right good evening everyone thank you for coming you may remember me on ten richardson manager the bubble like department and we're here to answer your questions short presentation on the need reliability and alternatives we considered for the under fifty k v substation project then we'll get into some site selection questions so at this point i'd like to turn the podium over to i actually brown who is the chairman of the min and everybody here just worked anybody want to hear the let's see what the purpose of tonight first of thanks for those of you who came the purpose of tonight it is to focus on every issue related to this project except for the site in question at the conclusion of our discussion over babak offer the chairs the siting committee will be here and give an update on the status of the siting process is committee still going through deliberations so what was appointed by the board of selectmen for the purpose of picking a specific site for the substation and then following out of that of course is the route that will be proposed to that as they facilities so they'll be an update on that and i think the real focus the discussion tonight is this because what we'd like to do is get these questions answered to the extent to which anybody has questions about it and deal with those issues so the all we have to deal with maybe is the siting so let's talk about the main purpose i mean the real reason why we're looking at this project is really two which one is our infrastructure in belmont and i'll get into a little more detail on this it is age substantial and a lot of it needs to be replaced it's really outlived its useful life and we need to replace the old that our inner connection with and start that's where we get all of our energy supply is that capacity to get out fill in detail we have no reserves and we're in the our capacity is now the same as our peak demand which is not an optimal situation to put it mildly by industry standards what we ought to have something in excess of peat demand some reserves we were proposing that one fifty  built because we think you're going the options that are available it's the most economically advantageous for the rate payers that all the other alternatives are going to walk through with some of these alternatives are that we looked at and they were studied pretty closely beyond people it's not quite that way because the because of the nature of the electricity thirty five percent of the revenues for example come from commercial customers who may or may not be tax payers in the town so it's not the same revenue base for the same base of people  well the project this is not a new project that came out of thin air this is been under study now for more than three years oh a number of me have been over forty publicly noticed meetings by various jim richardson and another is held a series of four public meetings for each precinct for the town meeting members so this has been vetted very widely as a project but we want to go through all the details  actually would say that we should have at least a ten percent or maybe higher reserve so there are something goes wrong work up we're out of our lives and quite honestly last year we had a little problem with that star and we were actually below the limits about twenty five to forty years old that's about an end of its useful life the supply cables that bring energy in development are have been in service for fifty years fifty years along the road or cables a lot of this has to be replaced so even if we were to stay existing capacity we would have to spend a considerable amount of money just to meet our existing the ma'am if you didn't check and we know it's going to go up over time so the a second cost more than one fifteen k v line that we're talking about i'm going to get a little more detail on that just a second now keep in mind that if we are we have two critical time constraints in making a decision it's not a decision we can be postponing indefinitely and there for two basic reasons number one is we need to move quickly before we default into a more expensive option what do i mean by that what i mean by that is if we if we run into some severe constraints let's assume for example we have a hike extremely warm august our peak us beyond our our historic peak and start as an obligation to service and they're going and we have an obligation to serve our customers we're going to invest money to improve the existing system and that an essential spend money for something we already know is out of date and needs to be replaced so we would be wasting money but we won't have any choice if we fall into that kind of emergency situation so the fact is we've got to move with some dispatch in making this decision and the second concern is as you will see when we talk about where the revenues come from one possibility is to seek something called pool transmission facility access should be status from the new england i s o which would mean that we could spread some of the cost of this of this new line across the entirety of new england that's ok to do a little more detail about that a minute but the point is the trend lines are being able to spread those costs if you look at the national trends on where these decisions are being made are not necessarily sympathetic to us so the quicker we move on that i think the more likely it is we're going to be able to get some assistance from the rest of new england i'm not suggesting that's a lead pipe cinch it's not but i think we have a reasonable shot at it and that the longer we wait i think our probability of us getting it is going to decline not increase now what are the options what are the alternatives we doing nothing as i said is not an option because we're at constraints and we have aging infrastructure so what are the options one argument is let's increase our conservation and demand side management programs to try to meet this growing demand the problem with that is not that there's anything wrong with those programs quite the opposite the like the part the like department in the light and light advisory board are very supportive of those programs in fact we have every intention of getting more aggressive about it the problem is there's no history of those programs reducing demand growth to the level the we need to do to be secure in our exit and our supply situation and of course it does absolutely nothing about the aging infrastructure issue that's completely independent to do we need to do more conservation demand side management yes we do can we do it should we do we should but what's critically needed here is not just general energy efficiency we need to be able to respond instantaneously peak demand and if we're going to respond instantaneous to pete demand we need real time meters we need to weigh communications we need the ability to control people's appliance use in their homes we don't have any of that capability now and we're not going to have a for the f power generation one option if you don't need more you don't need more interconnecting capability if you can generate in belmar now think what's the probability we're going to build any electric generation in douma that's i think a nonstarter from everybody standpoint seriously and look at that very closely because that in theory nine theory in fact that could solve the problem but so could installing one fifteen k v supply from north cambridge those two options would solve the problem so then the question is the first two don't the second two could so let's look at those two and what and what do we do the thirteen k v expansion alternative interest in the as well as the one fifteen k v line require considerable expans n considerable certainly the same work as the one fifteen k v both of them require trenchant cable conduit and paving from alewife to belmont they both have that in common secondly the new substation site preparation demolition remediation construction has to be done in both cases the equipment in cambridge is owned by one star paid for by b m l d through transmission rates and by the way we pay for transmission through the new england i said when then we pay an additional one million dollars a year for the inner connection option and we have to make our own improvements as well because we have to improve on our side of the line not just on star we currently have six peter lines we have to have two more added we have to add more breakers and some other equipment in order to be able to receive that kind of electricity input in the belmont so it substantial expenditure of money and the total cost by our estimates was about fifty seven million dollars that's our estimate by the time we gets through litigating within saw in that slide west for the one fifteen k b is thirty eight million dollars that's the cost and we're going to talk about whether some of that gets offset or not by revenue possible receipt of revenue from the new independent system operator fifteen k v lat cables into the new belmont station the new station of course is the siting issue that i'm not discussing bob will give you an update on the addition of the one fifteen k v to thirteen eight  substation in belmont we would be retiring the other substations ultimately so three substations which currently exist would be retired and replaced entirely by a single substation so a lot of land transport of the cost actually the base of the town will require three sites that the light department is currently using which may offset any sort of tax if we take taxable property to build the substation some of that gets offset by the fact that the town's going to acquire three sites it currently does  substation the underground one fifteen k v to belmont station we have to make would cost about thirty five million dollars i'm going to give you a breakdown of that the second there is the three million dollars differential between the bond issue where we're proposing and the thirty five million dollar cost of that and it's explained by three hundred bytes could be three million dollars in additional distribution upgrades that have nothing necessary to do with this but because of aging infrastructure and you need some additional capital investment so that's the thirty eight million dollars thirty five million is for the one fifteen k viewing now so the thirty five that line of thirty five million compares to the cost of a fifty seven million for the for the for the thirteen point upgrade thirteen point eight upgrade which gets us less capacity about a third less capacity they want to get with us so for more money we get more capacity money we get more capacity don't get confused again the thirty eight million is the bond issue because