the following podcast is produced or sponsored by community members the content views and opinions expressed are those of the participants in do not reflect those of v m c or the town of dhamma b m c welcomes your comments call us at six one seven four eight four two four four three or email us at access at belmont media dot org hello everyone welcome to community conversations i'm your host roger col next week starts the annual town meeting for belmont town meeting is belmont's legislative body and i think it is generally believed that this could be could well be an historic town meeting we have with us today to talk about town meeting and do you give a preview of town meeting joanna jubilance who was the senior multimedia journalist for the belmont citizen herald thanks for stopping over joanna great to be thanks for having me i think rather than looking it trying to look at each article there are perhaps three articles that could really change the town o that's one you said historic i totally agree so i met with mike widmer the town moderator this is going to be his eleventh town meeting from belmont and he told me what the three most contentious exists and just about every surrounding town now right you go to staples and cambridge and they're like do you want to buy a bag and you're like oh i forgot you guys have that plastic bag and so that's kind of going to be if this passes that's what will be happening in belmont there those thin film single use plastic bags with handles that a lot of us like to collect and keep you know for our dog waste no just kidding but you know they do come in handy don't they they're there you know they're great to have around but they're not recyclable curbside if you want to recycle them you have to bring them to the back to the store special places yes like the supermarket and the the ban is a citizen's petition it didn't it originate with from within town got no so i did it originated as a citizen's petition and then the selectmen actually took it on and submitted it as their own article but it did start out as a citizen's petition but the selectmen were so much in support of it that they said let's let's make this an article let's think for a minute about what the man or to whom the band applies the the logical ones to think of our plastic bags it would it would apply to them some of the little stores like belmont toys the toy shop a bellman and champions i think the plastic bags they use are not the thin film ones so it may not apply to them so it really depends on the type of interac yeah so it's not all plastic bags it's the as you were saying in films and you'll use plastic back then when you say not all plastic bags there are thin film bags that don't have handles that will not be banned and those are the ones that people use like for meat products wet products newspapers dry cleaning those bags will not be banned and the purpose of this is environmental the plastic bags get into particularly the marine yes environment and have an adverse impact it's not really a climate change issue it is a waste or a litter not a litter but a way yeah and but it is it is it does pollute the environment because because there are carbon emissions that i think are released from these bags from the production and yeah from the back yeah so i definitely think it's definitely going to help the environment not to have them not and not only will it help the marine life it'll help it'll help our environment you know stop polluting and there's actually statistics that the plastic bag proponents plastic bag band proponents will be presenting which i think you'll find pretty shocking when you look at some of these numbers so i'm going to put you on the spot ok let me on the spot what what is your prediction ben much town meeting my answer and i prediction is it will pass put your logo on them and people walk around with them and it's kind of like free advertising for your business so that's that's the other thing that the plastic bag ban proponents are saying you know could be good for businesses and they'll actually save this it's a store like star market could save a thousand dollars a week by not having those plastic bags anymore because that's what it costs them for those thin film bags well actually the advertising is i think it's a legitimate point  and it's not as though i have a separate bag for my books or my food i just carry my bag with me advertising foodies it wherever you go right right  so so that would be a good thing you know and so we'll see i don't think i will be surprised to see this one get as much debate as some of the others and i definitely think it will pass that's my prediction lots lots of the the day they'll be voting so one of the article that is expected to generate the most discussion and i say one of the articles who has in fact it's spread over about three or four articles has to do with the future of marijuana dispensary in the town of baum out in right there on medical retail marijuana yeah and there's a sequence scene issue with the consideration of marijuana the the first issue actually isn't on the annual town meeting but it will require a special town meeting so can meeting will the special town meeting will will convene on may second and they will consider whether town meeting will consider whether doma should opt out of  allowing marijuana dispensary recreational marijuana dispensaries and in dama yes so there was a citizen's petition which town meeting member precinct eight pam eager excuse me is behind pamela eager she got that citizens because she got over two hundred signatures to get it on the town meeting warrant and basically what it what it is saying is opt out completely of any kind  of medical retail marijuana stablish meant i think with the exception of marijuana dispensaries and but but if it is so that's going to require i forget now if it's a two thirds vote a majority vote but i think it's a majority vote and and let's be clear that when we say opt out what that means is that non medical marijuana dispensaries would be barred from locating in the town about much right but it doesn't and it doesn't end there if this passes the town meeting there has to be a special town election which will ultimately decide whether or not they'll be allowed in belmont and it be up to either the selectmen the selectmen will have to decide if they'll be a special town election or they could do a referendum with five hundred certified signatures to get it have a special election to opt out so if ken and meeting vote to opt out in the board of selectmen say despite town meetings vote reach choose not to have a town don't know my feeling is they just want to see and see what happens that's actually what adam dash selectman chairman said monday night at the warren briefing he said let's i want to see what meeting says and then decide  there is this is going to be complicated roger because six amendments were filed by town meeting member emma thurston from precinct one and tonight they're going to be voting tonight twenty fifth  going to be the by law review committee meeting is meeting and they're going to look at these amendments and decide if any or some or all are going to actually be voted on at town meeting and that's going to really  this even more but she wanted to give people choices because the citizen's petition says opt out completely so she has amendments that i think will allow