an eclectic community a mixture of loyal long time multi generational families amazing alumni and short term but no less loyal visitors who bring their it was during the town meeting use that this story take shape our town went from no way to all the way and came together to rebuild the playground that had at last become too worn out to serve the children safely park playground committee i'm here to update you on what many of you may already know about some of you may not in november of this past year two of our playgrounds at our elementary schools failed inspections and were immediately closed i want to give you an update on that why now because we all have constituents who are extremely passionate and care a lot about it and i thought it was important for all of us to know what's happening as of april the butler playground which was closed in november was demolished in december fortunately they already knew they had problems with the playground and they were working toward putting a solution together they had a design that was already approved and they were ready to fundraise so they got busy and did a lot of fund raising for a two hundred thousand dollar project they have now raised over one hundred thousand dollars which is to be applauded they have designed the project in two phases phase one will include the basic playground structure swings and surface playground surface if you don't know is incredibly expensive with that hundred thousand they have now selected also a vendor based on the state approved list and their intention is to build out phase one hopefully before the summer time at that point the playground will only be half done so there's still a lot found out today not included in the capital budget don't see them anywhere in there so i'm just wondering if that issue was raised at the committee and if so what the discussion was about my contribution to those expenses that we know are coming yes it was definitely raised at our committee level it was one of the requests given to us department it was however the last item on their list so it was not of them that was a list of twenty items so it was not a clear top priority for them well we do not always go by the priority order the departments present to us there's a vast difference between the top five and number twenty the bell wellington burbank and butler playgrounds were all replaced by p t a funds and parent work in the late eighty's in the early ninety's i was on the school committee at the time and i remember dealing sort of intimately with it similarly in that same era joeys park was created at the wynn brook because that park is actually sits on recreation land so and finally when we did the general middle school that equipment up there was replaced but again not using school department funds so prior to now school department funds have not been used to do any playgrounds in the town yes they are a significant item they are it a big ticket item however it's something that we feel strongly the school department needs to wrestle with and decide where it fits in their priority order and similarly the joeys park would have to come in a priority from the recreation department so while we discussed it we were reluctant to put any money towards any one playground this year because it would set a precedent and it would set us up then for funding five playgrounds as we go forward and given the tightness of the budgets we were not willing to do that mr jones did you have a comm a public responsibility for the entire town and i think the opportunity next year to have a consolidated facilities department will give us an opportunity to look at this regardless of what land these playgrounds are on to make sure that our equipment is safe for all of our children thank you ed cassandra precinct six i don't mean to be a dead horse on this playground thing but it's been a issue that i feel very strongly about i want to publicly command mr mcallister in the playground committee at butler they've raised over one hundred thousand dollars they've done everything they said they were going to do unfortunately the school committee did not find it in their ability to fund the hundred thousand dollars that they said they were going to find i personally believe and i just heard mr john say the same thing that the town of belmont's responsibility to provide playgrounds and to care for those playgrounds and we're not doing that and i find that a travesty if you're somebody to market share the boys like me tommy member at large parts of the playground we did the liberate on this in one of the things that we discussed and maybe i will be chatting about this as well because it was just wonderful opportunity in this community at least about a playground i think joey park as well to run a public private private partnership waiting terms of raising funds and so we talked about this we ultimately did not vote to approve it's going to continue to be on the capital budget committees radar screen but from my perspective i really think and you'll have the board of selectmen behind this as well and you know the capital budget committee that we can look for ways to privately fun the playground at the butler school and possibly joe which park and i committed to the capital budget committee i commit to all of you that i'm going to work with with the residents to try to find a way reach out to private individuals or the the banks in our community find a way to raise additional funds for these playground so it's not something that we're going to ignore something we're going to get into focus on over the upcoming year this and i really respect the work that the committee has done and i know that there were difficult to liberations and i know that there's more requests and could be funded that said i also need to express my disappointment that i know there was one hundred thousand dollar request for the butler playground and i don't see anything funded it's not it's not the hundred thousand but it's also not twenty five thousand we are funding bush voter response system that we haven't decided to approve yet whereas we know that we are going to be need to fund the playground that has to be rebuilt that it's torn down and i think those priorities are  there would have been my choice but i know that there's a lot of things involved i'm also disappointed that there hasn't been there hadn't until tonight been a public reply to that hundred thousand dollar request i've been trying for several months to follow the process without being able to come to the meetings i've been trying to find minutes but there's no minutes posted it's been very difficult to find out what the disposition of the request has been i understand that it's hard to argue to pray or to fund something that's on the bottom of the schools list i understand also that there are seventy five thousand dollars here for the butler gym floor so it's very difficult to argue that a different decision should have been made when one hundred thousand over hundred thousand has been funded i understand the difficulty of all of that  but that said yes there's a history of funding school playgrounds through the p t a s but the world has changed and they're getting very expensive the budget for the butler playground is two hundred thousand dollars which is a lot of money for my understanding with the wellington is that the p t a did raise money for the playground equipment which i believe was in the thirty thousand range i could be wrong correct me if i am but that all of the infrastructure that