voltage on those cables because of the safety rules against i would have there's no additional pipes if we go to expand the thirteen eight system and star's going to have to dig from a life substation to belmont  belmont will have to meet them there and extend the conduit to one of our substations at those substations we don't have a breaker position to land that line at so we don't have the way anyway to use that capacity by adding the six line we were able to make a little bit of a line swap on some cable and use existing facilities but we have no more facilities to connect another cable to so that's why as we look at the thirty eight capacity limit we do see forecasts they increase electricity electric use has gone up i just want to get to the cost for a minute again we have aging substation equipment twenty five to forty years old it's got a thirty year life  supply cables are over fifty years old in a lot of instances we have a piece of cable we took out from one nine hundred thirty two the other day some of the alternatives we looked at but the cost to go one fifteen and build a new we're looking for a bond at thirty eight million dollars has some distribution improvements of thirty five million dollars project cost the thirty eight option to get it to a level where we have capacity to serve project a lot over the next five to ten years is fifty seven million includes and the technical and engineering benefits are going to the one fifteen are much greater than incremental improvements in the existing system there's some economic you know the economics of it we can potentially get this project completed with a twenty year cost the twenty one million dollars if we're eligible for reimbursement again the thirteen eight solution is going to be about fifty seven million dollars including and stars investment they don't have additional feeder positions to feed as a seven to date line they have to make substation improvements there so there's a lot to it it's not as simple as adding a line we were fortunate in two thousand and six two thousand and eight that they had the ability to give us that six line our capacity our firm limit then was twenty seven million twenty seven megawatts which is substantially less than what we saw even last year in the cool of summer on that peak so  read we are also looking if we go to upgrade our thirty eight system we are going to need to put the substation someplace different than where it's at we don't have the space to put it so  chart shows us is that one fifteen k v project could be up to thirty million dollars up on project if we get reimbursement and what happens with transmission we've applied to the i s o the independent system operator who oversees transmission a generation operations we have their approval to go ahead with this project so it beats their technical requirements reimbursement is if where affecting  regional transmission grid we're putting in facilities that improve that grid then we would get support from the i s o payments annually for the cost of that investment so the transmission lines th v underground cables in some portion of the substation are going to be eligible as transmission facilities for reimbursement and we think we have a good chance of getting those we have a good argument so that would bring that twenty year cost down to twenty one million dollars at present today we're paying about a million dollars a year to end star for transmission for bringing the energy from the l ife substation that last mile and a half into belmont so that payment would go away and if we get reimbursement it brings this number way down so that's the need to rely reliability in a nutshell again the report that we kohima town meeting member and i saw your presentation that you gave at the tom meeting last time i think there's a couple points that you really have to sell to the town and i think you're doing a decent job of it but i think you have to improve on those one is how you know like a risk analysis of how good is that reimbursement factor i mean if that's really out there that we can grab we got to really sell that that's us because seventy million dollars saved is almost a third of the cost of a project we have to figure out how to get that money if it's available and i also believe that we have to look into your numbers just looking at your graph where you say while we're forecasting the the usage of the town here i'd like to see efforts put in the say ok the town is moving forward  others cushing square project that's on the books right now that's going forward we should be talking to those developers and understanding what their draw to the town is because we're really scared projects overly district for those belmont is going to have substantial increase draw so just saying you know the existing house we have our existing footprint as everybody adds more microwaves and computers and i pods that's not really where the draws coming from the draw is going to come the growth of belmont over the next fifteen years i think it's important that is sold to the town that the need for the substation is there i also think when you're talking to cambridge plating how zone is you made reference to the bigger picture that you know how this is linked to the high school construction how that's linked to the library conversion to a police station i really think supported people understand the really big picture of the town because of think historically the town sells a small picture and people don't understand the big picture and if they did that would make those decisions much clearer for the town and i think that was one of the faults that was maybe with the presentation last time be affected it wasn't on those two articles i think you could have very easily passed the funding article and it was really shot down on the site article i think it sounds like you're considering that as two articles but i really think adding some more to the power point on you know the real usage that's real to the town you know cushing square waverly square wetlands whatever and doing more research to understand how real is that reimbursement factor because if we've got seventeen million dollars and we're not finding you know that almost drives that decision says hey reworking those old lines is just so off the table we shouldn't be talking about a were killing ourselves if we do that way but we have to sell it  people understand that education that is really important if it's not it you know it it may get voted down again and i think i'm not for that but i would i think we need to sell it better to come off the table that you know you've got to really do that homework on that because if that gets sold we get sold on the river on that you know we're never going to recover great which is that we're going to do more and it boggles the mind what people have i mean and i think we have to work