welcome everyone thank you for coming we're holding a forum to introduce everyone to the three candidates running for the open select persons seat and today this forum will focus on issues of concern to seniors and i have a few questions that i asked the candidates to be prepared to speak about in their remarks so the fair and that is the following and we're going to have each of the candidate speak for seven minutes  and address the questions that i'll share with you and in their remarks but not exclusively so then after that we're going to have a question and answer period what i'm going to do is  for that question answer period you're welcome to come to the mike and ask a question if you cannot walk to the mike then i will bring the mike to you so that you're sure not to miss that if you can't walk to the mike and then after that depending on the time we're going to have each of the candidates share a couple of minutes of closing remarks and we hope to make this an hour long program and stop on time so where the candidates are in order of alphabetical order so that's how we decide to choose who st three questions that i had in mind or one what do you see as the major problem seniors face and if elected what would you do about them number two in two thousand and eleven the board of selectmen committed the following in writing that this facility the beach st center be held for the primary purpose of operating c c away programs and that at least until the facility is fully depreciated in two thousand and forty nine see a way of programs will be given preference over other uses of the facility further the facility will not be sold or converted to another use without a two thirds vote of town meeting given this commitment how would you handle it if other groups in town looking for space ask you to replace some or all of the program space at this center for their use ok i know that's a mouthful number three we're excited that the taliban is now what's called the  age friendly communities network as a member of this network we are blige to put together an advisory council that will evaluate feasible projects which would make a great place for seniors and people of all ages to live would there be any types of projects that you as select person would want such a newly formed advisory council to explore so those are the questions but they won't be exclusively the issues that the candidates will speak to so without further ado i will have these candidates introduced themselves by name and however else other information they want to give so going down the line seven minutes hi my name is jesse bennett i am a candidate for select woman in belmont i live on trowbridge street and i have lived in belmont for twelve years i live in a two family house over on trowbridge with my children one is that burbank and rd grade and one is at the chanter a in th grade and my wife we've lived here for as i said for twelve years  we feel very fortunate to have relocated to this amazing community one of the reasons we did it is right at the back of my father in law's cousin raised her child here is still living in town and she told us we would love it here and she was right  thank you so much for having us here today nava this is a fantastic opportunity for us to speak to the issues facing seniors in town and and thank you roy and tim for being here to thank you everybody for coming in it's gorgeous afternoon so th for being willing to be inside and listen to us speak the challenges that i hear most often brought up when i speak to seniors in town include housing access resources support resources for vulnerable seniors caring for having social worker who's available to care for people and also traffic which is the traffic and walk ability is an issue that faces everybody in town i think of all ages as i've been involved in the safe routes to school committee for the last several years i got involved burbank and i was concerned that a lot of students were being dropped off in cars they could you know just as easily change their behaviors so that the families were walking together to school and we started looking at what some of the obstacles were to safe walking and belmont so in terms of that i like i said i think it's not just safe routes to schools i think it's safe routes for everybody and we could have a safe routes to seniors off shoot i'm sure that would be a great great project we have a problem with our infrastructure that i want to see us  address and make sure sidewalks are safe and we have a problem with keeping them clear when it snows that we have problems with motorists not paying attention you know being distracted and it results in tragedy from time to time as we saw this past fall so this is an issue that's been very close to my heart i started out on the safe routes to school committee and i have been part of the high school traffic working group looking at the issues around the new high school building the seven to twelve school and now i'm on the transportation advisory committee so i really want to make sure that our work always puts pedestrians and bicyclists at the center of the equation when we're making decisions about how to care for our our infrastructure in town  i'm really i want to make sure i get this in order so the beach street center ok so i'm in the community of people who are schools schools schools schools schools all the time and i think it's very easy for us to get balkanized in town where we were all kind of thinking about our community and what's most important and i get concerned when people are like well what do they use the beach street center for  people my age who don't understand how important this resources for so many people in town i am encouraged by seeing the engagement here today you know that i know that there's a real dedication to this resource by want to make sure that other communities that aren't yet using it we all hope i hope to someday be using