goes on in preparing the site and doing the surfacing the surfacing alone on the butler playground is going to be fifty thousand dollars i'm guessing for wellington it was probably double that because there's a lot more space all of that is very very expensive  understand that the history of the capital budget process has put money in for the town playgrounds but now you have an equity problem between playgrounds that are town playgrounds and playgrounds that are school playgrounds it's an equity problem across the different entities i think it's an opportunity for us to enter into discussion as mr jones pointed out we do have we will have a new process going forward as we consolidate buildings and grounds i think there is an opportunity to define equity not only across the playgrounds not only across the neighborhoods but also across time here we are purchasing something that has a twenty to thirty to forty year life span so if you happen to be the in the cohort of families that have children during the year that the playground gets torn down you have two hundred thousand dollars to race if you happen to come along five years later you don't and so i think that's another equity issue and finally i think there's another opportunity for us over the course of the year to define public private partnership be slide at robins farm park in arlington that was torn down and had to be rebuilt was a fifty thousand dollar project the town department went to the friends of robbins farm park and said we'll fund twenty five thousand if you can raise twenty five thousand that to me is a partnership looking to the p t a s to completely fund the playground is not a partnership so i think that replace the four in the high school and pay for a new wooden four except he wanted to put his company logo on two corners of the court and that wasn't deemed except a bow and i'm just curious if maybe the times cycling make it or does town meeting decide when we can have some commercial of strength here but question in terms of funding for playgrounds which i paid more attention to this article recently i read something about a community that was using community preservation funds for playgrounds and i don't know if dr solomon could answer that question but whether or not those are a possibility going forward and i did read the same article that said that the community preservation act may be altered to loosen up their standards to allow for more repair renovation whatever but understand that that is still a little ways out before the community preservation committee has finalized their criteria has finalised their process and is as put out application opportunities then it seemed to take on a life of its own yes when people carry precinct five i would like to make a motion to replace this line of nineteen thousand five hundred dollars with nineteen thousand five hundred dollars being so apportioned to the butler school playground and i'd like to speak to that i am very familiar with the audience response system i think they're fine and great but i think that we could go through another year of having a seventh inning stretch as i like to think of the standing boat students at the butler school have a very short window of time to gain from the socialization and social skills that and recreation that take place on a school playground on a day to day basis and i think it's very difficult to ask a school community to raise that kind of money in a timely fashion and i think that although nine hundred thousand dollars is a small amount of money in the overall amount of money that needs to be raised for that playground it's a good step forward for that community to get one hundred thousand five hundred dollars closer to building that playground in a timely fashion equipment that equipment has to be assigned to so it could be anywhere from six to eight weeks before you actually see the construction going on assembling of the equipment that will be ordered will be a community build project as i understand from the playground committee but the height of the entire project was designed as a two phase project that is this phase would be put into play put up so that we would hope that it would be available for children this summer the remaining part of the project has a lot of landscaping additional settings some plantings and so on at this point that looks to be probably anywhere between one hundred thousand dollars additional and that money has not been raised so that's where we are at this point with the project to write jack boyce precinct one but i guess i'd like to mr moderator ask dr kingston to just speak to if there were an extra twenty thousand dollars devoted to capital budget towards the butler playground even if that doesn't address all of the outstanding needs is their inability to spend that money before june thirtieth two thousand and thirteen of superintendent of schools the answer of course has to be yes roberts i think you're right next to paul roberts town meeting member precinct eight you know i think every so often in town meeting you come up against issues where it sort of shows that the political leadership or the school leadership are kind of out of sync with the with where the town is and where the community is that i think we saw that with the with the librarians where there was sort of a acceptance of the fact that we were just going to get rid of our school librarians the elementary level and town meeting kind of came in and said no we as a town belmont that's not who we are as a town and took action and i think that this is another one of those issues i think that we've had a playground that's been out of commission now for the better part of a year and i think this is the town saying this is not who we are as a town and we just saw a long list of very important  capital you know projects that need to be funded but i think that this playground issue whatever is left on the tail of this whether it's eighty or one hundred thousand dollars really the message here is this needs to move to the top of the queue you have kids who can play  structure at recess who are already spending way too much time you know chained to their desks and need some time outdoors and this now needs to move to the top of the priority list for the town meeting does have a role of a stablish ing priority and i think in this case the obvious higher priority is to get started on that playground perhaps in the future we may go in this direction but i think this fire is weighing in against school my name is johannes with heart town meeting member from precinct four i'm i'm also a parent of a fourth grader at butler who donated fifty dollars sept as allowance to playground funds and you know that's a very big part of his budget yeah i want to brian cushman town clerk at this point knowing that the butler school playground is out there i'm perfectly happy to nine if we add to this amount were up around one thirty so what i'd like to do is try to drive to get this playground set up so they could be built based upon what happens here tonight and to that point i'd like to ask the moderator if would if it would be appropriate two asked the town department heads in in there put on their charitable hat into volunteer to give up seventy thousand dollars of items that are already on this list i think they're very charitable put it would not be appropriate to do that tonight we so terry precinct three i just wanted to add i'm not but their parent and  i just want to point out that over the last couple of years the fund