on conservation and that we have to look really about how these developments are going to affect the town because that's that's what this gentleman just said a lot of this information is a lot of the need is for new growth it's not needed for what we have now because if what we have now is almost to botch then we just cut the some amount turn off your computer for the day i mean but if we're going to be using this for new growth then we have to know that so we know that that's what the purpose is and i think it's been skirted around but we've really not heard that but i just in the continuing the point of the previous speaker about things that i'd like to hear at town meeting i think it's fine to say that the engineering of the route out from  wife is you know it's complicated and expensive and you don't have the budget to do that and you need to know where the site's going to be first but the fact is these different sites as you've said until coming up coming up through dr spinelli place where the roads are much less traveled in they were put in pretty lousy condition right now or possibly even the m b t so to to talk about the route which we don't know in isolation from the sites to me is is wrong there they're connected if we're if we're talking about the murray sandler site we're absolutely talking about coming up concord avenue and so i'd like to hear about a ballpark whatever versus finally you were challenge before about the n p t day and you correctly made the point that ultimately we're all one government here and we need to work together that kind of thinking and logic i think tends to hold sway more at the higher levels than at the lower levels so i think it would be wonderful if either the advisory board of the site's  can't talk about details we can talk about the basic issue of kind of understanding and i understand you can't make promises out of that but it would show that at least there's some information as opposed to just what you pointed out you know kind of the idea that's out in the air that they're impossible to work with that's may well be true down here if you go high enough it's it's got to be it's got to change and so i'd like to i'd like to you know i'd like somebody maybe if the yeah maybe the selectmen that should do that but it would be interesting to hear a town meeting a discussion where the roots where the sites are not completely divorced from the roots because the roots have such a huge impact on the cost and the sights and the roots are totally connected to each other so i don't think you can so we can't have engineering we can't have hard numbers but we can't i think it's town meeting will not appreciate the fact if they are not connected up they are connected and we should hear we have should have a discussion in that way and it would be a bonus to design and evaluate those roots fully because we don't again know that the the end point what we've assumed for purposes of the this discussion is a fairly conservative estimate assuming the road construction as the sort of the most expensive route alternative so for purposes of comparison and the reason we keep asking you to sort of ignore the route discussion is that we've already assumed for purposes of a cost basis sort of the highest cost of what we anticipate to be the highest cost routing alternative and obviously we haven't done the final design but you know we would just we we can't take it any fourth further at this point but we'd have the same sort of a worst case high cost scenario so we'd like again the purpose of tonight's meeting as much as it's  an obvious factors to evaluate we want you to look at the sites them specifically and compare them for other reasons and assume that we've taken in fact into account in the thirty eight million dollar estimate the highest cost route so that when we do final design  railroad the railroad wrote is going to require with that we have the agreement from bta it's a one year license we pay for that license annually so there'll be some payment of maybe fifteen maybe twenty thousand dollars a year i'm not sure what that cost would negotiate out though after one year we could redo it it's got a thirty day terminations so it's makes it very difficult to consider that  people who focus purely on the dollars and cents in the permeating if you look at flanders road cambridge plaiting murray sandler think of them is all being roughly one mile within a tent or so roughly one mile from el wife they're all just under thirty eight million dollars in cost and so the incremental cost savings between those three is very small when you were going to take a route whether it's road or side road or whatever it is they're all can be really similar thirty six and a half million thirty seven a half million thirty eight is conservative and the real goal tonight is say assuming a thirty eight million dollars project what are the factors that people care about for fifty concord out of across the street here yes it's a mile further that's very expensive but among those other three sites there's not going to be a seven million dollars savings it's going to be much smaller and so we're really hoping to get feedback that says i care about the town getting this piece of land or i don't want the town to take anything they don't need let's go to the smallest place possible if they're  there's a misunderstanding here the thirteen million dollars a mile versus the six million dollars a mile the six million dollars a mile is the cost of the cable so the longer the cable the more feet of it you've got buy the more expensive it is the seven million dollars for road construction is the cost of digging the trench the cost of putting in whatever materials the cables have to lie in back filling paving curbing and so forth if you come down the railroad right of way if that's even feasible and the engineers are saying maybe there isn't even enough with there to be able to lay the  cable i'm not positive about that but there's some question about whether or not engineering wise the railroad right of way is feasible if even if you come down the railroad right of way you've still got to dig that trench in after you lay the cable i'm not sure what else is involved in it you know out of voiding seven million dollars a mile by coming down the railroad right of way you may be avoiding some portion of  that if you come down the back streets you're not paving the road that is why it is conquered avenue you don't have the traffic control problems that you've you've got coming down crocker knew we don't have an estimate if you can down a narrower street you know how much of that seven million dollars don't you have to pay but you still have to dig the trench you still have to pave you still have to have some traffic control does that help thank you would love to see that go on in my question is i'm assuming you are looking to use the