this not not as far down the road as i would like to think but you know this is this is an amazing resource and it's part of making belmont a town where people can live for their whole lives and feel connected to one another and to not be isolated and to have access to the support services that they need or the entertainment that they need or the you know the friendships that  that you form when you're a part of you know taking part in an activity here i think it's vitally important and i think we need to stay true to what the charter was for this organization peachtree center is primarily for seniors and all and it needs to remain that way i'm also one of the things i do as a volunteer in town is i'm on the board of the belmont after school in richmond collaborative and we recently knob i think you came over to basic at the  did a program of outreach and i think that that's also a really key component to making sure that our communities that our community is as a whole is really connected it is a fantastic opportunity for middle school to be able to come over to the senior center and to meet people and to see and to connect with them and to make these connections across generations so so base basic the afterschool program and generally had done a workshop where they were focusing on this kind of outreach so i would love to see more opportunities for that not keeping track of the time i hope you are not ok now the final question that novel wanted to make sure that we address is the age friendly communities study and i i found the study incredibly fascinating although not surprising i mean it was really great to read about the things that we're doing right in belmont and the things that we can do better i think that we have to make sure that we have housing that suits people at all stages of life and belmont i was concerned with the recent mclane development proposal which called for rezoning a parcel that had been originally marked for seniors several years ago and make it a luxury to have luxury townhomes that are three thousand square feet which doesn't seem to meet the needs of the seniors who are living in town we need more housing that  is mid range meaning more housing that is affordable and we need more opportunities for people to downsize if that if that's the point in their life when they want to do that and then we also need the support services for people to stay in their homes if that's what they need so i think that we have to take any opportunity for development with the those goals in mind we don't have enough housing for seniors in town we don't have enough affordable housing in town and when are looking to make changes to any zoning for a developer then we need to be able to say to them well you know these are the things that we need we need more affordable units and we need things that are less expensive than one million three  myself since you may have seen me only in a capacity as warrant committee chair which can seem a little dry but my story is the following in just a couple of minutes i grew up in new jersey in a politically aware household my earliest two presidential election which made a big impact on me when i was a teenager later on my dad didn't go to college because he was actually in one of the early rounds of draft forty one and he came back from the south pacific in one thousand nine hundred and forty five and college just wasn't an option anymore but he and my mom were able to send me to was only in university in connecticut and after was lee and i went to yale and got a ph d in economics where i was a national science foundation a graduate fellow which i think might never quite could believe that but he was pleased to see it and at yale i met john and my wife we moved to chicago and had two boys there then moved to belmont because she got an offer from weidner library where she was a librarian  when we moved to st watertown for a year than belmont in one thousand nine hundred and four you know we've always been interested in town affairs but for a long time didn't know anything about belmont we would sit around the kitchen table and say well why is this happening and why is that happening and i didn't really know how the town was even organized and finally we had a neighbor who said well want to just run for town meeting and i did in two thousand and three and heard about the war in committee i didn't know the warren committee existed until then and was quite interested in it and was appointed to the warrant committee into two thousand and seven where i've been ever since and i've been the chair since two thousand sixteen so as most of you probably know the warrant committee's role formally is to advise belmont in any financial issue that comes down the pike particularly when town meeting has to vote on it and just examples of the kinds of things we've done since i've been chair i think that in two thousand and sixteen the st year the big question at that time was should belmont remain in the minuteman school district or not and we worked awfully hard on the pros and cons of that issue and i actually flipped i started out thinking we should stay in the district but after working on it for six months i thought the better course was actually to leave and that was the recommendation that we made to town meeting and town meeting actually voted the same way the big issue of the next year was pension obligations to about months retirees you probably know that there's a big unfunded pension liability that we have to deal with but we studied that issue at some length wrote a report and belmont then the board of selectmen the warren committee and the retirement board working together came up with a policy for dealing with the retirement with the pension obligation and then last year the big issue of course was the high school and i was a strong supporter of the high school the long wrote letters a letter to the paper because that's all you're allowed