it includes things other than just this so the thirty just just the new k v line and substation there he said the relevance to this is to be done regardless of the three million dollars so the relevant figure to compare is thirty five million versus fifty seven million this is the breakdown of the other subset of the cost of the of the overall project obviously this is the best there's numbers around it but this is basically that i don't think i need to go through that i where is the revenue going to come from to pay for number one i want to make it clear it doesn't come from taxes there's no tax revenue involved in this it's entirely to be borne one hundred percent of the cost is borne by belmont hundred so basically done my repairs will pay one hundred percent but they're paying ninety percent of a lot less money than they would under thirty the option now if in fact we do get pulled transmission facility just to explain what that is if the new england i ask which operates the grid in the six states in new england looks a transmission in a couple different ways number one is just technically does it fit into the system does not operate does not cause any problems and that's a technical issue i don't think we have any problem getting that but if they decide that there are system benefits in other words people other than just belmont rate payers benefit from it they have the option of spreading some of those costs all across the new england system because some of the costs of transmission in new england are socialized across the system and some are not and if we've got that we think something about twenty as much as twenty one million dollars of the revenue requirement will be offset by the by the by revenues that are coming from the new england system operator and whether we get that or not i want to be clear i think we have a reasonable shot it is by no means a lead pipe cinch but it's certainly worth the effort and there's a very real possibility but even if we don't get this option fifteen option we know we stopped paying in star million dollars here and this one million dollars payment probably goes to about two and a half later that's ballpark it's hard to be precise but based on our estimates we think it would go if you get questions do you want to really take it over and i know some of them and they're very good the town is very lucky to have those people on board the some of the documentation that w sent out in talks about this contingency issue and i guess i just didn't understand that as i understand it now we have this a single contingency line from alewife and i guess that runs that run down the railroad washington is if we have a single contingency what is that when we talk about single contingency in the project we're talking about loss of one of the supply lines coming in right now they none of them come down the railroad tracks they're all coming down conquered have o it makes it sound like we'd have a more reliable supply with the one fifteen k b cables as opposed to thirteen eight that we have now and wouldn't be the same single contingency when we get the new one fifteen put in no it wouldn't only because the capacity we were going to bring two lines in so there's two circuits we're going to bring the line in and back out so there's actually four cables that come at the belmont the loss of any one of those won't cause a capacity issue where the loss of one of the thirty eight lines would it it has to do with the capacity the carrying capacity of each line in the higher voltage can carry much more ok i got that and i the transmission line would do is remove that connection so we wouldn't have to pay anything to end star that we stop paying that we have a transmission service agreement it's called that that's what we pay for it they're kind of  mm the utility customers will pay for this so all of us who use electricity in belmont will pay for it will this still be competitive then and i guess that takes me to and i'm on i'm really embarrassed to ask this question because it shows a lot of ignorance and i wish i knew it better understood it better but i don't understand if if we decided to take away our own electric utility who we got our power is wonderful everybody i've ever met and it's wonderful but what i would love to see is a something that gave me and i think some other people involved like this to a basic understanding of how this whole thing works one of the real costs of our utility what are the real benefits of our utility and i guess the question of the fact that we will pay for this thirty eight million dollar upgrade out of our rates how about how does that what does that do to our rights relative to how they are in other towns well let me put that in context of this is to be clear thirty eight million dollars is if we fall if we do that option the other option is fifty seven million dollars noirs there is no option to do nothing that's not an option well i just i guess i want to understand what as you pointed out yourself so work at the white department a very responsive they go no i don't nobody's ever accused and start being overly responsive to well i'm sure i'm sure of that but that's what i'd like to see i'd like to see all those benefits listed i like to understand what the rationale is what the benefits are and what the costs are that would be helpful to me but even if even event star or national grid or somebody else were in operating the belmont system they would still have to go through something like that  physics is opposed by i understand that and i'd like to say somebody my neighbors i i live in the woodlands in my neighbors have huge power problems which they have spoken to me as a town meeting member about and they are desperate and upgrade because they have brownouts their televisions explode or least one has so i know that we need to fix this i understand that but i just want i wish i understood in context of what all the alternatives are and i guess i have one other question about that knowledge somebody else a something i maybe will ask somebody else later well i mean these are all this route that are good questions but that the one thing i would still leave you with in terms of this project the questions you're asking about you know should this be municipal when should we be privatized i mean those are all interesting policy questions but they really don't change much about what i'm talking about here because these upgrades something has to be done i mean the interconnection even if somebody has came in and bought the system they're looking at the same set of decisions and so it doesn't change anything about what i'm talking about the only changes which set a manager is make those decisions ok thank you thank you i'd like to follow up on rosalie's point about showing us nevertheless exactly what will happen to the rates even when not suggesting we do nothing but i think it is fair that the people oh exactly what we're getting into and so a graph showing what's the effect of this will be on the rates over the next ten or fifteen or twenty years i think is a legitimate thing to do i think the other slide that i'd like to see because you broke out all the costs and i certainly i'm not a town meeting member but i married to one i'm going to make some suggestions to him and a slide that shows what the costs pretty going to present this to the town meeting i guess i'm making the point that those kinds of comparisons on slides would be beneficial i think to town meeting members as well as the effect of this on the on the average rate payer and the third thing i would like to comment about is the conservation the town meeting people ask questions about conservation in the town meeting and i remember that the answer was well we're going to do some things to improve and to think about conservation we already do some things we're going to do more and in your comments you also indicated in terms of conservation that we will be doing more i think it would be good to have some practical things that the like department is going to invest in or is going to ask people to do are is going to suggest that people do five six seven things that we will be doing over the next ten years to help people and serve me answer some of that right now actually what we're still we're not a big out to get to buy smart meters so we can start giving get real time information we're doing customer we're doing series uses usage studies trying to figure out exactly how customers use so we can figure out to answer your question where do you get the maximum conservation for your buck we need to know more about how you use electricity when i say you i mean you personally you collectively how you use electricity so we can be more responsive to that  we're looking at we've been collaborating actually with with a lab at mit to talk about maybe you trying to do some smart grid operations within belmont to try to reduce that we have to light the light advisory board has asked him to hire a full time person to engage in conservation activities that's the be the focus of that person's job so we can really so they can be a lot of focus and concentration in that area there's a lot more we can do and a lot more we should do the only point i was making about conservation is it doesn't solve this problem but it clearly is something we need to do you're nobody would argue with what you said about that and i think in terms of the things you're saying how do you how do i get advice about how i could be more efficient my use of energy that's a kind of questions you know where in the bill we did you know you can we do a contract with somebody who come in to do energy audits at the light departments expense will do those kinds of things so there are a lot of things that you can get that advice by but with a phone call right now a we can do that but do we need to do more you bet we do and are we going to do more what we damn well should i mean there's just no question about it it just that it doesn't resolve this problem i just like to point out that there are probably twenty five people here tonight and there are two hundred eighty eight town meeting members so it's very good to have this meeting tonight but i do think that when you go to town meeting you have to have all of those explanations at hand i agree the problem we had and one of the problems in town meeting is that the format of the meeting is the people have stud this the most had the least time to talk and people had studied it the least most and so one of the things we did do is figure out a format that works better for the town meeting where our purpose in doing these meetings was to try to shorten the town meeting discussion the games