certain kinds of marijuana establishments to open and give give people some choices i know that she supports the retail marijuana she's she's been pretty vocal about that because of the income it would bring the town and we're going to get into that a little bit later  if you ask me how i predict this is going to go roger it's really hard to say it's really hard to say based on what i've seen come in my e mail for letters to the editor and also on facebook in response to an editorial that i posted you know about what kind of message a retail marijuana establishment would have you know would send bill my children i'm i feel like there's a lot of people who are for it more the more for  against it but i actually could be wrong because i asked the selectmen i did a public records request and i got all the emails from that went into the select my mailbox for the month of january i didn't get february march and april but i got just january and there were twenty eight e mails to the selectmen the majority of them saying please have a special town election to let us decide if we can opt out you know i'm sure there are people out there who are saying haven't we been through this before because we had a vote not too many years ago article four not article right but it was mentioned before but there was wording in that question that said a local town could have a vote to decide if they wanted it in their town and a lot of people either may have missed it or you know it wasn't like saying it was a mandatory vote it was like you could a local town could do this so you know that's that's what i think the argument is and  it passed the question for past the margin was seven hundred seventeen votes so i think that's that's pretty close i mean we did have an eighty percent turnout for that election fourteen thousand registered voters rotors but still seven hundred seventeen is like the margin if if this were to be put to a town vote it wouldn't be a special election but it would go on the november ballot or is a campaign one way or another right well let's assume for the moment that being an economist i can always assume let's assume that marijuana retail marijuana sales proceed in the against that i don't think so i don't think so this town needs that revenue and that revenue would go into the town coffers and it could be used for you know a lot of the expenses that the town has some capital improvement projects so one of the confusions i think that exists on three percent sales tax is what it can be used for because some folks that i've talked to anyway think that well you can only go toward drug enforcement or there's a totally different separate tax there's still that three percent that would go to drug enforcement and i think this is an additional three percent that would go into the town coffers i think i'm right about that ok lot of people believe it or not still don't really know all the answers and that's why there's another article that meeting has to vote in our other communities considering similar articles i have was i know for a fact that other communities have voted in favor of that temporary moratorium and i also know for a fact that other communities have had special elections and to opt out and it and it passed so i know my home town that i grew up in just had a special election april fourteenth and it was you know to opt out and it passed when you say it passed the decision to opt in to opt out passed so they will not allow non medical retail marijuana stylishness to open in dedham but a community like dedham does have a lot of commercial tax revenue  it's it's a very commercial town so you need that extra three percent is the question and i'm not saying i'm for against this roger just so you know i'm all for getting things fixed but i'm not so  sure my question is is belmont ready for something like this it really seems that that is the big issue on the one hand there are folks like myself i will take a position people like me who think we've decided this issue and we voted to legalize the retail sell of marijuana and just like we regulate the sale of alcohol we can regulate it at the local level we can regulate this the sale of marijuana and yeah it is not the wave of the future but it is no longer the illegal drug that it was when you narcotic in a medical way but it is and hallucinogenic and so the question is do we do we want to have that here in well be one of the two most debated articles of the two thousand and eighteen what do you predict the vote will be roger not to put you on the spot i predict that the town  it will not opt out of the retail sales altogether and i'm not sure how people will vote on the the six amendments which will give a more nuanced approach to opting out i could see i could see it going either way i can see people feeling a pressure to say well let's be reasonable let's at least provide an opportunity to allow the town to opt out of certain aspects of the retail sale of recreational marijuana meanwhile applications are are getting accepted now by the state and as far as we know there haven't been any for belmont because at this point there could be there's no you know like someone could apply to open in belmont at this point and one thing we should be clear about is this doesn't have anything to do with whether there should be a dispensary in the business owners or right but that's all coming down the road in the future is this town meeting will not decide who will not make any decisions about where dispensaries will go with this town meeting will be talking about whether to allow dispensary is in belmont right or whether to send it to a special election to decide whether or not medical retail marijuana establishment and we should emphasize that that we are talking about the non medical marijuana retail sales of marijuana for right well i say for recreational uses but for non non medical purposes exactly be the third big article which could be one of the most fundamental changes in in belmont in decades if not generation s article article twelve article twelve two emmys the board of selectmen to five members and this came about as a result of the committee to study the number of select men which voted nine to four in favor of going from three to five and let's let's step back a year because this committee didn't simply materialize out of thin air this could actually be jim williams legacy two to the to that and we nobody's talked about it in public that we should create a study committee and write town meeting graded to study committee yes and let me give you one of my biases here and one of the significant things about this issue quite aside from the issue of whether to expand the board of selectmen i thought was the the notion that town meeting created its own study committee to inform town meeting so they weren't relying on the board of selectmen they were relying on the work committee but town meeting said this is such an important issue we want to have our own town meeting study committee to look at this issue and report back to us and that's exactly what they did and someone said maybe they should have also looked at how it would change the staffing but that wasn't part of their charge so if you go from three to five this was brought up the other night at the warren briefing it would probably change require a need for a change in staffing patrice garvin the town administrator did say because she was asked