on the show to reflect on the year two thousand and eighteen because i believe and i'm sure you agree that this was a year of major accomplishments i mean out of the three years when you say like there was a lot that happened in two thousand and seventy yeah i think i prefer saying it that way there's a lot that happened rather than accomplishments because i think government what you want out of government is more steady as you go and so these all of the things that it happened in  but we're actually talking about calendar two thousand and seventeen yes we are so there were a number of things that came up in two thousand and seventeen all of which had been worked on for months and months and perhaps even years in some cases and  yeah it's been a very active year and we only have thirty minutes to talk about some of these major will say happenings so i thought i thought we would focus on what you think are the top five or six happenings and i would say one of the most recent things and i know this was a a big item on your agenda when you were running for selectman was this all peb liability and most recently wealth jones broke the news of his accomplishment on the open study committee that they reduced the liability or they found that the the liability is like almost half of what they thought it was like by ninety million dollars less so the original total is like one hundred eighty million and now it's you probably know this number better than me ninety two ninety ninety two million so a lot of people watching might say what does that mean and i know you and i actually had a very productive meeting where you explain to me why this is so important for belmont and what it means but i thought maybe you could you know just tell people what why what does this mean for belmont financial future and why it's important well it was going to be the town's largest liability one hundred eighty million  proposed to citizens petition which are kind of fun to do because you only need ten signature yeah to get them on the war and a town meeting agreed that the board of selectmen this was before i was on should have  a study committee to look at the open question and i was elected selectman as you know so what happened was after that town meeting in august of two thousand and fifteen we had active people who are active in government and they started looking at the situation and i think if you don't have a good understanding of your liability to understand your largest liabilities always a good policy so to borrow a phrase from hillary clinton's book takes a village in this case it took a town because we put everyone who applied on the committee this was mark sammy an ralph started they found out very quickly that the actuarial projections that we had weren't using the town's actual projections they were using state averages right then they visited wayland who had done a similar study before and their their liability and they came back and reported to us this was in two thousand and seventeen it took a while to get yeah and we hired siegel which is the actuarial firm that handles our pension obligation yeah and they took our health care numbers right which are confidential and they were qualified to do that and they ran the numbers and did a number of other analyses and the net result was that the liability was reduced by some ninety four million now we thought it was we knew that even though the benefit didn't change the way it was being funded changed and we expected the reduction it didn't expect of thirteen million for for their active million but but not not not this outcome and this outcome is  the prior or the current i should say funding strategy actually work whereas before it never really paid the liability off and now right under the current funding strategy it will pay the liability off by twenty good i made that up while i walking my dogs to me and i just wanted to be able to talk about it that was look at what's happened now that's great but i have to say that without ralph without jeff without liz actually liz liz alison was the one who suggested that the committee follow the cash and she had to withdraw from the committee after years so because of her planning board work right jeff of making the comparisons to other towns there's more work to be done so two thousand and eighteen they'll be even more progress there is i mean i do have some ideas that i'd like to discuss i'd like i hope i hope my colleagues and i'm sure they will be willing to think about it and floyd i do think that we can do more right arms of managing these liabilities and will be addressing that in connection with this budget cycle that's a very exciting time to look forward to and another major happening in two thousand and seventeen or was the community path route yet approved by the well yeah i think again this is along the lines of it takes a town because russell you know and in his committee they worked on this project for that re years three years i mean it we actually the town has sixty six committees operating and no allow at different points in time different committees come to the forefront because you know their work is being done and it needs to be presented  but i don't think you can say enough about this community path implementation committee because they are vetted virtually every possibility they vetted every consideration ten public meetings ten public meetings and it it's a very solid firm outline our next step is to figure out how to fund right the next step in the project which is more of a design phase and  you know we'll we'll be addressing that in connection with the two thousand and one thousand budget as well to see where we can find the money to to fund the next step but it is it is exciting and it's something that is also going to take you know in their presentation to us that you know they're talking twenty twenty two perhaps twenty twenty one you know right when the concert hall goes well yeah exactly so it's another one of those long term deals but you have to you have to keep moving moving you have to keep moving things towards the right words the end product because if you don't take those intermediate steps you never you never g i agree and speaking of getting things done a town administrator has been hired to replace david kill that was another big happening patrice garvin from the town  able to tell anybody all right so we did it in the executive session and we appreciated it but so it and then of course he took the job then he went through the budget and then and then he left in february  someone that i was meeting with on the budget said gee jim if i didn't know better this looks like a david hale farewell budget and i couldn't say it but the budget was well done and it was accepted by town meeting and  think what happened then was that we looked at we put out a contract that required some sort of skill test which you would normally do for a police chief or fire chief and we only got one response back and so then we had to go back out again so we didn't really hire our search firm until august right and once we got grow white on board things went very quickly i was on  and others and we went through one thousand years of mason right we narrowed it down to six yes we lost two then one then one less and at the end of