are all the questions so you know i think you know we've been talking to him to make widmer about changing the format so you can have the kind of more of the dialogue that you're just describing and we can have those answers but the format of a town meeting doesn't lend itself very well to that so we need to think about how to change that let me just add that on our website we actually have our conservation efforts and what we have done in the past and what we are doing in the future about seven things like you said and it is available interesting you should introduce yourself our website and we'll get more information  i have a question about the costs the fifty seven million versus the thirty five when you was commenting on the fifty seven million use made it sound like that figure was kind of a guesstimate and you weren't sure what and start might do that yeah but i thought you were talking about the thirty five as being very fixed the reason the reason why that's correct you're right that fifty seven fifty seven is our view of what we think it would cost and wouldn't surprise me events are at a higher estimate the likelihood answer is going to lower estimate almost doesn't exist but the point is we can control war the thirty to thirty  the one fifteen k v costs are much more within our control than the fifty seven million for the other one because we can we do work on our side of the line and start does work on its side of the line and whether we agree with them and what their costs are remains to be seen maybe well i don't know but i think fifty seven million in our view was a reasonable estimate of what we think it will cost you right i was a little vague on that and the reason i was vegas because i can't guarantee answer is not going to come in with a higher figure i'd be stunned if they came in with a lower figure that's almost improbable that that would explain why you're more positive about the thirty five because we control it it's all within our control because we're the ones that are doing the work we don't control everything that's done on the on the thirteenth eight because  work and then and secondly beyond that the other morning is because we because we had actually has a question about what's the advantage of the town owning it we can use tax free financing they can't say you have to they pay taxes we don't we pay payments in lieu of to the town but in stars tax rate so what it whatever work and start does is almost inevitably more expensive just because of because of the tax situation because of the financing that's available to us and to them so it's so in that so that's makes work on our side of the meter cheaper our side of the line but what i don't know even even even if you know and all that in i still don't know what none of us know for sure what and star is going to come in and with in terms of what their costs are and the likelihood you know i've been a utility regulator i've never seen a utility lowball it's estimates it's usually the almost always the opposite  and whatever it makes gets reinvested in the company anyway so that's an additional cost than any investor on utility has over me disciplined utility the construction of the one fifteen cable is going to be done by belmont that's correct without any and started not in the construction i mean it's possible in the end it might be turned over them to operate but that doesn't affect the cost that one affect the cost thank you very much year now that has a huge impact of usually on the what looks like the net present value of that twenty year karishma that's right and my question is when do you expect to know the status of your file when do you know you are whether you will or will not you're well there's two there's two filings we have to make at the i also want one is a technical one just to make sure that we meet all the technical specifications that we don't demean diminish the functioning of the grid if so we have to as far as the decision with the p t s we have the filing in for the technical review we can't go for the cost recovery hearings until we have a site select that and have done a little more work to define the root cause so we can't proceed any father with the i s o until we you know really have a project that will moving ahead with his comment was control of a site means that you have an option to buy and it seems to me that that's a step that involves very little money relative to the school project and is it possible that that could be separated from the overall project and you could move ahead to get this approval so as to settle in people's minds just you know this is a seventeen million dollars uncertainty whether you have it or not and that cash flow well maybe it goes maybe you're going to do this anyhow or whether you get that approval on a couple that's an interesting point there's a couple things about that number one is we have to this this project the transmission connection has to be approved by the the states and  energy facility siting board in order to get that approval we have to have the substation site locked up we need that we need to identify it and then we need and then we need to get the approval for the for that can't do that until we have the site locked up that's required similarly as tim indicated to look at the p t half and exactly what the load flow analysis is going to show and what the costs are we need the site locked up to acquire property we need town meeting approval so it is possible and we've actually thought about it i think public meetings we've discussed the possibility of separating out the two issues and do two separate town warrants that's technically possible but the want but the approval and maybe we should do that i think everybody has an open mind on that but the question about doing that is it's somewhat academic unless we have a site locked up but you're right i mean one thing we want to probably do is we may want to do an option as opposed to actually the thing but of course if you do the option and you don't use it you lose that money as that's the thing you have to consider but so you know you're right but i think that remains an open question you know if you think you know town meeting members would we feel more comfortable separating those issues that everybody's got an open mind on separating them but we in order to proceed we need approval on both scores i think he had a question for and then gentleman right here good evening you know i've spent a lot of time since the first meeting he had here going through this and trying to get everything straight most of it out of my one question is i was coming in something i was i knew with twenty million dollars of the thirty it was coming from and that was from the savings event stuff i understand so and i have no problem with the fact that we need this upgrade ok and conservation is all i care about of conservation is when i flick the switch the light comes on ok a lot of people might providing we don't get any money back from the transmission line the i want to get this straight the belmont rate payers are on the hook for ha million dollars is that correct it's like if we get money back it could  the one fifteen k v line how much would we not pay and star and that offsets it even further because remember we're not over twenty years we would save twenty million dollars that's all remained that's correct ok another question i had both i thought you just said that talking about this new line unless we give it to and start to operate so again i'd you when you were talking about this new online who would own it you said we might give it to and start to well over the question i don't know what we're going to do about who would who operates it but there they could maybe there may be bet there's two different issues ok one is who makes the capital investment in the line who's capital structure is used who's financing who's financing opportunities he is who's who's right of return requirements for years in all those areas we benefit so we it's from us making the investment is an enormous benefit actually physically operates  a completely separate question it doesn't affect the cost structure much and we wouldn't pay to be honest about it there may be other trade offs like where and whether and star supports our applications to the i o so what kind of understand i mean there's a it's a complicated set of questions we have to pay to we the not the yes that's true but it but if we operate it we have to pay ourselves to do it so it so no matter what you do you pay in the questions what's the least expensive way to do it that's all but either way you have to pay  would hope you guys can do when you come to town meeting or for me before town meeting is somehow the explanations aren't clear enough yet i don't tell me what you need to know i'd like to clear more right now i don't know not even a diagram i'd love to understand the relationship between us and the star and the relationship between and strong the i s o is installed i can explain it to you right now but and still right but i think i'd be great if it was explained in a way that i could give to my neighbors that other people in town who are interested in this could understand i love it you explain it now but i love a drawn out in a really clear dog all the utilities in new england use the new england i s o they operate the grid the lot of utilities own transmission some of them don't o transmission but all the utilities depend on the grid they're all part they're all they all operate within the within the framework of the i s o all the sins of the semi governmental thing it's like it's a it's an ngo technically not for profit operation now it's very expensive da parade but it's technically not for profit and it's supervised by the federal energy regulatory commission it's regulated by them and they operate the grid and for the six new england states all the utilities function within that within that i s o for transmission purposes now in addition to that obviously there's generators on the other side of the grid and then they're companies like us distributors on our side of the grid and so we all buy off the grid and we all pay for transmission most a lot to the system network the backbone of the system those costs are generally spread across new england but with new lines what happens is the question is who should pay for new lines when the real question and becomes who benefits and there's and this there are million ways to look at it two basic ways a look at it either and let's use our our case if it's determined by the by the board of the new england i s o which is an independent board of governors a independent i mean there are no financial obligations