well as the executive session minutes from july thirty first twenty twenty seventeen august seventh twenty seventeen i  e one comment i do have is with regard to the internal recall control report that jim gave us on the thirty first or that was a young thirty first  know this is the attachment right ok as it is yeah ok fine i'm fine with this so i make a motion that we approve the meeting the municipal light board meeting of minutes of tuesday july eighteenth two thousand and seventeen moved second i was in favor of the executive session minutes we're not releasing them we're just voting to approve them at this point for july the executive session minutes for july thirty first twenty seventeen make a of whether you want to talk about the collection process or if this was born from the internal report of the last meeting i think you may have spoken about her but basically what we do is every year starting about april first people fifteen and he and a bill that is over fifty dollars and forty five days overdue we send a reminder notice after ten days later we send a notice of a terminate what we call terminations notice and then another five days goes by beyond that and they're subject to terminations at that point sixty days past two you can cut off their electricity it's more of a ninety day process it's forty five days after the due date of the bill and the bills a good thirty day it's the thirty day window to pay that bill in the in the first place this is are policies and procedures procedures are constantly changing and evolving so we have several new employees in the like department our customer service groups we thought it might be good to have them come in and sit with us and walk medical letter it's somewhat of a hands off we can't do anything to collect that money from or from a writer for instance we've had a customer who has moved in with in town typically when a customer moves in they have an upstanding balance and that's an opportunity that we have to collect before we provide a service in this case it's not it's no longer an option because they've never left town to not consider a new customer and we can't collect anything on it in the areas on the previous account that's a d p you process as well as i mentioned our hands are tied very tightly there's not a whole lot we can do with protected accounts so that's why we reach out to you to see what we can do to sit with them and get maybe some more insight to any recent changes in the policies that might give us some room to change or to adjust our brought i think the reason for bringing this up it came up was we were talking about the liquor license regulations and whether or not you know to make sure that we get proof that everybody's up to date in their payments before they come for us and get a license then it came up as to what exactly the rules are the policies are doing need to revisit them for the light department whoever it sounds like d p regulates this so heavily there's probably not a lot we can do yes that's on the protected accounts the unprotected accounts again these things still yes they still regulate those the protected accounts are residential accounts is that correct that's correct yes so commercial account like a lot are talking about would be different they would not be subject to these protections no i'm just saying that this came up out of that discussion of a lot further a emanation reinstatement many i don't do not know the number i think ninety days and i understand the need for paid people have to pay their bills but that's pretty short period on their seniors in town perhaps they're struggling for you know i mean i don't know if we try to work with as many customers as possible so as part of our process if a customer is willing to work with us we take the whatever's in arrears we divide that over a four month payment plan so as long as they breathe a sig docking with us they agree to pay that back over four months we work with the customer and there is no they appreciate that i just think one hundred days to me seems a short period of time when we just cut off electricity but that's just my feeling i mean perhaps it needs to be six just laid only we meaning ninety days it's not significant doesn't matter if we should have which was the ninety days or six months or try to negotiate payment plans they give up it's a six month to make good on this you know we're going to terminate what you know maybe it's not even a problem at all just jump in again i know the d p you as craig has mentioned has quite extensive rules and regulations which i think generally considered very conservative in terms of protecting customers and not subject in them to receivable and we're not in that position well you can find out what the others are doing as i don't want to you know i don't know what they do thank you ok just for the for the future for our next item just so people know our schedule for the rest of the year the municipal life board we meeting october sixteenth at five thirty nov twentieth at five thirty and december eighteenth at five thirty so stay tuned one other thing i want to talk about in that is in the minutes of july eighteenth and the regular minutes right i asked jim palmer to prepare a memo proposing what could be done to fix the issues in the independent auditors control report ok are they working on that you know what i'm talking about issues the integrity you know we had the we had the union and then they have that control report which is separate and it's in it's in here i don't want to be too but i think i think you know craig should organize somebody to tell us how the resolving those issues there is a permanent audit committee meeting with the light department that's coming up and i forget the date but it's coming up soon and i'm assuming we'll be we had a permanent audit committee meeting on the town side last week but we have a permanent out of committee on the  e side soon because after the belmont light year ends as you know the end of december so that's coming up right so i was something that would be on the agenda for that meeting so we haven't discussed it we haven't met yet what we asked for it on august first so i don't know if it had been