front part came to responding there are that's on brighton street there would be very minimal truck traffic once construction is completed we may have a vehicle go in there once a day to do a maintenance check go just a visual check make sure everything's working we have an existing substation here on it  just three it would be about the same type of activity you know some days it might be a couple vehicle trips but very little day in day out traffic and the noise would look at a very low  noise transformers and we could baffle whatever sound there is through walls and containment well there's a gentleman that's been very very very patient that here mentioned in there and where the covert goes underneath i just don't know how that you could do it i mean they one of my experiences and my experience are with the government dealing with with brode not only recently the conservation commission when they were putting in for their own engineer for a bike path they were bound by their own regulations and setbacks and i would look and see what could fit but i don't want to so i didn't i but i believe that when you do present the town meetings you've got to go apples to apples and have so it if there is a savings going down i would just assume like somebody said assume the road on each one of them because i don't think we're going to get the railroad and go that way i thank you very much for thinking through the alternatives thank you also for talking to the doggie daycare people because of the town member walking into there that was disconcerting you know to hear that and so if that could be worked out that would be fine  i wouldn't rule out any one of the alternatives that you're preventing down in that end of town i think the cambridge plaiting looks very good i all this is president with the neighbors and cindy you know and what their input are but you also discount it right away well if we bought it it would have to be for the high school but you could buy it and sell it for a commercial and put it back on the payroll and use that in that i think that's still an upgrade from cambridge plaiting we're looking for you know taxable dollars coming in with commercial development for stores or whatever so if it couldn't a package deal couldn't be put together for the school maybe not then that that seems like it's on the table the school alternative is good i am a tennis player i miss those indoor court but those are the worst courts a town the ones down in the end they're there and crummy shape and there are short so you mentioned before maybe there's a pretty well with the school department that you know you get in the land for free somebody mentioned there's probably room on the other end of the high school field to build a couple of nice full size courts in exchange for that and maybe that's that's a possibility for doing that but i think of those the cambridge plating looks pretty good but i appreciate you looking into all the alternatives i have one one question though after all that comment substation it's just it's just too small a parcel it's about six thousand square feet and you know so would be encroaching on to the ball field anyways so it just does not you know we'd have to double the size of that pretty much  family twenty flanders how does that compare with the school sites either location dollars if the school were to donate the land obviously that's the me saving however they'd be the cost of building that maintenance five thousand square foot maintenance hear them talking about redoing the fields and so forth so there'd be a fair quid pro quo for getting land for nothing you giving back to the schools so i don't think it would make that much difference if you look at the change in that handout there's a bar graph the kind of shows the different costs in the thirty eight million dollars call and you'll they they the way this process would work is we would build the transmission facilities assuming this is approved and we have a site we would need to borrow the thirty million dollars to build the project if we're eligible for p t s reimbursement that money would come back in an annual payment to the transmission order that the light department that would do use the offset the bond costs i would have to borrow the money and then over twenty years we would get some payment from the i s o for our transmission investment so it's not that we borrowed twenty one or thirty eight and we can't go make that application until we have a site and are able to defin our transmission line cos so until we have a site we can do our route design to say this is what it would cost to get from point a to point b at that point then we can go make that application  precedent that this type of construction would be eligible for reimbursement we feel we have a good shot at it we have a very talented consulting firm working on that with us but until we move f project we won't know but again the criteria isn't between twenty one and fifty seven that the project costs are fifty seven million dollars to incrementally or to build up what we have or thirty million dollars to upgrade to a higher transmission voltage we would want nothing more than to see pure coat out of there but have you given any thought to if that ends up being the site as far as environmental issues clean up what of all those sites there's been boatloads of assessment done there's a lot of data we know a ton about what's in the ground there we know that it's regulated and we know that we can design a substation without impacts to the neighborhood in the substation like we would have to manage that soil but in our cost estimate we've taken that into account we assume the soil is going to handle is regulated there's also a deed restriction on that property which basically says you can't touch the soil it's got to stay under a cap well that's paving or new fill and a new ball field there's lots of different ways you can build a cap but the soil has to stay isolated it can't just be used in a school or daycare or a garden or whatever so we know that it's part of our design process and we've taken that into account for sure we could easily build a substation and then on the other the other features whatever that other future use would be because there's a deed restriction called an activity and use limitation and you well because it exists no matter who builds there so if it's the town for some other purpose or the land gets subset and sold to some other purpose whoever builds there has to maintain that the destruction to isolate the soil but there's a really good information about soil and groundwater so it's well understood what's there we have other levels of information on all the other sites enough for planning purposes but but you're right that's the one that has the most issues and it's been the most well study  michael smith tommy member of precinct six i think