to anybody within the system they if they if they determine that in fact the entirety of new england benefits for get significant benefits from that they will offset some of those expenses by contributions from all consumers all over new england if they decide there aren't system benefits like reliability for example but there are maybe benefits to belmont and those they don't want you pay that every time somebody poses transmission that process is replicated within the i s o that's the way the system works if if if and star was proposing to build the line they go through the exact same process now for us one of the considerations is if we go in for this is to talk about who's going to us who's going to support our application who's going to our proposal is going to oppose our application and obviously you get into a lot of situations about well you know do we want to work out some agreement on something to get increased support  there's a lot of judgment that we can explain what we're going to explain in advance what the considerations are but you don't know at the end what exactly the bat until you actually sitting at the negotiating table trying to work out some arrangements so for example this question about who's actually going to operate it part of it is what's and stars position going to be in regard to supporting our application and that's i mean that's one of many considerations there a lot of consideration is the one star utility like we all know is they're not like we are they are utility they're investor own they're for profit i understand that but they are utility that's correct and i think they cover a lot of towns but they're being a lot bigger than us that's for sure in our area ok yeah i just wanted to so right now our capacities at thirty four m w so what well what if we go ahead with this and it sounds like we should what will the capacity be at that point sixty  right if we proceed with this project that capacity would be limited by the size of the transformer so i would put in probably fifty sixty seventy m v a so if we had radiators add cooling to the transformer we could address anything it wouldn't be a line capacity it wouldn't be or capacity constraint as that makes that's what i think that's that's our that's our that's our assumption look i mean we're making this estimate we don't want to come back a second time for a bond  so i think what we've done is we've made fairly conservative estimates hopefully it won't be it won't be that costly but i think if anything we have to made it slightly on the high side is that a guarantee no i can't guarantee it because a lot of things could change but i think it's a reasonable estimate but we did it with the specific idea of not having to come back and read and you know do this second time and i just want to echo what some other people said that i think would be very helpful especially for also making the case with our time and how how that compares to other utilities because i know that not only is the department much more reliable than some other private utilities but also that your service is much better as well so i do thank you guys shouldn't be shy about that you should definitely wish for your minute you know we can we can put that together we can either did we could do it for the town meeting by putting it as a bill stuffer so everybody can see it there a lot of ways we could do that but we can there's no problem doing that great one last question today we see the slide on the peak demand again i just had a quick question on th but i was just curious what that three percent space on is that like based on how much our pets based on its base increasing over the last certain it's historic it's historical data projected forward looking at certain pattern is that based on what how how are the increase how it's been increasing over over a certain number of years ok great thank you oh yeah that's a that's an excellent point this is entirely based on but as you point on historic data which obviously is premised on what uses it we know but we also know in the not very distant future you're going to all kinds of new uses literally plug in hybrids you're going to have you may have you may have a lot more local generation you may have meet you know metering the goes both ways i mean there are a lot of things that could be happening and it's a matter of fact we're going to have to become a lot more sophisticated operating the distribution system which makes an even more important case why we need to have enough in a billet he's at the deal with all the contingencies we're going to deal with so this is this you know whether this is a conservative or you know or less conservative estimate of gas may have better it's entirely based on what we know today but we also can be fairly certain with that being at precise about it we fairly certain usage patterns are going to change some of it may be more efficient but some of it may not be and we just don't know that i guess i will agree with my chance that i want and said it would be really wonderful a town meeting to show us how this bond is going to affect the electric rates and to you and also whether that reflects the full cost whether the rates we pay as belmont electricity users is the full cost and the one question that i have that i don't really know i know that it is a pallet he pays money back to the town we all pay profit to shareholders the way  star does but we pay money back to the town is that correct a middle of tax is correct are are the does the pool of employees in the municipal utility is that paid for is the other wrote those retirement for out of the like department revenue so it's fully self supporting that's going i think you can make a very good case a town meeting by shell by tooting your horn and showing us that you have lower rates i fully understand the need for the upgrade but i think you should do yeah they had a half of the bill you pay for there could or are costs that we have only minimal control of minimal meaning we have to make reasonable purchases of power but we don't control the cost the market sets those prices so when just your friends star anybody else absolutely true so that's a variable that this isn't going to change one way or the other understood so for fifty percent of the bill this is irrelevant to in addition to that there are some of the transmission costs and particularly if there's transmission congestion costs are also something that although this may reduce our congestion problem possibilities but any event those costs also are not part of the so we can do that analysis but it's not we're not but it's not going to be the total bill it's just going to be that component of the bill that's affected by these costs that's fine and i think everybody would understand that and i think seeing how this bomb will affect our rights is a very important thing to show and yes sounds like it still comes out we can do it i think well  put in a bill stuffer or so everybody can see it yeah tom meeting is what we can do and we can do both but i want things i was hoping to do and we you know we didn't think about tonight is how do you make the town meeting format more i have to say sitting in that town meeting was very frustrating because we had spent all the member of this committee it's been i don't know how much time study this and people were getting up and asking questions and saying things that they just couldn't possibly have known as much about as the people who weren't permitted to say anything  frustrated i think you all knew too much and there were there were lots of that's certainly true but i think the form baseline questions of people like me didn't know what it's going to help your hundred percent right and that's why i think this kind of format at a town meeting would be a whole lot more effective than i heard somebody say here earlier that there was you know how four thousand town meeting members and present and this to over two hundred town meeting members and belmont well this meeting tonight it's been on schedule for a sofie work for the bell my light went and just want to say a couple of things about the presentation because if if people get up there and say that you know best then the town meeting members are just going to keep voting no that's what i think i know we need a new substation because if we don't build a new substation and i'm going to be the supervisor on call the some of that's going to have to turn off someone's lights and i don't want to do what we need to do as a light department is show the town meeting members why we needed to substation and i agree with paulson this lady here and maybe the better way as i'm watching here and i'm saying if i'm one of them it's going to make me vote yes this time and what's going to make me vote yes as i agree with this lady here show me and then show me that we need to do i think now as i'm watching is let's put some pictures up here and let's show a forty year old substation and what it's like in there that we can't get parts for anymore if it breaks out let's show them the splicing that we're doing out on the lines from the freedom lines coming in from cambridge that when they go out and we have our crews in the substation and the unconquered out doing splice and let's show pictures of the splicing on the cables let's show them what the infrastructure looks like because adding two new lines thirty eight lines from cambridge into belmont doesn't address a six we already have that are fifty years old so i did we need to show the tao meaning they want to see what they're getting for thirty eight million or if they don't do anything we need to show them in pictures of our substations which you know that we can't get pot for anymore that we're trying to retrofit or are the splicing that are a line through the doing mill that night to get the lights back in line back on line so if the power goes out we're not getting to a backup i think so i think we just need to do we can talk about the little one line grid line from cambridge to belmont it looks nice in the little them the real thing let's show them the splices but show me a switch and then people will say you know what if that's a forty year old car it's not an antique it's a piece of junk correct this is going to be put on the town to reflect this is wonderful eventually it'll be there which is great when we bought our house in belmont and that this goes to what you just said we were having our men did come out and he first his jaw dropped and he said tim has to come over and take a look at this because our electrical board was the original when the house was built around one nine hundred forty and he said tim said this man also said