the end of the period there were only two qualified candidates right  candidates that the screening committee recommended to us right and so we were grateful that we actually had to celebrate our meeting process to meet now demands of the market in either one of them i feel highly confident either right kevin or patrice could have done it and marc and adam expressed a preference for patrice i respect that it was a unanimous vote and here we are yet quite at quite a change for her coming from surely to belmont but the way she put it in her interview was well just add a few easy or else yeah of course it's not going to be quite that easy but she's she's an interesting resource because she's been in town administrator in two different towns so i think i think it's different you know if you're it's like an in any other job you know if you're the assistant senior editor then that means you're the assistant senior editor but if you're the senior editor it's a different deal right right and it's one of the same as being a selectman you know you can you can be a town meeting member and you can be very effective but there's a huge difference between and a town meeting member in the select to have these candidates in place and the other thing i would say if you asked me who was the most valuable player for the selectmen in town hall this year my answer would be phil phillips marshall and the reason for that is you have to think david walked out in february ok i shouldn't say it that way david or even left for a better job right in february and so phyllis's men are in a room and acting  administrator since then and in this interview process one of the things that came up was that normally when you have an acting town administrator and you get close to the placement there's always a big question happen to hear that and let's talk trash so a lot of media trash there's that was a big decision by your board too because a contract needs to be  a week yeah so anyway eight yeah well the the trash contract was renewed for i believe two years when it was originally up right because we weren't prepared to renew it for five and so we renewed with our existing carrier and during that time d p w had a consultant come in and they had a citizens group yeah there like anything else there are probably three three different camps in question and so we wanted to settle up before year end that was one goal yeah and we felt just like in the community path we had had enough public meetings we had enough citizen and gage meant and what we did was we divided the trice contract up into three pieces right you and i discussed but i'll say it for the public and the first piece first i should say that this is the is a collection contract right and that's it it's a collection contract so what we collect are is yard waste and bulky items from the curbside to the curbside pick up is right is one aspect of it yeah we made no change to that with the single exception one exception that you cannot put out more than one bulky item per week right you can't put out your whole living room no living room sat in the living room sets from arlington or amber and you know it it it was a great benefit i think it was one of those deals that benefited the few over the many and it was a very generous service and it just was something that we didn't think was necessary and yeah of course if you can put out one bulky item a week you can put out fifty two boki i say over the years we don't think it's too punitive so that was an easy decision we would do that yeah the second one was recycling and we the the actual recyclable bottles and plastic and everything in one container and then it gets sorted out at these centers that shake it up and parade it for you can do what we do which is we separated at the curbside  and that up till now seems to have been the best alternative and when we were looking at the recycling contract we decided to stay would do a stream more out of common sense  history than anything else so again there would be no change and then with regard to the collection there were really three choices one was actually two with with a twist one  was to continue as as before yeah with two men on the truck right or to go to automated which then required a certain container right we had to make the container decision and but those decisions dealt with collection not with recycling or pay as you throw right so we decided that the future of trash collection is the automated pickup just we would have had to buy new equipment this time anyway on the manual page and we have to do it for the automated pickup in the cost as it is about the same but what would happen after the first five years is that we would begin to get a payback from from being on the automated side because the cost would be reduced because i have one man  so mark and i voted for the sixty four yes gallon because we relied on the the consultant report right which said that the sixty four gallon would cover seventy percent of the town and then for the pay as you throw proponents although some have not accepted decision still what would happen is if if you are part of that thirty percent that your your tryst couldn't be handled  sixty four actually you would the only choice is just to reduce your trash output because we're not going to offer to sixty four gallon containers  minute and a matter of management now there will be accommodations made for folks who don't need the sixty four hour that and then we can we can buy the smaller thirty thirty i think it's thirty five gallon for them that's those can still be automated but even more than that some of our neighbors in our fellow citizens actually only have one little plastic bag of garbage and so we're going to make accommodations for that really great and we have a model that  it's up by denver's ok it's not danvers but it's by denver's yeah and they did the same thing and they about ten percent of their pickups have to be were accommodated for that reason great the other point about that is that if we had gone with the thirty four with all due respect to adams you know it probably would have covered only forty percent or so of the town and then people would have requested another and another thirty five  you're bidding the service if if one stop has two barrels it counts as two stops yeah so it just didn't make sense to mark and i and so we voted that way the other important thing was because almost everything we do is selectman there's always different opinions and usually there's three i don't know why that is but usually there's three and as you know the people in belmont have strong opinions and they think they're strong proponents for their position yet so what happens is if you're a selectman you want to try to keep in mind the common good that's that's the idea the principle of the thing the common good of right and so by picking the  the three people are going to be going to be happy with the decision you know in this happened over and over again so you just have to have confidence in the board of selectmen it doesn't matter i don't think who it is because once you get there you realize this is the way you have to play so you have to have confidence that the board of selectmen is doing what's best for the common good even though it may not meet your