issue is really the fate of the waverly square and bta station and you know along with that there are implications on the belmont center station and whether there will be a new station all together  it is my hope that with this continuing discussion that we are we are able to provide clear direction and hopefully come to some kind of an agreement and narrow the options on the low on the location the proposed location of the waverly station it is my hope that you know this is your opportunity belmont residence we also have people from watertown here and waltham that are impacted and it is my hope that you make your views known in order to give  clear direction to the n b a let me start by introducing our state senator william issue and the facts get out as much as possible the people and there's a problem understanding the choices that the n p t is struggling with and have the chance to put into that decision and to put some new ideas on the table so of of having an open dialogue and the so i look forward to the conversation we have this evening and hopefully your only options ok thank you senator i'm impressed by the turnout tonight excellent turnout thank you all what the format will be as follows first we will have a presentation from the n b a which i will introduce and then we can open it up to comments from people on the floor if you do want to make a comment please come up to the mike identify yourself and your address for the record and then you can you know please make your views known given the number of people that are here tonight i'm going t about what the solution for what we currently are facing with the the order to make the waverley square station fully accessible and what the alternatives and options are that we have available to us materially the presentation that we're going to give you is not greatly different than the presentation we gave several weeks ago we did receive feedback quite clearly that folks wanted to understand how we came up with the idea of the pleasant street alternative as it has been discussed and so we have included some graphics in the presentation that that show what what that looks like quite quite candidly we have done very little work since our last meeting  in anticipation of continuing the open dialogue with the townspeople it may look like we've done extra work we just have added in the graphics that that represent what that alternative might look like so that we can continue t discussion of the different alternatives so john doherty as was introduced is our project manager he will be the face of the project from the way we have other staff from our design consultants niche engineering as well as  we'll try and take about fifteen or twenty minutes to go through the presentation i'm open to the floor for your comments and feedback thanks or thanks the board of selectmen you folks who are here who have a great interest in what we're trying to accomplish here so we did make this presentation to the board of selectmen and as eric said it's a little bit modified but not not a lot we're going to show you what the existing conditions are and then slide into a conceptual idea nothing firm for what possibilities we have for a new station so as you all know this is the existing wave away with the with the small parking lot platforms this was triggered by repairs that we made to the waverly station with the platforms and they subsequently triggered an m a a b order to bring the station into complete compliance and you know order requiring us to make the improvements we have looked at several alternatives to the existing waverley station and they include a new high platform which is typically the way we like to go  d the idea the rough order of magnitude cost is in the thirty million dollars range to upgrade waverley station because of its location in the way it's constructed it would be a pricey change another option would be existing low platforms and add a mini high platform typically we're trying to get away from many many highs and the really difficult to build them to work correctly in the waverley d and as you can see ramping to get to the waverley platforms would be extremely difficult so this is another option you know with the change in direction ramps and we need to by the way we because we have to have you know ramps on either side of the station and this is just a sort of isometric view of what the ramping system potentially could look like it's not something we're looking to do in that for m and again this is this is another possible option which puts many highs at the end of the station and elevators that would be to require head houses at the waverly station site and the head houses or you know basically any structures that actually fall that many that would be above grade at this is a sample view of what a head house may look like in another view and this is just more data on the existing platform and what it would take to upgrade with that typically stations and now built for nine car platforms  which you know we don't always run nine cars but we do sometimes and so we build the stations to accommodate that john if i could just jump in real quick so you go back to the last slide just to to describe to everyone have reconstructed stairs in red we have elevators news for locations in blue and purple those alternatives that john just went through that had the the ramping was part of our initial feasibility study to determine what what inaccessible waverley station might look like and this was the alternative that provided the the best solution from meeting the access requirements that that is laid out for us we are code requires that greater than fifty percent of all entrances to a station be fully accessible and this gives us just about sixty six well sixty six percent two  thirds accessible entrances to the station and it gives us also the appropriate amount of eager as required for emergency evacuation purposes this is the alternative that is the thirty million in length to eighty feet in length that is really only providing access to the two cars on the outbound end of the train set a full high level platform runs the full eight hundred feet  of the station where the platform would be four feet above the