we were a fire waiting to happen it was that antiquated and that old and we upgraded and then when we did some work on the house eleven years ago we did a serious so that everything is almost on its own little piece as i've mentioned to you tim and what you have said when people come to town beating they really want and need the knives the forks the spoons they need to see the real photographs of what it looks like inside the  substations just showing the outside doesn't mean a thing it's got to be very very concrete and i know i we read my husband i read all of the flyers that come out from the department as well as what's put inside the bills and you're all being very very proactive in trying to get us to be more conserve conservation oriented the reality is is that like our house that we first we bought it the board was antiquated we're looking at substations that are old they're going to burn out we're going to have brownouts we're going to have more transformers blowing out in the summertime it's just going to happen and but i think at the people i think there were two things happening at the other town meeting one was understanding all the finances and the other was the site and people were concerned about that and i think that those are two issues and i think that the the with the finances can be explained very very concretely with pictures with graphs that show  i think that that will help to make the case you're talking to the choir right now i mean i just i think this is whole thing the citing his is a whole other piece of it so it's got to be upgraded have to have fresh clean lines for the next thirty five years and i ran in here late from teaching a graduate class to prospective new teachers on how to get across ideas to students in high school and i do a lot of it through powerpoint technology and i always explain to them we all have two brains right  left fifty percent of population is left brain dominant fifty percent of the population is right brain dominant that's the way it breaks out there's a few of us geniuses that are metacognitive who do both but most of us are dominant one way or the other well established by cognitive scientist i always try to make sure when they do their power points that they're fifty percent visual right brain is fifty percent cognitive mathematical curve bending in pictures curb and right left brain people get the curb and think the numbers the charts left brain people need some picture susie and i can mix it up right brain people need pictures can we just be integrated in our educational prochoice kind of funny i just ran in here i thought this class today and i show examples of how to do it i think this gentleman here really nailed it we just need different ways of understanding the same reality advantages that of doing this the transmit the one fifteen k v line is the economies of scale are such that you don't you don't save much by doing that so we have been a huge reserve that we don't we wouldn't currently have wouldn't have it all if we did the your final selection on the equipment would be sixty m v a rating is just a rating i believe in the i three nine we have fifty m v a transformers filed but as you wear add cooling to the equipment you get a higher rating so could be a fifty sixty two and a half seventy two transform but the difference in cost would be somewhere in the order of no not really no it's really a cooling capacity issue between a forty five mph a sixty it's several inches overall that's not a very big tank size difference can ask questions different ones that are in our frequently asked questions on our website we also invite you to come to our next meeting which will be about citing and here's our ad for it but it's also here in case as a takeaway so i just want to encourage everyone to help i think he's heard it all before so it's all right and as you know tonight is primarily for our discussion of the capacity in the aging infrastructure and i will by way of disclaimer say what i don't know about those issues fill libraries it was billed as an opportunity for us to give you a shot update as to where we are on the side issue and i agree with the young lady in the back when this went down a town here to tell you that we have a site and i'm here to tell you why that site is the best because frankly we don't have a site yet as you know with town meeting we had a site twenty flanges road i think it had a lot of merit i still think it has a lot of merit a majority of the town meeting thought it had a lot of merit but we needed the two thirds vote so i'm here tonight kind of bring you up to date what we're doing in the process after we didn't have the votes we need in that town meeting where we are right now there's an old saying that a life is like growing a little boat and i wanted to know where you're going you have to look back and see where you've been so let me kind of do that and tell you where we've been and maybe gives us all some direction of  where we're going here you're going to run the pictures for me i don't i was left side of the brain or right side of the brain but in any little about that that committee i'll be very briefly we have members from the visor board with we kind of looked around and said what are possible sites and up on that picture you'll see and there was fourteen different sites they ranged all the way from the incinerator site way up where over to where the skating rink used to be on route closely we went through kind of what were the criteria what was the right size we need about eighteen to twenty thousand square feet was a site that was available how close was it to l wife brooke because that became a major issue and there was confusion about that at the town meeting it cost three million dollars to bring a line down but it has been pointed out tonight the line as they go back so that's where the six million dollars a mile figure came from now when you dig up a road such as going to get avenue and you have to have detail cops and you have to put it back in pristine condition which i'm sure will be a condition of cambridge if they let us to get their road that's where about another seven million comes from so it's like thirteen million dollars a mile so obviously in selecting a site we want to see what was available as close as possible to lee alewife pro care and the short list came down you got that one the thirty nine hit meeting which is is there any room on the high school campus to put this up so if i can have the next slide which shows where the those candidates came from and you can see them there the four fifty c new wife is way over there in the foxhole and in twenty flanders the pure code site the movie sandlot site right there and as you start to go through them there are pros and cons with all  starting with your quote site and while we take a quick picture and then flick back that's the peer quote site next to the high school next to the tennis courts in back then it's a good site for a lot of reasons commercial area not near any houses that had neighborhood support a lot of people would like to see that that use removed proximity to you know wife as they say which is so important and another factor that we consider we call it collateral benefit for  town i co chair the capital project overview comedian is capital projects a lined up like dominoes and stopped like dominoes because you got to move one move the other we need  station the place for the police station to go to is the or is the library the library has to go someplace it's a go over the high school campus is all caught so it's of synergy react capital project overview committee report where you're going to put  a library maybe you could put it there the high school campus have to get bigger there's a lot of reasons why we should have the pure coat properly folded into the high school campus and there's one big reason why it isn't going to happen because it just cost too much money and the situation we're in right now well that was a decision our committee came to but it's a decision that we may go back and revisit in may bring back before a town meeting but in substance when you go to the picture it's three times bigger than we need in the discussions we had with the yonah price was six point five million dollars we need about a third of it yet con pass the smell test and just expect the rate payers to pay that  donated to the other two thirds of it to the town for dollar it doesn't work that way so if you apply a straight ratio the town would have to spend four million dollars plus to by and that's a lot of teachers salaries a lot we don't have that four  million dollars now in the judgment of our committee at this time so but in any event it will let's see and i me say this i've been in touch with the owner who really would love to see the town get it and live in new york and we're trying to arrange a meeting where maybe we can discuss something so i don't put it out of the picture completely the next night is the four fifty can't get at belmont santa advantage of that of course is we already own  a combination of two miscible buildings that should have a future value to the town something else other than and other than a substation there are construction impacts of what would happen to the senate digging it up and so close to your wife brooke it believe it or not oh it's very close to a neighborhood it has a lot of neighborhood support and one of those public meetings that we had earlier on to our amazement most of the neighbors came down and they wanted to see substation discussions with the owners and twice had a handshake agreement and someone mentioned option back then how you acquired the site the whole concept we always have had we have to get control of the site by way of an option and then as you go through the printing process at the state when you finally have receive you were brutal and if it's been approved by the selection by the whatever the state agency is then you'd exercise your option we had discussions clearly means that can't get have is going to have to be dug up to bring the line down and that gets into a very expensive and probably contentious discussion with the city of cambridge as we came over to  my favorite plan this road it's got an awful lot going for it there's the picture it's the right size it's in the commercial area there's no i was around it it's about as close as you're ever going to get to the wife station hopefully this is not a sure thing by any means but hopefully we could bring the line down the along the side of the tracks avoid a lot  if we're going to come back with that site i think is the committee we've discussed it there were two reasons that we think that appeared to