to support the high school i'm glad it passed and i'm glad that the war and i you know the warrant the warrant committee obviously debated a lot because the school's very expensive it's a big deal and i'm pleased that the warren committee voted unanimously to support the high school i think that's that was the right solution in general in terms of other things i've done in town and then i'll turn to the novice specific questions  always been interested well i've been interested in a wide variety of things environmental building quality of life stuff so we have solar panels on the house i was actually chair of the group that established the pricing policy that belmont light instituted that ended up in the most successful community solar program in the state as far as i know i have an electric car now which is the greatest car ever owned i ride my bike a lot i'm on the community path project committee and to anybody who asks north or south i say there are questions with both but it will get built which is the main thing the community path will get done to projects that i'm particularly proud of just to give you an indication of how i think about things probably for twenty years it was saying what you do which we do about the police station because both buildings were in embarrassingly bad shape and if you watched my presentations during the war and briefing i showed you highlights like the ladies bathroom and the police station and things like that they were really terrible  the reason nothing happened for the longest time was because the town commissioned consultants who said well you can fix it all and it will cost you fifty million dollars and at that point that discussion stopped and i said to the warr committee two years ago you know we really have to make progress on this and let's just rethink the whole thing and after working on it there i have to say i initiated a discussion that morphed into the major capital projects working group and it's now become a building committee where the the d p w on the police station work is going to go up to bid next month thirty seconds my gosh and it's going to cost nine million dollars not fifty million dollars let me just say quickly about the three issue is the use of this building when the town makes an agreement we have to live up to the agreement so of the senior center has st dibs on the space until two thousand and forty nine that's it if any other group wants to use it let them come forward and offer a use but it has to be agreeable to the current occupants of the building and it's not then it's not going to happen as far as i'm concerned regarding services to seniors my mom lives in a in a continuing care community in pennsylvania and i'm astonished at the range of activities that they offer and the people there are so diverse even that advanced ages like eighty and ninety i would leave it up to the residents to say what programs are most desirable to them because people's interests are all over and then work to make it happen i would not impose my own preferences on that i think it's important for the people to speak up and the rd question is when do you think the priority of the single group there are lots of issues but the single greatest issue a senior housing  and there's also a great range in senior preferences some people want to stay in their houses some people would like to downsize to something appropriate some people want to downsize to something small some people would like to buy something nicer when i worked what i hope to see is not just mclean because mclean is relatively small in the scheme of things i think there's a great potential for building a much larger development on south close and street in other parts of belmont and there will actually be in the end a range of housing from relatively modest to something grander and i think we can use it all and for people who want to stay in their houses in discussions now with banks but it's just way premature to say where that might lead though i hope will result in innovative financing schemes where people can stay in their houses much better terms than they can with financial products that currently exist and that's that's as far as i can get in my seven minutes thank you thank you good afternoon my name is timothy flood in i'm a candidate for the board of selectmen i live in belmont for seven years with my th grade daughter victoria and my girlfriend casey i graduated from arlington high school and joined the united states marine corps i was deployed for both the war in afghanistan and the iraq war and after leaving active duty i worked in federal law enforcement and i currently own and operate a small business called east coast chickies we recently moved to fo road in belmont about eight years ago excuse me after eight years in arlington last year i was excited to relocate my business to be closer to home and be more involved with my daughters after school activities and more so to become an active member of my community unfortunately i encountered many hurdles setting up my store in town i have heard similar challenges from other business owners as the co chair for directory data and advertisements coordination for the general p t o i have contacted every business in town in person for advertisements in the student directory hearing stories like my own and worse some business owners often have apathy and even disdain for the community so after listening to local business owners and neighbors concerns with overwhelming kargman i decided to run  we all want belmont to thrive i offer a fresh perspective and want to provide an avenue for neighbors to share their opinions and concerns i want your voices to be heard within the same conversations with belmont residents i am encouraged by our community's commitments to insure excellent schools and reinvest in smarter public infrastructure with that we have a long path ahead to achieve these goals my top priorities