tracks for the full eight hundred foot long train set the mini high is four feet above the top around or track for between forty and eighty feet depending on how the so getting back to where we're at here this is a profile section through the station looking at it from one side of the station to the other is a little bit hard to read and these are some rough numbers that we utilize to come up with our order of magnitude cost for wa at it because we know that somewhere down the line there will need to be some improvements made at belmont it's not imminent but that station will obviously need to be upgraded at some point in time so if we're going to do work at waverley we're going to consider what we would need at belmont pull them in together not not to do the work at the same time but just as a sort of analysis of what we have here and this is some ride p data for belmont station and these are existing conditions at belmont the lion's club owns the existing building and this is a pleasant street the distance between the two stations is approximately fifty five hundred feet and then we had a general discussion with a meeting with the meeting with the selectmen over the project goals obviously provide accessibility and accessible facility we're always looking to improve service which we have worked very hard on fitchburg line with the improvements we've made there we would like to increase station ridership improve the infrastructure and also improve multi modal link with linkage which is something i know you're interested here and belmont very much in this is a rundown of some of the things we're doing which i basically alluded to already  feasibility we've done a feasibility assessments and evaluation of making the station accessible and we've prepared some alternatives for discussion and again why we're here  work with the town officials and and residents to see if we can make something work for everybody this is the belmont center location and there was discussion at the me previous meeting with the board of selectmen about looking at an option to build a new station of in belmont it's not on the table and based on the difficult process to go through with the weapon the station we would need here would impact a lot of residents locally i think john go back and say i think one of the things that we spent some time talking in the last board of selectmen meeting about  the linkage between waverly and belmont center and how those two stations form this partnership within the town of belmont and have similar needs in terms of accessible means t to the train and the question was brought up you need you need to n e t a and you need to look at pushing that station closer to the east you're right now you're just telling us why it doesn't work at the at the current location because of the degree of curv that i think we spent some time talking about at the last meeting how the curvature of the tracks make it so that when we build a high level platform four feet above the track it either is set so far away from the trains that we have gaps between the edge of the platform and the doors to the train that become very very wide across org there's actually physical conflicts where the train would hit the platform and so we wanted to show you that in fact we had looked at these situations as as we were developing you know what internally anyway what what the alternatives might look like for a solution at waverley that that sliding the plant the platform in the station to the east and installing an eight hundred foot long high level platform to the east of the existing belmont station would be very challenging from from its impact on the community and why it was a natural natural idea to rather than shifting eas shift west and when you start shifting west in that one mile stretch between waverly and belmont center it becomes kind of a natural progression towards what john will talk about in a minute which is the place in st alternative that we discussed briefly at the last so speaking of the pleasant street alternative the track distance from belmont center is three thousand six hundred fifty feet and the track distance from waverly is fourteen fifty this is the location right  here and that's you know as we said earlier it's a conceptual idea of a possible location and as eric said you know we don't have a lot of options going to the west of belmont station because we need the straight run track and this is just to the east of waverl so this is a quarter mile radius around the proposed it's not proposed that the idea of pleasant street alternative in this is a half mile radius  and then the concepts this is the existing belmont d p w and this is just a you said this is an idea where we would have a station at this location and it would be fully accessible and these would be the head houses for elevators on either side this is a rendering of what that station might look like in this is of rendering of what the platform area would look like so this is just to the west of scuse me the east of the stock market and this is pleasant street route sixty for question so this is the project sequence we're in the middle of it now and we're trying to coordinate with you folks we've done the feasibility study an assessment of the existing waverley and this is my contact information senator's office we've we were here before you to begin in earnest the process of evaluating what the what the solution is for making train accessible  suggestion how could we not know that a certain level of expenditure which trigger this you know the need for providing accessibility in this demand that are now are sort of in this unfortunately in this and the situation where y we're under an order to do something they're immediately in sort of like to the cute situation and you can just walk through exactly what what repairs were done and how this was triggered so it essentially got a lot of questions from residents and certainly essentially what what happened this picture shows it perfectly there was a safety concern that used to be a white yellow painted strip along the edge of the platform we installed this tactile morning edge which in and of of the platform whereby the the regulatory community views the