opinion well it'll be interesting to see what the bids come back as and what you know the final you know companies that you go with because you know as well you know we cycle a future of recycling is kind of uncertain you know i'm not sure that the public knows that you and i america cleans up its recycling act they're not going to take our recycling anymore so we don't know for sure what's how that's going to change things well we do know for example that our current collector has from zero to fifty two diane the time now it's not so pretty anymore so we well we you know when you're dealing with somebody like and they've been they've been a great vendor and they're bidding on our business on the automated side to understand could be wrong about that but i think so but so you don't want to punish them to a point where they can't perform the service you know what would happen to them is that they've been picking it up for free for the last seven years because they could sell it and sometimes it's my understanding that they used to make one hundred fifty dollars a ton so it was a right that was a good deal for them but now they have no where to they can't sell to china you know there's no one's buying it anymore and what they're doing is they're storing we are are getting bids of one hundred dollars per tonne for recyclable materials and of course the problem with that is that the trash disposal is sixty five dollars a tonne and so if the recyclable price is one hundred  then then it's really going to squash the recyclable market now i also understand from phyllis and jay too that these markets are cyclical these things it's this is happened once before and whether this is a fundamental change or not is the question but as you might have picked up from your article china obviously has come a long way in the last decade and they have four times five times not five times as many close to five times as many people as we do oh yes so if you have one point four billion people living in your country they're all producing trash it could be that they don't need these materials anymore it could be and they might they might have said they thought that the us recyclables were not clean enough for their purposes instead of saying was more yeah i'll leave that to the economists but but i write sort of a junior economist myself and i do think that in the back of my mind is that as that economy has developed you know they're dealing with the same issues we are and maybe they just don't need to do anymore i just got the signal that our time is starting to run out oh i see you have time to quickly touch on me one more or you know we could quickly if construction of that i thought that was the biggest risk that the town had when i came into office yes and we paid a lot of attention to it sammy and mark and myself over the last three years and in fact  that that substation was installed successfully yes it came in under budget and so there's more work to do there is but this was the big it was up until the high school project that's under consideration now that was the largest project that belmont had ever undertaken so i wanted to mention that you have a different name for cushing square now what is your norad for bradford sounds kind of new york in a that come to fruition and we were very patient when i think i think it was sammy was chairman that year and they kept asking us for extensions and and we kept giving it i know because we wanted the deal to either make it on their desk or not rather than having the town say no we can't give you another thirty days so that turned out to be a good strategy but it was only happening i really do not the town meeting did but yes that was a big change when i when i first one of the first things i did as a selectman was i was asked to vote on food liquor license as collateral for a loan right and since i was a bank lender my my my question was since the loan didn't belong to him or since the license and belonged to him how could you pledge as collateral right so i was assured that that was business as usual in i massachusetts which it is yeah and that it was perfectly acceptable so we did that then what happened was put his his license out for transfer and star market made made the highest offer and then again this is one of those situations where there are two or three different groups of people and some people thought that the new licenses that had been awarded it's i think in two thousand and ten whenever they were awarded had been conditioned as not transfer right but there was an error made there was in the well it was actually it was in the town meeting motion it was not in the town meeting motion we should have we should have learned our letter our lesson about town meeting motions with the center project you know because people thought that the design was firm and it wasn't and right and then with regard to the liquor license people thought that they were transferable and they were and then it went to the home rule petition in the home rule petition came back that they were transferable because the motion from town meeting didn't say that they weren't they weren't on now now that's not going to be allowed anymore well no but what's interesting is that  we i thought we went too far and i voted against it in town meeting because i thought that the restaurants should have the license attached as kind of a right of first ring and when i saw it but the people who were on the other side of the fence they just they wanted no no transferability at all in that's what town meeting voted for in it so that's the way it is but since then we've found out that boston cambridge in somerville all have problems with this and their problems were worse than the ones that we had because the one that we had was permitted even though people were disappointed about it it was still permitted  and you the only decision that we could make would have been that star markets wouldn't be a qualified license holder which of course is silly because it's a very responsible  dor and company and but in somerville cambridge in boston some of the licenses are bought and sold some are issued for free and us and it's a huge mess so i  don't know if you saw in the globe recently that you know that now they're going to look at the whole thing because there's really almost by town there's a different story so i've actually changed my opinion i still think it would have been good to have the restaurant licenses have their liquor licenses attached to the premises or the business just so that they could have right of first refusal when they were selling their business but now i  understand since the whole situation in massachusetts is so messy anywhere that belmont's in a good position now that we just say if you have a license and you're going to sell your business you have to give it back or not that so unfortunately we are out of time  accomplished in your three years thank you i just i view it as being another rider in the storm you know kind of keeping herd on the situation because i think a lot of people think that selectman have this much authority when we actually have this much authority and so it's it takes it takes a town to do this work and thank you everyone for tuning in i wish everyone a happy healthy two thousand and eight