be negatives one was the relocation of the tenant who was the doggie daycare people in the great escape and the second was a low we originally had very cooperative sello allowed us on the property to do all kinds of environmental work and so forth had a change of heart when it finally came down over there and we were going to have t voluntarily and there are a number of places that the dog within the existing area within a very short distance we hope were present years that he could go to so so it is except for those problems of  acquiring and hopefully voluntarily in this and replacing the tenants it's a good place where this site should go if you show the picture of the picture of an issues were raised about the environmental so i asked dave to put in this slide again very quickly i mention a town but and ashley is right it's a difficult format a town meeting but i don't know that we're going to change it there's something out there called robert's rules  someone has the floor and i ask the question unless you can get up each time to shoot down every bit of buckshot that flies around the room people got there right there as they were they got to say so that's why we want to have more of these meetings and hopefully will watch it on television and we'll answer these questions in any event the question was raised that had all kinds of environmental problems it doesn't it doesn't we respect everyone on the planet is road site of the hundred foot river act which applies to belmont the river act is only twenty five feet when you get the cambridge because it's an urbanized screen a stream one hundred foot buffer zone we respect the floodplain we respect it fits in there very nicely the land that we're talking about buying would only be the bomb on land we'd leave the little piece of cambridge land which would be with nothing presumably would be donated to cambridge for conservation those are  the sites that we discussed before and that town meeting of those you were they all remember some gentleman whose name i can't remember right now but he stood up and he had a sketch of the high school area and my memory is somewhere up and back by the tennis courts he had superimposed xerox machine is something one of our plans and said hey there's room up back there and it would be a lot of problems with what he did do it was no way to get to the end up back then but it did open our eyes i'll say this we had thought of that before but as we know under state law that property committed to school use is under the jurisdiction of the school committee and unless the school committee  agrees it's an absolute nonstarter they have to agree to give up some of their campus and there's a lot of reasons that they have why they shouldn't give up a campus that it's too small to begin with it was built with state aid based upon the fact that the campus was of that size and so it was a lot of issues using a town land but i'll say this we've had two meetings already with superintendent and two whistle and jerry missile the administrative town of ministration prison and we have drawn some sketches which i don't want to get into in any detail tonight because we have another meeting scheduled with them on fed very forth i think it would be employed in an appropriate to get in detail of where we are with those discussions but other than to say that i hope that this will become a viable option that somewhere you go back to the picture of the high school there's a lot of land in here now there's a softball field and as a soccer field too there's one of the that's one of the existing substations that land will go back to the campus and you don't have to be too creative to figure out how you can play without much land and fit in the twenty thousand square feet and then maybe some benefits to the school operations school by way of one of the things that they've always wanted is  space for their maintenance acquitted and so forth something like that with five thousand square foot area that they want so they can recapture that full four classrooms well that's no problem maybe we'll wink and pass that one on to  the rate payer and build them a five thousand foot wing on this substation where they can store that type of materials a lot of synergies in there that i think that that may be a viable project viable possibility so that's where we are we have made up my mind yet we've got to get an answer where we are on the school committee we hope to advance discussions with the plan this road people mari sandler's is clearly still in the mix i don't think the existing belmont like department which is an extra mile away and probably negatives of that is definitely in the mix but what we want and the reason i walked out there and had a push ashley off the stage is i want to use this occasion where there's still some of us here  give us some feedback what do you think we should we go with this at this point hopefully by the next meeting which is two weeks from now we're going to have some priorities in our own mind that will be  addressing and there's also the thoughts of how to present this to town meeting by way of options should we have two sites they can vote on one first if it doesn't pass go they alone if it first one passed  audible i mean how do you do that but but i think there's problems in presenting alternatives i really think we should come to what we think is best and go back to town meeting and and have as many answers as we possibly can and hopefully get the two thirds vote so let me open up any questions anybody has comments in the same way that we're here we're looking for more concrete visuals i think that for each of the sites the sampler site the high school site the flanders road i think it would be very very important to very concretely have slides that show what ten thousand or twenty thousand whatever the square footage is what it would look like as the footprint on the murray sandler site what it would look like at the high school site because it's very very hard to leave with the flanders road to know just what is purchased and what that footprint would like think that it would make a lot of difference in people's minds the other thing is that tim richardson was talking about having the lines go down conquered avenue where is your to and where we'd have to get an ok from the city of cambridge whereas you're are important considerations that people in town meeting will need and if there are people from the the precinct where the murray sandler area is if they get together prior to town meeting and have one or two of their town meeting members speak why they want to have the murray sandler site if it fits that the footprint and all that i think that that could be very very helpful especially as something on the outside like the the cambridge reservoir their electrical plant is gorgeous and i think that if it will could look process my strength is environmental but i do some of this work as well so for flinders road you'll see there's a there's a kind of a green square that shows ten thousand square feet that's a that's a generic ten thousand square foot square but because this is an industrial area where the other buildings are generic industrial commercial buildings that's the general footprint we put together but so we have those conceptual layouts for each of the sites as bob mentioned bob and and bill of l o n tim are talking with the school about alternatives and those will be once the school says they want to participate those who become more readily available but so we have this for each of those properties and including very sandler and but more importantly here one of the reasons we want to highlight this is that it shows that we can really do all of the construction work outside of the resource area so we can respect both the conservation commission requirements in belmont and in cambridge but you also mentioned routing and going down con out and and the thing i have to stress is that as a team because of the paving costs we know that the the assumption is that the greatest cost route is going to going straight down  blanchard or something like that that thirty eight million dollar cost assumed a one point two mile cable length transmission length each of the sites that we've looked at here with the exception of four fifty concrete out of it is less than that so we know that our cable length are estimated cable length route is going to come in just under the one point two miles in fact a couple of them could be shorter but some of the things that we've considered our culture alternates on side roads there's kind of an industrial area in cambridge we might be able to consider so one of the things we want to do is minimize traffic interruption and impacts from construction and so we're taking that into account but we really can't say here's the end route until we have a site in fact we have to come up with at least two routing options when we go to the energy facility siting board and so we agree we think fighting with the m t a is going to be possibly an impossible  coordinating with cambridge and offering collateral benefits like doing our work and improving their roads as a side effect after the fact is part of the negotiating process so we can't commit to a route until we've got a site selected and we have to come up with a couple different routes but please know that the engineering team knows that we think the worst case is coming straight down concord have and that using some of the alternate roads that parallel it will have benefits both for the project cost will be less because we won't have to have as much traffic impact and they'll be benefits to improving those roads after the fact know when you're talking about alternate lines there's concord avenue and then there is the m b t a and you're saying that going through the streets in cambridge some of that's commercial some of it's residential correct where we tie in it isn't firm yet there's some flexibility down near the freshman circle this is a pretty straight shot shortest distance but there's also a commercial industrial area here that if we are coming to flanders road or cambridge plating or the high school property we don't actually need to maintain that straight line the whole way there's other alternate routes at that we're considering and we can't really commit to saying we're going to hit the street or that but in the world of minimizing impacts to the vast majority of traffic on concord out of we're going to consider that as we evaluate the different options how much time does it take months to put that line in the digging me member precinct six i thought you asked bob what my what thoughts were and i thought the flanders road so i made a