repaving of a platform in its entirety as opposed to just patching a pothole as effectively reconstructing the platform itself and by reconstructing the platform in a way that is not compliant with eighty eight regulations at a federal level and in accordance with the five twenty nine c m r which is the massachusetts accessibility regulation we are in violation of of those two regulations and by order we have to make the station accessible from which to them and thanks for the explanation eric i guess the questions i'm getting is that how could we not have known that in with mean that you know we went certainly you know i think frankly i think that the team that did this wasn't aware of the regulation i thought they were doing a good thing by getting rid of the humps and the bumps in the cracks in the models of the hazards by repaving it and unfortunately the due diligence was not was not met on the on the design side going in and we are we are in this position now and  for eric or maybe john first when you you mentioned that you had a meeting with the board of selectmen on the on this topic i just want to remind everyone that that was in an open session we have not had a closed session meeting with the m b t on this topic and as a matter of fact we insisted on this meeting that one point the other point has to do with the letter that i reference earlier eric where this was a letter that was published on the website the town website it's dated october twenty sixth and in this letter it states waverly open and investing the funds required to make it acceptable into inaccessibility related project that would have the potential that would impact a significantly larger number of customers with disabilities did not receive a response from the two that that offer and i wonder if you could just discuss what that option three was kind of the background for that certainly so as i mean the order has been in place i don't know the exact time i don't have it in my notes it's better part of two years now when we went through the feasibility study the options that john presented early on that have the the ramping structures and lead to the elevator structure all at waverley station that was when we were just considering the work that we were the station before we went into any other kind of permutations we went before the the the board and the and maybe board and presented alternatives which included not spending the thirty million dollars that we really by priority bice but spending that at a at a nother location that maybe is prioritized ahead of waverley from a ridership perspective the board did not accept that alternative a a as a mechanism for for meeting the requirements of the order to make we really accessible and and said we must return to to make we really accessible ok so that they actually gave you an affirmative no or are they just declaring to meet with you so the i don't i believe we have a letter from them or at least meeting minutes from when we met with them like meeting i did meet with them and i can certainly get the details of that discussion and just briefly it's my understanding either way whether it was made affirmatively or whether it was made by declining to meet does grant variances typically they are time variances whereby they may agree that within a certain amount of time you must form comply with the regulation or there may be  t variances branded do you technical infeasibility in fact that was the first avenue you made several years ago when this came up was to retroactively request a variance for this work that was ok sorry sterling crocket not a town meeting resident meeting member but a resident of precinct five here in belmont this is really just a statement i don't have any questions i just want to state this on the record position belmont as collateral damage in a fiasco the yet the n b a moved forward anyway if the town of belmont had stewardship of its own stations you can be sure we would have analyzed the options before spending the four hundred thousand dollars we would have sort of these things out before having to blame the a b for rejecting or ignoring an extremely late appeal and before acting like we were forced into options that overall actually make the commuter rail accessible to fewer belmont residents because we care deeply about our own stations it's not hard to feel as though if the entity in charge of the stations care deeply about it they would have taken similar actions as such i feel the m b t has acted either in bad faith or negligence or both i don't understand why belmont has to pay the price for the n p t s negligence or bad faith but here we are cars the existing platforms are like four hundred feet and four hundred and fifty feet and as you as you pointed out in your slides there's one hundred seventeen boardings at one station and the population of train riders however that's not what i really want to talk about i'm a as i mentioned at this attempt twentieth meeting a member of the community path implementation advisory committee appointed by the board of s n last year to study and make recommendations to the board about routes for community paths through belmont one of the groups that our committee will be studying is an elevated ramp system through waverley station that was recommended by the predecessor committee charged with gathering community employed and studying options broadly in fact the idea of an elevated ramp system slash community path through waverly station was first proposed by the central transportation planning staff of the boston m p o in its one nine hundred ninety seven massachusetts central rail trail feasibility study so this idea has been out there for a while are our committee present committee has a budget we're currently drawing up an r f p for a feasibility study that will be conducted in two thousand and sixteen and we'd be very interested in working with  the on that aspect of our plan to make it something that fits with a structure that would be acceptable to the n p t a looking at that ramp alternative one and two that you presented advisory committee and the ramp system proposed by the end be t s a and in fact i believe that it's not difficult to envision a calm combined