you all have done a terrific job in establishing the need in stating the case for what needs to be done here i think you've done a great job in isolating certain  sites you're asking for feedback but i would tell you that i think that the flanders site seems to be a good site i think that the sandler skate shop seems to be a good site and a high school seems to be a good good site the problem that i have is the cost of each of these alternatives and i would recommend that before you come to town meeting that you come prepared with a list of the c the cost of each of these alternatives to the best of your ability and factor in if the m b t a does not allow you to come down the tracks what the costs would be  and factor in what do you is the process how long might it be going through the m b t a i also don't think you should come without having spoken to the high school and gotten their understanding of whether or not one could actually go ahead and acquire that land hostility i apologize i came in late i didn't see the original presentation but one of my questions is when you're talking about the tennis courts and the high school has there been any discussion on him apps and what kind of feels will be generated and proximity to the high school is that electric magnetic field you have an electric field and you have an electric voltage in a magnetic field and you have a current that a wire process is we'll look at the design alternatives the effects be the i s o is going to require that we look at the overhead alternative the it's not a construction standard in the area they have transmission towers of the wires that you see along the track are the t the we just i think with the standards that have been developed for installing transmission i'm going around the boston area underground is kind of a standard i'd hate to go to cambridge and say i'd like to put an aerial transmission line down for the track we have the same easement issues with them and there's just this physically not enough space for a double set of towers to run you know that on if we put all the wires on one tower that one tower falls down we lose all the wires that you'd want to have some redundancy in that structure  there was a comment about the space behind the tennis court i mean the hockey rink that is for dumping the snow that's why they've never they put it in the position that they put it in when they play in the high school they have to dump the snow in the back so to answer the question if you think you can put some more tennis courses and the town meeting approved i think it was forty thousand and forty five thousand dollars to fix the nine tennis courts so there are nine that affixed and one that is hand like you said before that's probably your most valuable retail space if you were to market and sell the property so if you moved the substation over towards the middle or the the current substation area you took more of that for your substation and let's say we squeeze just a little bit more this way for the town  for the high school to have a little bit of space you said it you said it's about two thirds too big so the substation needs a third and let's say we let's say we divide it half and half let's say the substation takes half with the with the high school closer to the high school land then you sell the parcel that's near the brighton street which would be great retail space dunkin donuts a starbucks or whatever so much more feasible for the town to put that up for sale that it would be for them to try to sell something in between or not really market it very well  being separated so if you want feedback we would love to see you do this project on cambridge plating even though a lot of the ground water mitigation h and yes we made great strides with getting chromium out of the air they still do emit a lot of chemicals that you can't smell yeah they're permit it exactly but i mean if you looked at what they made into the air it's not like you really want your kids to breathe that while they're playing tennis or t ball  we the mediation that we really got for our neighborhood is that we could walk outside and we didn't have this horrible smell bumping us in the face all the time and in the reason why we got mediation is because it was a nuisance but now that there are chemicals that they're emitting don't have an odor doesn't mean we're not breathing them so i just don't want you guys to forget that there's you know there's still things going on that we really don't want to go on in the town of belmont in we ha precinct precinct a town meeting member chris koch and precinct a town meeting member you know as i stand here we all many people think that the cambridge fighting site is the one to do but if we want to do that then we have to make it happen as a town and the people that live on channing road who'd like plating to go away we have to do what we did when we got a vote for the fire station and when we had to have the vote for the senior center when we had the vote for the  wellington we have to work for it so as a community we have to go out and can convince our fellow citizens that this is a wise use of our money and that it's worth the tax debt exclusion and if people are willing to do that and put energy in time then perhaps we could have it happen if people are willing to step up then it won't happen  yeah my name's jerry divine i live in baker street and i live on baker street and i also work on brighton street in the brighton street area and my family's very well vested into that part of the town the hill estates and hillside gardens and turf equipment company and property and this is a real important issue for us and i've been there my whole life in that area working and living in that area and i have to say that you don't underestimate the value of in the opportunity we have to take away cambridge plaiting from this town it has really been a blight on this town and to get clean fresh air for our kids and the benefits that it can go to the high school and some of the proposals made about putting using the retail space on brighton street would be so beneficial to this town it would actually clean up the whole area so i think there's a lot of pluses that you can underestimate there and it's it's an ideal site and the four million is a lot of money on the last person to vote for increased taxes but because we pay quite a bit but i have to say that i think i know i can get tremendous support in our neighborhood for that and i think that you know four  million is a small price to pay for all those benefits and it's just up to mendis opportunity when i saw that they wanted to sell that willingly for six point four million i was ready to jump for joy here because we we've really been through a lot over the years it used to be a real filthy place over there and it's the clean up that site is just a tremendous asset to the town