lot of sense particularly if you could come down the railroad right away does he and did we determine if the m b t is actually the owner or the c s sucks or someone else owns those tracks go i know that's been looked into an i pod as i don't know the answer off the top of my head but i do know based on experience other experience with the m b today is that there highly unlikely to give up access to their r rights so even though we may go for a stroll down the rail and say oh there's an active spur there it looks like there's open space they they consider the entire right of way that's within their purview to be there is for potential expansion  and one of the risks is that if someone said we'd like to put a transmission line under there they might provide a license and say go ahead you can do that but that license would be revokable and so there'd be a risk to the project and only let can we ask one of our attorneys to answer that a property i want to also point out that if indeed we could go down the n p t right away it's certainly an option that we would prefer because in that case it's my understanding that the line would be less than a mile if it's less than a mile it would require the state's approval which of course w would speed up the process significantly in the interest of full disclosure i want to know that i used to work for rob shapiro at the energy facilities site in council many years ago so we are familiar with some of these issues but i do think way you know you have my full sympathy because i know how hard it is to just get to a site and you're never going to get a site that everybody's going to be find satisfactory but i do urge you to keep pounding on the m b t if in fact they are the owners to try to that seems to me to be the best way to get to flanders road or perhaps and the of the other options that that you've got lists of here world but unless you get the owners but now i do agree the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and expecting different results so unless the owner agreed to sell before you got to tell meaning the doggie daycare is buy the land let's put you know in the future we keep talking well we need a new police station when you know library we need a new range you know these are all things on the wish list somewhere down the line this is an opportunity you have an owner that wants sell i'd like to see him leave cambridge planing asked to go you know that's just the way it has to be i can't say for a fact that cambridge plainly has caused access cancer in the neighborhood but i'm going that way that let me let me say this and then down the clay i think wants to respond but let me say this in each and every site as part of my due diligence we had davi and i was at that meeting where the neighbors were for those name is i agree with you would take anything just to get mari sandler god so as an employee of the light department as much as i think that's likely to work i'm not sure that's the best location for a substation having an outage in the middle of night in someone's neighborhood when i'm showing up with a couple of my trucks to access the substation i just not sure that's the best location interest rates were able to purchase bonds for wellington for three point five six percent which is a record low so the argument is really no we should invest as much as we can buy now  land bank properties you know there will be a rational approach but guess what paul thinks is not all rational there are competing demands i'm attracted to donate their buy the land for that low price it's a good deal twenty year bonds fine problem is the other consequent result of being an economic downturn is that we also need to support operational expenses and we're not getting the money from the state the federal government we need to run our town and we're at the bare bones level right now we just got through two weeks of going through all the town departments right public safety public works we're down to the bone we used to have eighty seven people working  public works apart we now have like run fifty we've lost a third of them in ten years we don't fire them all one time we just do it every year we do it through attrition if you want your part whole fix involved one we have a list of six hundred people waiting we just don't have enough people to get out there and solve those problems so we're faced with an obligation make a smart long term investment or start cutting services that's a very interesting situation to be in and right now we feel like we're obligated to maintain a minimal level of services in all across the board so asking for a death service override to  dollars means in the same season you probably don't want to ask that same amount for an offer ratings that's all right that's call political reality so i intellectually with you but i politically don't think it's go go anywhere but just an honest answer aesthetic and i believe the one million dollars in the estimate for the thirty eight million dollars project total of the thirty five million total is a shell building it's  i don't know what the specifics i mean you would have to really address what neighbors would be expecting to see at each of these sites and i don't believe that that would be covered by the one million dollars we  actually prior to town meeting i guess it was in the the precinct meetings and the informational meetings ahead of that we showed examples of different facades and certainly for the federal level meeting will bring that slide again will kind of updated but so what we can and so for relatively different small cost differential cost it could look like a colonial of the there we had an image of one that looked like the alamo we have one that looks a lot like just an old  stained steel building this is one that's in norwood i believe but so there is quite a bit of flexibility we can make a substation look presidential you know with fake curtains in the windows so or we can design it so architecture it looks just like the school and it has a similar facade and exposure so if if we're getting to the point where people are saying well here's a site and we like it part of the team could get we could do in a rendering of it and say here's what your neighborhood would look like with this building added to it and there's some cost to that so we haven't done it for every one of the alternative properties but we can that that's there is flexibility and it's not actually very significant cost difference so it would be like one million to one point two million dollars difference there would be one million to two million dollars i mean those are pretty beautiful thing i think that one is not one right i wouldn't want to see that at the high school i think we're talking less than two million in that it be in the one to two range i mean i know that we picked kind of a typical building for that million dollar exterior you know we didn't pick something that looks like the taj mahal so there would be an increased cost but if but if that satisfies the neighbors and gain support that is necessary for the project it would be worth it i think that that's important information to have before you make a decision about which site you want it at because if i make a decision i wanted at one particular site say the salmon or marie sailor site but then you tell me oh no it's going to cost another million dollars to get the building to look a certain way and i'm like oh that changes my metric and maybe i would have preferred the cambridge plating site or maybe i would have preferred oh given that i would have gone back to flanders row i think it's important to understand what the real cost tradeoffs are when we're evaluating this because i know that would be political suicide to pick a site and then after the fact tell people that the building they're going to get is not in line with what they thought they were going to get and then it's going to cost them more i just think we need to put it all out there at one time so that people are making well informed decisions about i'll speak for tim for a second and then you can tell me if i'm wrong but we can show alternative building facades and say within the proposed budget here are the types of facades we can build because i don't think the facade should really be what drives town meeting for saying i want it to look like this or that i think you really have to say what's the site and  box building something that's far more attractive to me even if it's a few extra hundred thousand dollars and i'm guessing i'm no expert in this but i don't think that that's going to make the decision one way or another let me say this and i'd be interested in feedback in this one of the things i said at town meeting why i didn't think mary sanders was the right site was because it really is the gateway to the conquered have card of the gateway to belmont where you are going to have a new library you've got the high school you've got the pawn you are going to have the police station if they move into the area you really want to substation right at the gateway and i think it made sense but a lot of people told me i was crazy hit it didn't affect them at all  i say this if it doesn't up my resale of site i think it will cost somewhat more because that's plunked down in the middle of a residential neighborhood and it is a major artery it will be the gateway not development and it should be absolutely is attractive as possible if we do the project team and these are really smart engineers who designed substations and transmission roads and a whole lot of utility infrastructure we have done cost analyses of each of these alternative sites except for the school we haven't put a new number together for that we made assumptions that if we built a school it would look a lot like one of the others so we piggybacked but so we have cost analyses that take into account the distance of each of those nominally from alewife we took into account the different kinds of facades we might need and the different construction impacts so knowing that if we go to marie sandler we're guaranteeing that the shortest route is long conquered absolute can be greater construction impacts that if we were down by the railroad tracks and we could assume some less impacts we did that and the highest cost alternative gets us of those gets to thirty eight million so we knew that that and i mentioned that that included a three million dollars property acquisition cost so assuming that that's three million just to buy a piece of land and it's the right choice correct three million dollars gets us to a flat clean lantus to build the subdivision and the and one point two so we had to kind of say ok let's make that's