community pass slash access to elevated platform with a ramp system that would be enclosed or at a minimum would have a roof to minimize over or eliminate the need for snow and ice removal during the winter highway fund for non vehicular travel and so for example the that and just to give some amounts that the green line extension of one point nine community path parallel to the the new green line thirty nine million dollars budget for a one point eight million dollars community path to a seven point five million dollars segment of the bruce freeman rail trail connecting framingham and lol with received an appropriation of twenty three and a available are are significant the line item for the mini high platform in your budget slide was five hundred fifty nine thousand dollars if the ramp system could be substantially paid for by a community path that was as i just mentioned paid for by federal dollars that would take it off the capital budget of the way that a lot of the costs and simply the cost of of the that many high and russell why no and vince showed me his drawings and in frankly i mean i'm not an engineer and they looked workable to me and frank and i would i think we would welcome gentlemen i think we should welcome the opportunity for you know whatever thoughts he may have on the reaping system that could be paid by federal dollars to help defray some of the costs that you're suggesting this your repeat system would would be in order to move forward to keep the station open that that i think that's something we should encourage the other reason with all these fancy ramps here i don't know why is this fellow mentioned why we have to have eight hundred feet of ram you know and the other thing why don't we have them  to the tracks rather than this fancy thing you've got here and i'm not so sure that that you could use part of the the bridge aspect of that to cover part of that lamp and comes think of breakdowns so the loading would be e and can you tell me why they have to be eight hundred feet so the m b t a standard commuter rail platform is eight hundred feet long so that we can plan for commuter rail growth which  it in fact occur system wide growth in the use of our commuter rail system and eight hundred foot long platform allows for a nine car trains that currently are correct it does not run on the fitchburg line  e admittedly we have we have just thought about these and in terms of concepts to begin this exact dialogue to start talking about why we need eight hundred foot long platforms i want to be just clear on  terminology the platform is the piece that is four feet above the platform and the ramps are not eight hundred feet long the ramps are closer to five to six hundred feet long and that is because of the great difference between the roadway above and the  elevation where the platform would be going down to five percent grade is is about as far as this is about as steep as we want to go with these ramps in order to make that connection as as  let me is about five hundred let me interrupt ok please no debate and there's a long line behind you so if you can just focus on the big points and i'm sure you can speak with them on details after  i don't know whether doesn't know until you find out we're going to stuff ok thank you and you're going to realize that any station or pleasantries is not going to be a walking station it's going to have t to be losing those central areas for the busses thank you before i asked my question i i don't want it to be last adamantly opposed to closing the way the least square station so before i ask my question that we want to keep it open we want it accessible my question is about the thirty million dollars that i heard you talk about and i'm wondering when i saw some of the draft concepts and i know your engineers here saw the draft concept included bridges through our neighborhoods and many of those neighbors are here tonight from waverly terr street what line street pearl street there here we we're trying to understand does the thirty million dollars estimate include the cost of the bridges zero our streets into the highway department and across the tracks and we asked that because of previous discussions with waverly square development private developers told us it was cost prohibitive to do anything like that so that's one of my questions does thirty million cover that the thirty million dollar estimate is for the waverly accessibility alternative only conceptual y we think it's about the same because it's the same length of platform and it includes the same number of elevators that the the parts are or similar the the location the full infrastructure is different and it is rough order of magnitude for planning and budgeting purposes only there is very little design that is behind the pleasant street alternative there is there are no bridges within the community the only bridge is part of the place a street alternative is to connect the inbound and outbound stair and elevator over the tracks so that those folks who would disembark from a train and need to  go to the other side of the platform could go up a stair or an elevator cross a bridge over the tracks and go back down to the they come from historic data as to how projects evolve through the design development phase the alternative that is represented right here is the thirty million dollar alternative reconstructs good portions of those tall red retaining walls in order to put in properly sized and scaled stairs it also puts in fo independent elevator shafts at the four corners of the station at each end of the eight hundred foot long platforms to provide accessible means to access the platform at greater than fifty percent of the entrances to the station it is it is these renderings that you see right here that represent the same concepts in the same level of detail as the concepts that are sketched up for the present street alternative that you see right there so thank you for handsewing that but your consultant on fun pronouncing it right nietzsche and engineering actually did a concept w dropoff in parking through our neighborhood now maybe that's above the thirty million which it sounds like it is who would pay for that and certainly that we part