raising for the playground of parents through the p t a in through the afterschool program have funded more than question has moved to terminate debate requires a two thirds majority all in favor please say i was opposed to a debate as to it passes by two thirds majority debate is terminated we now turn to a if you look down at the very bottom the last line is a subtotal of what the gap is between those two between phase one into what we do not yet have with the butler playground fund is not yet have its thirty eight thousand superintendent of schools in the news is even better than you know mark i'll get to that we had an announcement we had a fire at the table as you came in to show you where the fund raising for replacing the butler playground stood and that we've recently received over one hundred eighty three thousand dollars for an estimated one hundred sixty eight thousand dollar project so we do have a contingency cushion and we're very pleased with that i would be remiss if i didn't start by thanking the dedication of the butler playground committee for all the work that they had done to ensure that this project got underway i don't think even they knew how accelerated the interest and commitment throughout the town would be  way with other major contributions to ensure that their funding for the project is intact  icing on the cake by reading a short note that i received from principal mike mcallister this afternoon i write to let you know that this afternoon we received an additional eleven thousand three hundred sixty five dollars and seventy nine cents in the form of a belmont savings bank check from a quote butler anonymous and a butler anonymous alumnus say that three times fast who wishes to remain  anonymous the actual assembly of the playground is going to be a community build project and you'll hear more about that as time allows but obviously a lot of the work that we're planning to do will take place this summer when the children are not on site and this first phase will come into a cost around one hundred thousand dollars pays to then we will plan accordingly in conjunction with the butler play playground committee and about our parents again i think the commitment represents a couple of things that i really like about belmont first our people are barry generous in support of their talent in their schools you may recall on may sixteenth late in the evening during the debate over the bu playground a member of town meeting from precinct four stood up and said my son saved fifty dollars and contributed that that fifty dollars to the butler playground fund from my standpoint right then generosity but not go unrewarded we needed to go forward with this and on town day i met with coralie to be to moscow and ellen schreiber and i said we will make this happen second thing i like about this is it's a town wide effort there were two playgrounds as you may recall both the butler which was in terrible condition and also the wind broke joey's park which was in a deteriorating situation and this could have divided normal community but instead it united elements i was of the work of particularly coralie and ellen and the other four founders of a new organisation called belmont partners in  day it's great to see how many people have come out and i'm sure will be coming out later on in the afternoon to help build this it's amazing to come down here and this is run up from the ground you know since last night so we're all delighted and and looking forward to i would like to just thank everyone for coming out tonight to the annual butler fall picnic so the simplicity of this event is what i love the most so it terms of our celebration tonight we're not going to try to make it too extravagant we're going to make it nice and simple my hope that our ceremony tonight is also simple and also made up of school friends to miss the picnic so we're here to celebrate officially if we could bend over for couple months now the completion of phase one of the only school playground project the first  when we started this project ever built a playground and we had certain pockets of expertise we had like a construction expertise we had some fundraising expertise but really it wasn't really about the next little bit of expertise it was just about a ton of effort and th is group of people met more times than i can remember exchanged more you meals and i can even tell and literally drove all way from from belmont out to new bedford to look at playgrounds they interviewed playground designers they checked out  in the bidding process they literally did everything it took and most importantly they raised a ton of money for this event so please give them a hand mornings i would come to work and you would be here already meeting with the playground people and so many times i would call and you know pull them out of a meeting so if i have to get into it like work my five holidays he said he was he would have thought he was on now there are a lot of people that got us started and there's a lot of people have pushed us through but ralph really pushed us over the top probably a lot of people didn't notice what was happening as it was happening be we were talking a comedian we just kept saying we have to lay in some big fish need to somehow figure out a way to get like a nice check and i didn't know it was going to be like a six foot check that we could actually carry around town but once we had that it e on your own that we got my own playground problems and she didn't say that and i was incredibly thankful that ellen when she first got into the playground things said let's help you and then when it's our turn you come back and help us and you know it is like a force a and so on and janice were always there and always asking me what the information was what's the latest in the program people are asking what can i tell them and i'm just so thankful that they understood that it's a principle i have this but i also said teaching and learning to be a charity and there were times when tom would say i'll take care of that and you work on your building i'll do that and you work on the kids and i think that having that support by the time is yes it is really helpful so thank you tom and  that we had in the back that was like just one stick and then it got to be like a half a stick and then it got to be just like a little no i got to have the image that's what tom is going to bring and then tom showed up with these incredible shade trees it didn't cost us a dime personally but tom not only brought his crew out here but he worked at the ford great help them plant it and then he did an arbor day festival in charge in time of it and what i really liked was that we weren't able to give those four theaters a ceremony as they walked out of here but tom you're pointing with them was really a big piece of them leaving something for the butter think they felt like they own those trees and they put those she is in for us and something you know somewhat of a legacy so tom thank you for coming  they are the ones who approved our plan and that was not easy to secure at the time and i hope what i told them is this is just a picture hopefully we have a ceremony going to come and see that this is really what it looks like if you look at the drawing imo and when you look at this playground i think it's exactly what we said we're going to build and thank you all for having the courage to prove that even though maybe you didn't have a whole lot of confidence in the way this office started so thank you all for that