must be fiscal responsibility addressing our traffic problems and promoting local business you can probably understand my interest in the local business i am sensitive to the need for a business friendly town policies i want to encourage businesses complicated is our need to realistically plan for a financial future as a community we are preparing to address our aging infrastructure including the high school the police station public works the ice rink the library and others will come one must keep in mind replacing or updating these facilities in planning for our future maintenance needs comes at a cost we also have an obligation to continue  pension benefits for past and present employees currently the town has approximately one hundred and fifty million dollars on paid pension liabilities we cannot afford to default on this commitment or plan to burden future generations with this debt although it is difficult and not desirable to defer projects or raise taxes in order to fund pension costs we have little reason to believe that an alternative approach will be less burdensome in the future unfortunately wants financial resources are finite relying heavily on residential taxpayers can be especially burdensome to our seniors future planning in budgeting must be strategic creative reasonable and most importantly involve the seniors it effects it is not to say that we should not spend money on needed services for example i believe belmont needs additional full time social workers for help with our seniors currently there is inefficiency in services and most importantly follow up particularly with complex cases such as hoarding in dementia beyond this i believe seniors would benefit from additional services i envision a group of volunteers that reach out to our elderly in their homes and just simply check in this group should be consistent and non mandatory reporters i imagine they would be better received than the police or social workers and help address issues prior to reaching any crisis at the beach treat center we can also expand the already tremendous programming and services offered i would like to see volunteer programs whereby students and elders can learn from each other i know my daughter would be hasn't it at st to teach someone else about computer skills or how to do something on their phone i think this would also help grow her confidence and help her feel empower for young people like my daughter and seniors alike i also believe it is important to implement new solutions to address traffic congestion especially in their own belmont center as well as continue to make belmont a more  that belmont has joined the aid friendly community network and expect this new advisory group to help evaluate opportunities for walking and other forms of physical activity and transportation from our seniors perspective i would also like to see this advisory group to help to help seniors age in place provide recommendation to address the lack of affordable and appropriate housing options and improve communications about available health and support of services and bolster senior opportunities for meaningful volunteer service or civic engagement i recognize that many of them want success as successes and future planning are at large part because of tireless effort an amazing work of town volunteer committees and boards i do not want these efforts to be minimized or lost only to build upon them i want to better integrate our shared values of community education family inclusive  transparency and collaboration to address our priorities thank you for this opportunity to tell you how i got here and what i think i'd love to hear more from you oh and remember please vote april  qualifications including education and experience i want to say a great respect for nada she does a great job but that's a separate issue and that and i also great respect for law enforcement and the p w and was really glad you know i saw it and don't want cable i thought it was big news d p w so i'm really glad you came up with a solution for making it cost a reasonable cost because they were both both things are absolutely necessary so my question is is the roads and domino i drive i think it's sort of fun to fly over the part of olds and i go into a ditch people in other communities often say to me why are the roads so bad in belmont so will they ever runts to take that i can i can start i'm on the transportation advisory committee and it's something worth that we spend a lot of time talking about there is a there's a record that is kept by the office of community  development if a road has gone below there is below a certain standard they call it the sixty percent standard back to the point when it gets ground down and repaved you'd be surprised at how much damage can be on a road before it gets to that sixty percent but if a road is damaged and it's not quite to that point then they'll patch it in resale it it also has a lot to do with other infrastructure projects so we have problems in the past where the town would road next year there's you know national grid is coming through and digging it up again so there's phasing that happens with these projects and when glenn clancy in the office of community development is making up his list of these are the roads that will be done this year he's taking all those things into account also sewer work that they're doing to fix storm drain because our storm drain runoff problem is huge you know we've been contaminating and we've been getting we got warnings from the e p a regarding the contaminants when we've had cracks sewer lines that dripped into the storm drains or other issues like that so they've been going through and doing that work the last override i worked on the campaign for that to get it passed and  e addressed you know having to injecting more money into the capital budget to pay for repairs as well as sidewalk repairs which are also badly needed at this point