of the station design and the road reconstruction would be part of the station construction would be borne by the n p t as part of the construction of this this facility again all of this is very conceptual pick up drop off it's really just showing what alternatives are available and it's part of a starting point for this exact type of conversation about what is what is possible and then what is appropriate thank you for your time and again adamantly opposed i'm also a town meeting member of precinct three a lot of this isn't precinct three pleasant street isn't a precinct and royal road an opening that is also in our precinct thank  you gentlemen thank you for hosting this meeting i think that it's incredibly helpful for the residents of belmont to get their say i'm aaron levie and i'm from precinct seven and i live at thirty eight unity i have i'm here because i watched the board of selectmen meeting on september twenty eighth and i saw what you presented which you presented tonight as well and i walked away and thought there have to be other options i pulled a resource of mine who's going to speak next who is an urban planner and together we pulled together voices that that we're at the meeting who expressed concern we sat with others who we know take the commuter rail on a daily basis from waverly square and we started to have an exchange of ideas trying to capture what kind of other alternatives you could potentially think about with the hat from an economic perspective that the m b t a is fighting fiscal woe was and is going to continue so our  presentation we have three decks that we said to you via the board of directors i don't know if david hill can confirm did you send that to the n p t and into transportation on friday thank you to it so you have three decks that are available to you that contain the background of belmont the accessibility of the commuter rail and how important it is to our viability as a town into the business centers that are around us it contains more information about other options that we pulled from residents of the town who recommended things like a parking garage that is that could be built in waverly square including over belmont carwash it were perhaps in the star market parking lot we walked exactly the steps that those who take waverly square would have to walk to go up and around to pleasant street it adds fifteen minutes of walking time and that's only if you have the right crosswalk  it adds a horrible amount of inaccessibility to put a station on pleasant street some of the options that that we've proposed just basically take your six main goals of multimodal linkage which is not our concern it's yours yes it is ours as well but it's within your financial reports and statements accessibility handicapped access ability  you know continuing to offer transportation options to the communities in which you serve and all with with the thought that there is a way to increase your revenue source by making both of the existing stations more accessible and more pleasant and with that i think what i'd like to do is turn it over to my neighbor in a single she's an urban planner by practice and training and together we are very happy to share all of the information that we pulled together for you aaron mention my name is an ascent govt i have a masters in a ph d in urban planning from m i t i'm a resident of belmont precincts have been living on thirty five marion road we came into this totally naive trying to understand would this be a better alternative for belmont and while i can totally understand where you got to this point looking down the length of the track and trying to do this analysis that way we really try to zoom out and think about what is the regional context for this and how is th station going to have a larger impact not only on belmont but on the entire region and it's very hard from that perspective to believe that this station on pleasant street is going to achieve the goals that you have laid out for yourself partly because of the topography of the town where it's a very steep grade going into mclean hospital on one side of pleasant street it's not a very wide right of way so if you are funneling traffic from if you have belmont center and waverly square they each have four to five or more access points for people coming in walking and in cars but on pleasant street everything has to get funneled right on to route sixty pretty much to get there you're losing accessibility to the destinations of film on center and waverly square because as aaron mentioned there's a very long walk if you're actually going to take the sidewalk you have to go all the way up and around to where pleasant street hits to pellow road or you can cut through a parking lot which is not there's no sidewalk there's no infrastructure there you don't own the land it's not clear that that's something that can be put  there and on the neighborhood side if you are in that neighborhood it's not clear at all how you would get to waverly square from wherever the station is going to let you out and that's also something that's not really within your purview to be able to control and so i think there's a larger question of accessibility of the station not just to the platform but for belmont residents and for people who are riding the commuter rail who may want to use it to get to belmont how do they get to the destinations within the town i think what you're going to hear tonight is a lot of passion people in this town care about it a lot i think there are what we realize is that there are a lot of potential partners for you to solve this problem beyond the scope of one of the constraints on the track in the constraints of the money and i hope that you can hear that and not not see just opposition but see people who really want to solve this problem you know waverly square is it is a node for a pretty large swath of multifamily houses a lot of working families people use the commuter rail to access the employment centers in downtown boston in cambridge and in belmont center it's basically the point of connection that goes from the hill to the lower belmont i mean it's very hard to replicate the level of access that those two points get you even though