the assumption and the cost will come down from there because we used the conservative costs to get that thirty eight million so if someone needs we pick a site that's closer and there's a value in a pretty facade with pillars in the front there be a give or take but it's not going to be higher than playing and i could figure in the extra four million dollars anyway i guess when trying to say is we took into account the different locations the different position costs and thirty eight million is the high cost excluding fo half the because of the added distance to go to the center of town you are asking for suggestions tonight i totally agree with what you just said i don't i don't think the way the costs are distributed among these different sites was presented maybe as clearly as it could be and it seems to me from what you said tonight that the highest cost is the distance of a transmission thirteen million dollars a mile i think if you had a slide show those sites very clearly more clearly than the overhead i saw and showed the distances potentially i know you can't nail it exactly but show those distances and those trying those costs that would clearly show you what a disadvantage murray sandler is that i think is think there would be a way of showing that so much is going to be up in transmission cost by some sites that the higher land cost on another site might neutralize that if you decide to go when you want to tell meeting and correct me if i'm wrong from the town meeting members you need to break this up into two parts as if you go to this town meeting and say we want to substation on this site and if they voted down in their vote the whole project out well there's always you bring them into sites and say this is what we need for substation then you get the town meeting to vote yes we need a substation get that vote then you can have a second vote on where it should go but if you go in the package deal again i think there's a good chance you'll lose again  i just one more point on the pure quote north there's a history to that facility in that precinct people who live in precinct wonder well aware of and i think former state representative and paulson's aware of there was an investigation some years ago about a potential cancer cluster in the neighborhood possibly related to emissions from kirkuk north there were smell issues there to clean it up because in it there are many numbers to shoot at that site many reasons why history that precinct one particularly would love to see that use discontinued at that site now separate issue what should the belmont like department do the belmont light department has a responsibility to purchase the site this most appropriate for selectmen i hope we'll have the guts to go to the town and say for our long term planning this is the right thing to do for the town four million dollars over a twenty year bond at the lowest point in his it's very different than asking for four million dollars in operating costs an operating override has a direct impact very different it's well i think it's a timing it's an education issue and i don't think that you should pass up opportunities and people in a town are very well educated and well versed about the finances of the town and i think that to miss an opportunity would be you know really  ok i understand i understand the idea of investing the money over twenty years for land banking use that site potentially for a lot of good things that could be associate of the school it could be a place of this for the skating rink all kinds of interesting ideas but you know it's it's a we're in a very difficult season right now where we're going to have to fight really hard just to get what we need offering expenses to satisfy the people use those those services and it's going to be touch and go and it's not going to be easy and to add another expense for a long term issue which may be rational basing both of  know up and read the recommendation that we should be proactive in a choir if your site for all the reasons that dan just said i wrote that with lynn in that report that she's reading my words back to me but it was a hard blindsided now but we're back to the drawing board should we go back to a pure gold site i don't know timing wise and i don't know if any of the consultants do this presumably if we said let's by the pure code site presumably that would be folded into the bond that the would be that service would be from the raid i don't know what the states selection board is going to say when you commune with the site is three times as large i suspect they're going to say you've got to sell surplus land how much time do you have to sell that surplus land i assume rather promptly that means you're immediately faced with the property in play in the market either the town steps up passes the debt explosion and buys it or it's going to go to some other third person and be forever out of our control so there may be unintended consequences we've got to be careful what we wish  a lot of debt exclusion so if you think that exclusion  cost of electricity so i mean one of the things from the standpoint of the advisory board is we want to make sure that whatever money the light department spend for like department business and they were not cross subsidising town visit town things and we're trying to operate as a reasonably efficient commercial enterprise whether the town buys pier whether it's a good idea or not is quite is one question but using light department money to buy something for the town that has zero zero benefit for the light department i think is not only a huge mistake it could well lead the complaint at the at the at the or at the state regulatory agency about why are we spending money we don't need to spend for capacity there's all kinds of issues about that and there's a real slippery slope issue about whose money you're building in there may be perfectly legitimate reasons for the town to acquire that site and then gave perfectly reasonable explanations why the town may not be to financial position to do it but using like department money to do it as a substitute is a huge mistake how do you want to go all laws in favor of going another ten minutes say i first let's pick a time of it can go we've talked about today first they're going to look at the need for the project and they're going to and we're going to be able to establish that they're going to look at the different alternatives and i believe we're going to be able to establish that they want fifteen k v to make the most sense the next and they're going to look at is a site selection process they're going to want to make sure that we look at all of these factors cost environmental impact it cetera and the cost of the site if it was if it was your code would be something they would they would look at they would not have the authority at the end of the day to say you have to sell off a part of a part of that property however i would expect that if that was the way that we went we would go in and explain the plan that we had long term in terms of selling off part of the land and the board would have to look at that and see if that that made sense but what they do is they look at our process and the term and whether that makes all right angles maybe we don't need the whole five but it's i think as as a consultant working for the site selection committee one of our goals is to get as much feedback as possible and you guys have done a great job tonight that was a lot of information but if you can help motivate your other town meeting members and other residents to come on the eleventh with lots of questions and lots of ideas about what they think about these different properties i think i would say focus a little less on the different strain a thirty seven point two million dollars project in a thirty seven point six million dollars project it's really not the cost of the overall project that we're really looking for that feedback on it's what people really think should happen at these different sites and provide that feedback because one of the conversations we've had about the energy of silly sightings board is it would be looked on negatively to have more than one option presented at town meetings so really these meetings ahead of time are not you need to give feedback to the site selection committee so the site selection committee can make a decision and say here's what's going to go on the warrant for a decision  so come with your feedback come with ideas come with saying you know here's why i like this site or why don't but but that's really we could get a tremendous amount of feedback and information on the eleventh so i hope we get that martin cohen to leading member i have a comment and a question or comment is do not offer the town meeting a choice of sites i think you said had some fable about a donkey between two bales of hay a question the owner of the flanders property he is willing to sell the owner of the flanders property at one point was willing to sell and was very co operative as at the near the end of  process family member convinced the other family members it was not a good idea to sell therefore we were looking for authority to take it by eminent domain and we were also told there's two tenants in there no problem their leases expire within two years we're not going to be building there for eighteen months or two years anyways plus the fact there's relocation money available so the thought is this it doesn't happen very often but it's my recollection that the town meeting is very revoked and to exercise eminent domain in an adversarial situation we have used them in a domain where the seller wanted it for some tax reason and of course eminent domain would require a different vote by the town meeting the same two thirds no no i mean it would be another article no no no the article is to authorize to acquire the property by purchase or otherwise fifteen point eight k as one article and then the site selection another article but is actually pointed out until you get both those docs lined up you're not going anywhere with this project ok now and you know it's getting near the time we have to put an article in the time i mean it this is almost february one i understand like other years the town meeting will adjourn and reconvene in june with dealing ok if if anyone has questions they'd like to email to be melty to christina please get those in ahead of time we'll make sure that there's adequate answering beforehand so they know there's actually a website d m l the project at belmont your questions this is great for us to give us a forum to know what you want to know and how we can answer it so thank you very much and drive safe home