the so it is it is  a huge amount of work i've also been working with the office of community development we helped through the safe routes to school program we helped advocate and get the town to sign on to the complete streets program which puts a little bit more money into the town's budgets through this grant effort to you know stretch our dollars a bit more in terms of doing the sidewalk repairs improving the pedestrian infrastructure and giving us a little more money for our major projects hi roy again so streets and sidewalks are something that we've studied quite a bit the problems that jesse identified i think have been largely addressed at this point the streets are not paved unless the water work and guess work has been done and  that's not the case it's an unusual circumstance the basic question from jane is how to pave streets and sidewalks more quickly because at the current rate we're doing the work it's going to take fifty or sixty years to pave the streets and it's going to take close to one hundred years to do the sidewalks and i would like to speed that up just a little bit how to do it well it's tough because it's just money and one way to do it is i believe there are still six meaningful ways to save money within the town budget and i would like to whatever savings we can still wring out i would like the earmark to streets and sidewalks you know there may be some potential for additional state money but we can't count on that and i think that the whole streets and sidewalks issue which sometimes is treated as kind of a joke in belmont because people don't know what else to say anymore it's not funny i think we have to find a way to do it one thing that i would like to address immediately is the sidewalks we've waited so long for sidewalks but if you look at the work that's done frequently the concrete starts to deteriorate within the st year or two so far i've asked that nobody has an answer for that one of the st things i would like to do is convene a panel to figure out what is going on with the concrete because it's insane to me to spend the limited money that we do have on sidewalks that then in two or three years time look like the old sidewalk that we just replaced but in general  jane has identified is a serious problem we can take we can do better in the short run but to really speed things up in the long run it's going to take it's going to take more work i'd love to tell you that i have an answer to this is that this is been ongoing issue for many years and realistically i don't see it being fixed tomorrow we have instituted new sidewalk repairs in conjunction with street fairs i believe that instituted last year someone correct me if i'm wrong on that to combine the two it was separated for a long time  so and that's one set moving forward i think the complete streets which is already mentioned is going to be one key aspect to consider all these repairs  needed carolyn carolyn bishop precinct one town meeting member we've lived in belmont for four thousand four hundred and forty five years and love it however i've seen so many changes over the years and this address es both the streets and the money one of the reasons our streets and our sidewalks are deteriorating so rapidly is salt in the olden days peter cass nina said we only use enough salt to keep the sand from freezing sand also pun but it did the trick now we're using huge amounts of very expensive salt nothing else salt so huge that chunks are this big i'm digging them out of my head i'm digging them away from my trees because trees to me make belmont special and my trees are dying because they've been heartily salted every winter for the last one thousand and fifteen years or so and then the other thing for money is i'm very concerned i appreciate need for the board of selectmen to investigate issues at depth in depth before they make a decision however recently the incinerator site has been a very expensive proposition to consider hiring this consultant hiring that consultant i think that last one was cancelled at the last minute making studies of the studies and all you really need to do is investigate the suggestions what's an anaerobic digester what exactly is involved what is and take a walk on the site because the site is impossible for those kinds of equipment those kinds of projects vast the the cap is originally was eight something inches deep with used soil taken from perini construction and it sealed things but nobody really gets what's under there there is a pit that was used for catch basin tailings and that is contaminated with whatever runoff lead cadmium off the our pavements that was sealed there was not just the specimens from our too soon to demolish the incinerator site but every the snow that was pil piled up there we removed snow that's where it goes to melt more content contamination from the highways so it really requires more work on our part to investigate these things before we hire a consultant  say now it's going to be iffy and think about what really is required it's so easy to say well put a soccer field up there while people might want lighting they need bathrooms they need parking this little site has been everybody's go to for whatever we need well my question is what do each of you think of these issues i mean do we really need these many consultants when you can think out or go visit i mean i know it's volunteer even though you're paid volunteer but those are i don't have the answers unfortunately and my question is what do we do with all this how do we get the money well as a consultant myself i'm very attuned to misuse of consultants and over use of consultants and i've asked that question about the town's activities cap may be more than the money that we've set aside for it and the interest in the digester was in just to explore whether this was a possible way of trying to cover that  worked out fine but it didn't work out fortunately we actually