you do have a lot of constraints in terms of the geometry of the track and i understand that that is a real challenge that is posing is posed to you but i hope that you'll be able to look at the slides it's a lot of information a lot of analysis that we've done belmont resident of town meeting member in belmont from precinct four and also a monthly pass rider from the waverly station thank you very much for coming out and having this open meeting tonight and thank you for th for hosting this i would encourage you to reach out also to wall fam and watertown because i know there's an awful lot of interested public officials and fellow riders that i see here tonight from watertown and waverly and i fear sometimes because it's at the intersection of three towns it doesn't get as much vocal support as some of our animated discussions about film on center in the recent past so i think what's mission what seems to be missing is the value of overall valuable public transportation here i think that the where we station and the belmont station are classic examples of a desperate and friendly public transportation that make it accessible for communities you know make the right incentives keep people from keeps my car in the driveway instead of on the roads it supports local businesses i've been i moved here a while ago now because of the the stop and to get in and i've been commuting ever since downtown with and i don't know the about the  because it's underground so you're it's not congesting there's no congestion of blog with it in fact of the parking lot makes a nice drop off place for that for people that are are  approaching it with a car it's a the pleasant street alternative is really i think just about everybody walks or nobody lives on pleasant street driven if there's one dead in road along there and for everybody i think that takes v from waverly station of the longer walk they pointed out you do have to kind of go around it's kind of a tricky intersection to cross otherwise but more it's just a community center and i think that the intermodal concept or the the parking lot concept i can see you from your perspective you look at the whole fitchburg line you say way where these two and so close together here and i think one model is your riverside alewife woodburn stop w people all drive in and park and then go into town from there but here you have a different example first off the people that would come in would be taking triple zero road pleasant street concord have which is incredibly busy with with traffic right now  that disabled americans act it because i think that station should be a bit accessible to all of us it should be accessible to us it's very difficult when you're on crutches to get down there with them on wheelchairs and it's not accessible so i would contend that we need to make it accessible to everybody and i think an alternative that involves closing it down makes it inaccessible to a lot of people i think it'll hit the tipping point and it'll make it the tipping point of jump in the car and taking that rather than the public belmont of the foot traffic coming to that it's not to have big parking lots where people can come down and drop off and consolidate so i'd urge you not to close the waverley station keep that option open and keep the community by brant with that thank you to museum science because of the traffic situation with ninety three and all the congestion there my concern is by closing we believe you are closing the lifeline to the boston community for all those who work in that area who need to get to that area and furthermore with the weekend shut down the rightly for the commuter rail we would be even more of a standstill there's no way you can close the way really station and just make it accessible just i agree we're at an impasse with the with the accessibility concerns and we need to address it just do it just honestly do it thank you to take place who is the present property owner of the pleasant street alternative and if it's the town of douma are they willing to sell the land to the end bta to do this project are there any other resource areas at the pleasant proposed alternative that would be impacted i think what you guys have developed is very thin at this point and it's hard for the town of dominant residents to evaluate anything without fully understanding what the proposed pleasant street  alternative is it would be ok you know just just to elaborate a little bit on on that point that the property owner impacted is in the audience does he want to wave now ok two brothers that are affected and you know they bought that is it five acre parcel a five or eight acre parcel of land you know with an idea towards the future redevelopment commercial redevelopment of that area that might even include some over fifty five aged housing very needed a very needed use in belmont  that area very closely and continues to do so and part of the concern is taking a taxable productive future development growth area and making it nontaxable once once it's owned by the a the other thing you do is you slice their property and half and they get into parking issues and floor area floor area concerns and tenant concerns so you know elaborating on what the previous gentleman said you know those are all concerns that have gone on in my mind the other thing is this whole notion of diverting all this traffic through the residential neighborhoods which i think a previous speaker has spoken about you know you will tremendously impact and congested areas between waverly street and beach street including this senior center this is where cars will be parking if you have access through through the town yard my last personal concern and again building on what the previous gentleman said is belmont has plans to rebuild our d p w facility on that site and if you take half an acre or an acre of land from us that you know that impacts our plans so i don't think belmont's ready to sell its land you know to the n b t n a and it could have consequences including  you know we have we are tight landowners as it is and belmont and that's that's a very deep concern that i have as a selectman going forward please continue yeah i'd like to you know i would