she said she said that it would definitely add more hours and more responsibility because she would have more selectman to be communicating with so she definitely said it would definitely increase her responsibility in a lot of towns that have gone from three to five or that have five have a town manager rather than a town administrator right but that was not part of their charge they were just looking at going from three to five and so if it does go from three to five then we'll have to see how that's going to affect staffing so do you want to talk about the arguments for and against yes let's say i was just thinking you're reading my mind let's let's just lay out for the listeners with your arguments on each side ok do you want to do four and i'll do against i don't care i'm just getting no i don't have i don't have an opinion either way i actually used to live in burlington and they had a five member board and i used to cover those meetings as well and what are the arguments for expanding the board of selectmen from three to five start with the fact that the job of being a member of belmont's board of selectmen has become too big for only three people that there is too much work to reasonably place on a person and to have them be one person of a three member board and one of my opinions on that i'll tell you my opinion is that i think that to some extent that's self created that the burden is self created there's no question but that the board of selectmen run from one meeting to another and i can't imagine how or why their spouses don't go nuts and maybe their spouses do but but the the board of selectmen one of the reactions of the board of selectmen should be well maybe i'm defining my job wrong that maybe i should be more  definitely one of the arguments they also say it would increase the range of viewpoints and experience on the board and given much diversity people often think of  homogenous lee white middle class or upper woman middle class community but there is really considerable economic diversity considerable considerable get that word out diversity between homeowners and tenants there are different perspectives that you're in in belmont so it's true that it would also allow i guess board members would be allowed to talk outside meetings and the way it would work is i guess one member could talk to another right but they couldn't tell the other members what they talked about something to that effect because currently they cannot meet outside that meeting they cannot talk to each other outside that meeting room yes let's talk about that for a minute because with three members on the board of selectmen any two of them would be a core so if any two of them got together to have a conversation that that get together would have to be posted and as a public meeting you has if there wasn't a posting of that there would be an open meetings violation right so we have three people now no two of whom can talk to each other outside of of a formal meeting and moving to a five person board of selectmen would allow individuals to talk to each other but what they couldn't do is they couldn't deliberate through serial conversations where i talk to you you talk to jeff jeff talks to julie and all of the sudden you've had a four person selectman keeps it keeps those deliberations transparent so they're saying the board deliberations would remain transparent if you keep it at the re i guess they fear going to five that that transparency could be tainted in some way yes well there would be more offline conversation yes yes they also say that elections would remain competitive that's an interesting argument because when you competitive so i don't know if i gree with that argument and then they said three members are more apt to reach a consensus well that's that's true there are very few to to win votes in belmont where is there could be afforded one voter a three to two vote and whether that's good or bad it depends on one's perspective i guess the other argument which i think is very much worth mentioning is that salary and cost benefits would increase if you go from three to five because the the there's a stipend that the selectmen gather and then they also could opt in for health insurance not all of them do but they could so there could be an increase in costs right an increase in health insurance and yet i sense and then in addition to that the staffing needs could increase which would require more maybe an additional staff member or addition to the salary of the town administrator who would need to become a town manager so and we're talking about town meeting making this decision really town meeting to be clear to our listeners town meeting doesn't have the final voice in this either you know i didn't even know that roger town meeting will vote to if town meeting votes to approve this then this would require a change in the town's charter and i or we need to be special legislation oh i see by the the massachusetts legislature oh so it would have to go to like the attorney general there no i think it would be introduced as a bill that we've my turn it over to state senator brown's are going to room state representative rogers sam k one would think that if belmont has said we want to do this the legislature would say ok but there is an additional step there now do you have a prediction on this oh i i predict that it will pass you do yes ok i agree with you i do i agree with you but it's not going to pass easily it's going to be a lot of debate on this i think that the town moderator and the board of selectmen have set aside an entire night to debate yes this one know we'll see if it ends up in may seventh or it could end up continuing to that following monday which i believe is may ninth i know it be that following wednesday it's possible but the whole well joanna we're out of time but a we covered a lot before we leave if i want to make sure that people know that we covered a lot today but there was just a whole lot of stuff that we didn't even bring up but people can read in the citizen herald yes both online and in the print edition exactly your overview of each of the articles coming before ten meeting yes so in this week's edition which is actually a special edition getting delivered to every household in belmont april twenty sixth i did a town meeting preview for the articles that will be voted on april thirtieth and may second and in may for the third edition i'm going to preview the selectmen one because this is a that's a big one and online you can look at belmont dot wicked local dot com i also did a preview i did a separate story on the marihuana article because that was a long one you know i try to keep  stories under eight hundred words so readers don't get bored they're complicated issues and let a lot of letters to the editor have come in so those are worth reading as well i'll be posting those  people should go to with good local dot com yes it's been great fun thanks for stopping over today i think glad to see that this podcast has been so successful and i'm happy that you're the annual town meeting in the town of belmont i'm your host roger colton you can stream community conversations on line at belmont media dot org and you can also find community community conversations by searching for the b m c podcast network on i tunes so this is a community conversations i'm your host roger colton i will talk to you again in two weeks