didn't pay the consultant very much this time and i think in the end the world will find it in the incinerators are pretty low impact uses that won't be there won't be playing fields certainly there might be a bike path trail or something through there i've always said it would make sense for either solar technology or better restored or something that's environmentally benign but  in general i would like to use consultants unless it was absolutely necessary in their scope of work was very clearly identified being looked at was it got narrowed down to five possibilities but over time in more discussions with the state we found that we couldn't do some of those possibilities and unfortunately with consultants at that time we would so they steered us a little bit i'm not saying that you know we should use consultants across the board there is a time in a place for them what i'd like to see kind of what you're you're touching on is maybe  roundtable with the community itself for quite some time and maybe work out what we can work out in house before we're reaching out i think that makes sense on a lot more issues other than just seen center site i think we can move things a lot faster throughout the town if we have open dialogue that's one thing that we are missing is that open dialogue and if we start to have these round tables that might that might help us move forward a little bit with respect to the solving itself is the equipment that we're using is also starting to get old and we need to update some of that equipment which will potentially provide a thinner layer of salt to be expended each time they come by you know but the reality is i think that the that does tie into a safety aspect in particular this year you'll see you've seen a lot of ice and ice is particularly hard for that for the town to deal with they would much rather prefer two feet uses were going to be acceptable for that site before we started the process i find it a little frustrating that we went down this road of exploring all these different ideas for the incinerator site without having a solid answer from the state on what would be allowed and in the transfer of the property to the town we had certain parameters and if the state knew that we were going to make money off of it they would have not and we wouldn't have gotten it for essentially nothing i mean we got it for the cost of capping it now i know that there were you know there was a real desire to cover the cost of capping it but we decided to take this land knowing that that was the issue and we have pushed it back and pushed it back in hopes of having this lake great idea that directly so open space help me you know putting things up there for the light department i i like the idea of solar and battery storage i think that sounds fantastic i think having open space up there is a great thing to one of the great resources of belmont is the fact that you can you can work in the city and then be in the woods in the afternoon you know it's a beautiful thing about our town we all need that respite so in terms of the salting and i couldn't agree with you more i mean i think it's  i think that we do we get we get into habits because we have a perception of what is the safest way of doing something or or we're you know what's the you know if if a little is good more is better you know so i think that we have to be very careful about the environmental impacts of the choices that we make with regard to keeping things safer on the roads i lived i lived in minnesota for seven years before i came here they didn't even plow the side roads unless it was three  well i don't know if we've beaten this subject to death but i think not plowing the roads when there's three inches of snow may not be an option but yeah i'm not suggesting that for here but i'm just saying i would say that salt is quite expensive and the highway department hates to use it so i think it would be worth asking again next year what's best practices and seeing if there's maybe a better way of going about it but they are they are not wasting salt because they don't have the money i also think that you're getting at the sidewalk behavior is often the residents and so we have to be out there communicating with the residents about you know the impacts of putting all that salt down there had their sidewalks going to crumble sooner i mean basic self interest but on top of the environmental impacts thank you and we'll stick to question that's her right that's our not just you everyone is passionate about certain issues i appreciate that it's just a matter of time trash and recycling problems and this ringback is a huge problem for me i was able to get the smaller size bins but there is no place on my property where i can store these been absolutely none plus i have a mobility issue now and i couldn't move it up over the concrete step so my daughter lives in cambridge and she comes several times a week and takes all of my trash all of my recycling to cambridge where it is disposed of and i would love it if somebody in belmont would consider problems that some of the senior citizens out of with these  is can belmont help you can anybody help me so that i can dispose of my garbage in the town where i pay taxes i would say if i could take a stab at that  so the new trash policy only started last summer and this is the st year which is really an experiment for everybody that d p w was not locked in to the current system without adjustments i think this is a period of gathering information and learning about the experiences of different people and i expect that the program will be customized in certain ways to accommodate circumstances like your own and i'm sure are other people with other concerns and the program will just have to be modified as time goes by i i mean i know that this is a very new program and a lot of people have had issues with it i'll say that our trash doesn't wait around for an