like to respond you know i think i think we you know i want to be clear that it is not a proposal for the present st it's an alternative that we felt we owed it to not only ourselves but the townsfolk and everyone to at least look at what the alternatives are that we have open to us so that we do our full due diligence in terms of looking at what what options are available the there's very little design very little engineering behind the picture that you see behind me it is it is to scale it is for reference it's you know something that that we're here to show you so that it's not this this this big idea in the background it's it's really just an alternative that we wanted to look at from you know strictly from a transit perspective and  f it's necessary to flush an idea like this in order to have this exact conversation so from that perspective you know it's it isn't that we are forcing this issue we are opening up that public conversation as we've been saying you know throughout our presentations and you know we are being forthright and honest with you that that everything is on the table this is an open discussion and you know some of you had some very good points my name's david the who i actually represent want to town today my wife will be coming in on the ten o'clock train down away from the square is handicapped also  a be an awful shame to lose that station i like those little circle on the map it shows that it's just part of a quarter mile away from the proposed station down a pleasant street not walking it's a little bit longer than that my wife walks to the train station every day no sundays you know six days a week basically and to ask her to walk another point a mile is absurd when there's a train station right there since the seventy's i don't see it changing i have seen i have lived in belmont for a long time i know all the water but i have to pick my wife a lot of times and as it is now because she you know the only thing i think that you're overbuilding the train station the adding work capacity to the spares so hence you need more hence you need more elevators that's funny you can go that route but you should really look at cutting the cost down those little mini ramps they are in use between here and brunswick m move a little closer feed their families work the hotels and restaurants in boston and leave on the six fifteen in the morning and they get childcare for their children the longer you make them walk the more money that they have to give to a sitter so that somebody can hold their kids until they can get to school so if we don't keep this we're hurting our most vulnerable population in belmont and it's significant we had the seniors the veterans that go in for their doctor's appointments we have the people that have the jobs in boston and we can not impact the most vulnerable population in belmont because i don't know what they're going to do if they don't have that train thank you thank you brandeis roberts as well as one occasion where i went to a lincoln because i overslept and so actually fell asleep after work self so i've seen all of those and i get it i mean i do have to say the belmont stops are not terribly good stops they're pretty bad so i would agree that they definitely need some help you hope you are aware that waltham has acquired the fertile land in that there's a possibility that some of that land will be converted into more housing within what about a mile and a half or so of that station so this is another thing to be considering in your projections for the future so one of the things i would say is that it would be excellent to have better accessibility to these stations it would be excellent to have better commuting possibilities honestly from areas like north waltham where where you're you know you're talking about i mean honestly some of the changes that have been even local changes like the narrowing of the trip have really made a negative impact on on commuting access you know so i think it's imperative that the stations remain i'm hoping that you make the right make the right call here thank you very much thank you feasibility study for the consolidation of belmont's two commuter rail stations skloot met with representatives in april to discuss a study to combine the stations at belmont center and wave into a new one on pleasant street that's from june and ten so i just want to reinforce the what my watertown neighbor said this is not a this is not a casual new plan this is a thing that there seems to be some attachment to the n p t and i would prefer that there was a lot more open assessing this pleasant street versus the waverly or the others for me is that there are some missing details i don't like to decide things until i hear all the details i don't get any sense of the comic to vittie between waverly everyone's talking about the burden that walking would be but is there a possibility of a bus that would take you there with the waverly bus go all the way through to it and other is it out of its scope to even talk about things like well if you close the waverly could you have some kind of commuter bus that would take you to belmont just looking for a much much less expensive alternative than thirty million to run a bus or you know a nice gas you know it's probably appropriately environmentally friendly bus it sounds like it's a low ridership so is have those kind of considerations been given the the the the conveyances between the stations and how that plays out all those are excellent points and they would be part of the next steps as we go through the evaluation of all the alternatives available i live on with one street and i just say thank you to people who spoke and it brought up things that i hadn't even thought of things like that the fact that the bus and the where police station and the bus and the and the belmont center station are so connected  and how it impacts the whole neighborhood i think i need to clarify something you're saying that to make the waverley station appropriately handicapped accessible is the same cost as building something like this is that true is that what you're saying more or less ok so why would you do this i mean i know this looks pretty and it would be a feather in your