experimental period to and we all generate trash every day and we generate trash every week and i think that the town needs to be more responsive to these issues when when somebody is faced with an issue of not being able to get their trash to the curb every day or you know get to their trash to the curb every week that is an immediate and pressing issue for that person and so the town needs to develop ways to respond and if it's if it is being able to refer that person to a community group of volunteers that might be able to do something then that's that's a good course of action to do it doesn't necessarily have to be a member of the d p w coming out and grabbing your bag of trash every day but there are networks like the cambridge neighbors program which has expanded to belmont and i would like to see you know they have a list on their website that they are looking for volunteers in belmont if we could locate a volunteer for instance who lives near a person who is having a problem in the town can help facilitate that person getting in touch with a volunteer who will help them that could back and take a big step toward solving that person's problem right away i don't think the town should be looking at it overall yes it is experimental we're having we've been having issues this year i know a lot of people have been struggling with it i struggle with like fitting all my recycling in the can every week with a family of four but you know we need to be able to respond to the issues faster when it's really affecting somebody's quality of life  so one of the things i mentioned previously was open dialogue and i think we come right back to that i think if the seniors were involved more in the original discussion of this new service i don't think we'd be reacting so one of the things we need to do is reach out to the seniors more and make sure that any new initiative that's coming forward the seniors are involved in directly involved and have all their input up front so we're not having to figure out what we need to fix after the fact thank you so i see three questions and we only have time for one problem or is there anything belmont can do about its own situation or are we just stuck with it i think the answer is yes yes yes and yes in the following sense belmont is a cut through town in terms of what we can do immediately we can't tell people not to drive through belmont i mean we can't close the gates but there are different issues in different parts of town some places people speed and there we need more in for other places where the traffic is then some particularly when kids are going to school or something we need to have sufficient crossing guards to make sure you can cross the street safely i want to investigate things like automatic speed cameras i know i've seen them in europe i've gotten caught in europe where you don't need a cop you can just put this unit by the side of the road and being if you're going too fast to get a ticket automatically in canada  alternately in terms of the volume of traffic it's that's going to be a longer change both in culture and infrastructure i think people have to get accustomed to reading more mass transit riding bikes walking when they can and ultimately for belmont when a lot of the commuters are coming from pretty far away i i think the solution is the fitchburg line has to be brought into the st century instead of in the one thousand nine hundred centuries if you tell somebody from europe that you have a commuter train were at the peak it runs two trains an hour they'd say you're crazy if that if that service went to six or eight dollars ten cents trains an hour you could take thousands of cars off the road and i would hope that that is i believe the m b t is starting to move in that direction finally but that is something concrete that could help reduce traffic on belmont streets you know this is an issue that i think about a lot and i could probably sit here and talk to you about it for several hours i'm on the transportation advisory committee now and we have started receiving the data from the town my traffic study we're analyzing the data tells us where people are cutting through where they're coming you know if they're in town residents or if they're coming from out of town but it is a regional problem but boston was recently rated as having the worst traffic in the country of any urban area it's because we have so many jobs and we have so many nine to five jobs and everybody is getting to work and coming back at the same exact time so in terms of lessening the pain in our town one of the things we're looking at in the transportation advisory committee is discouraging the use of neighborhoods as to save yourself some time keeping the traffic on the arteries which of course doesn't decrease the traffic on the arteries but at least it make things safer in our neighborhoods also looking at infrastructure changes that can help cars move through more sanely in different areas of the project and development for the area by mill street and concord which would have to roundabouts instead of having the crazy left turns and everything gets backed up and everything is nuts over there and that would help slow down cards as they're coming through and help them get through more easily so it would be a traffic calming measure that would also allow cars to get through more quickly one of the problems some and then one issue with the cameras is that we can't do it in massachusetts we have to change state law but we also have an enforcement issue in that you know you have we have a limited number of police officers and so really the way that you want to slow people down is by instituting traffic calming measures things that give signals to motorists that they need to slow down that they can't fly through an area big because there are protests tree and there are bicyclists there sharing the road with people so we need more of that and i've been working with and paulson on the high school traffic working group and with the safe routes to school committee and we've been talking about different town wide measures that could take to encourage residents to give belmont a reputation as a town where people drive twenty five because the town wide speed limit we don't have a reputation that you're going to get caught in belmont if you drive more than twenty five if we have an initiative that helps get people to slow down then people know they can't whip down concord avenue at forty miles an hour so it is an issue that causes a lot of pain in town and you know it's one that i care about very deeply and i hope to continue my work on in the board of selectmen so there's a couple things that we need to consider in regards to traffic st and foremost is the apps that are used today  ways they're specifically routing traffic into residential neighborhoods to lighten the load in spread though it this is an intentional thing that's being done there's been a lot of studies to look at this regionally as well as nationally one of the things that has started to happen over the last few years is that ways in particular has been more responsive to communities that have been reaching out to them in working with them and giving them the data that they have to see where the cars are coming and going from and then depending on that community they've chosen to put in one way signs to change routes of traffic and what essentially that has done is it's solved certain areas now keep in mind you solve one particular area it's going to affect somewhere else so you can't you can't you know be narrow minded or close minded and say we just need to solve this particular area you have to look at it holistically and look at the entire town all the cut through it take all that data and it just the whole town and if we're talking about one ways then you have to look at all the residents that are on that one way and have to agree to that and i think that's going to be the tougher problem is getting all the individual residents to say i agree with this one way so keep that in mind there are there are things that we can do again that comes back to that dialogue and having this communication and having this information of these programs are in place in these providers are willing to work with you but you have to be willing to work with them as well ok thank you very much just have a couple more minutes left what i'd like to do is  from this direction now if you could make it closing statements about a minute that would be great i know that's a bit of a time pressure actually not  if i will thoughtfully in collaboratively represent our community i will listen to your concerns and convictions and act on your behalf i will be a voice for all community members as a local business owner i will establish more business friendly policies implemented new solutions to traffic congestion and better prepare us for a financial robust future thank you very much for coming out today  i'm always impressed by the amount of community involvement in belmont for any question that comes up the line of people out the door the board of selectmen is long and the difficulty is coming up with a solution that can address the concerns of such a variety such a diverse group of people and to me the best way to do that is through experience through a variety of issues and to try to come up with something that works for people who don't necessarily all have the same view of things but from having been involved in these types of issues now for ten years or so i think i've been successful in finding things that do work and i'd like the opportunity to  solve turn my efforts to some of the issues that we've identified today and show that it can be done thank you i want to close today with the personal story i was thinking about how cross generational relationships we have affect us in our daily lives for for the rest of our lives and when i was a child one of my favorite people in the world was my great grandmother whose name was alice although i called her nanny and she was a great admirer of our state's governor i lived in connecticut that's where i grew up who became governor while i was a small child governor crossroads tenure as governor of connecticut made a great deal to me as a young child i grew up never thinking that it was impossible for woman to lead our state when my when mel across so resigned from her put her post for after cancer diagnosis any which nanny shared with me and the note said you know thanks my grandmother for thinking about her and that governor cross so i had been honored to serve their state in the capacity as governor the sense of pride that came off of my great grandmother in sharing this story with tearing this know with me has stayed with me my entire life  she to her governor grasso represented something bigger than just a governor she represented what women could achieve in an environment where they weren't necessarily encountering open doors i take that great sense of responsibility very seriously and the process of running for select men comes from my great feeling that we should all be civically involved and we should ourselves out there thank you very much thank you very much and in that spirit i apologize to those people who were eager to ask questions didn't get a chance to so if you could just let me know you're going to be meeting together and another form correct and what is that date and time so that people have an opportunity again we will be more they'll be a live debate on the belmont media center but that's not really an open forum that's this friday and we will also be at the league of women voters candidate night not this coming thursday but next thursday the st of march and that's at the middle school and believe it begins at seven p chance to meet all the candidates for office in town ok thank you very much for coming and thank you to the candidates