cap but i'm going to speak selfishly now as a resident of woodland street at the bottom of my street is the d p w it's the old what are company building which is probably going to be might be one of the places that's used as part of the station on the other side i have a one block long street where children play all day in the middle of the street when there's no school and car if you know the idea that cars would go down my street to drop people off at the station or the railroad is horrifying also those streets really see street at the bottom of the street is a d p w then there's pleasantry and then there's the hill the sound of everything echoes off that hill we hear everything at flat at five o'clock in the morning we hear that everything is a d p w here now i don't mind hearing the train go by that's kind of nice but to hear train stopping and going and people hugging their horns for their people that they're picking up it's at the thought of that i can't imagine how any could sleep so if it's going to cost the same and where really square is is you know it up and coming neighborhood lots of new construction on the road there's lots of businesses it's accessible to what are tonics accessible to wal why would you not make that accessible if it's the same cost as this just seems crazy that it makes me almost paranoid like why this thank you thank you station for everyone we don't need anything fancy we don't need i've been in the heavy highway construction business for thirty years i've done a lot of estimated thirty million dollars seems awfully high to me one thing i noticed on your conceptual providing good access to both ends of the platform and only have to bridge the wall one place your support of exploration would only be at one place and you'd be in areas where you have access so as far as the plan goes let's to proceed with the waverly station access them with center station access minimal we don't need fancy stuff it's more important for us to have the stations in the access than they have something that's on line and  know that it's not your goal to create monuments i'm an engineer myself i stepped on your chair before or from the contractors side so you said that i've been  again not been fancy provide the access in and i think it can be done at left much less than thirty million thirty million could probably cover both stations and one thing i observe they know that there's an issue with the government center that curve becomes a tangent basically at the end of the bridge environment so you move those platforms or at least where you need to have the access slightly to the east that affects some homeowners i know that that will be contentious but that does resolve the issue of the super elevation thank you thank you hi my name is nancy cujus and i live on somerset street which feeds into pleasant street and basically i agree with most of the people who talk tonight who say they would like to keep two stations i think that we placing  two stations that people can walk to with one that everybody has to drive to is just madness if the point is to get people to take the t v and stead of seem to me that the one suggestion i have is that there should probably be some kind of bus service that connects ill wife goes down pleasant street and ends up maybe at waverly and then goes on to watertown waltham so there's sort of a class town bus it seems even in the four short years i've lived where i do that traffic has increased and i suspect it's because of all the new industry and building in watertown and waltham i work in newton six miles away the only way to get there in any kind of time at all is to drive it takes me between twenty five and fifty minutes to go six miles because i go down pleasant street high class for the stock market and it just seems there should be public transportation and although i like bike i'm just not going to bike that far so i also feel that belmont is the historic center of town that really came into being partly because of the built and people not be able to one place thank you and no more no speakers please at the end of the line however who's the last is a gem ok yeah well marilyn i was going to introduce you know my name is roy epstein i'm a town meeting member from precinct six and member of the war committee i'd like to return to the subject that maybe created this whole issue which is disability access to wave of station  i would call myself a hard core disability well part disability access issues affect me hardcore because i have an immediate family member who is wheelchair bound and has been for several years so i'm very aware of things like elevations what's uphill what's downhill what's a curve and so forth let me just say from  practical point of view if waverly station was made completely wheelchair accessible it would be totally irrelevant because let me just give you a practical  example if you're if you're in a wheelchair and you want to go downtown you have a choice you could get in your wheelchair and somehow get to waverley station and then take the elevator down get on the train which does not really have very good wheelchair accommodation pay your three dollar fare at half price get to north station and then somehow get to your final destination or  you could do what i think wheelchair people really do which is call the ride pay three dollars it comes to your door at your house they take you from the from your inside your house to the van to the door of your destination for three dollars so nobody unless it would be some fantastically rare circumstance but nobody who is truly wheelchair bound is going to use waverly because it's more or less accessible that way fully is just irrelevant because the ride is pretty good and that's what happens when you have a law that was passed in one thousand nine hundred eighty seven regarding accessibility which is what the architectural access board is to the ride which is a relatively recent development so it is truly an interest in improving accessibility for severely disabled people  take the thirty million dollars and your market for improving the ride and things that people really want you and i would hope that that that even though there's been the least one or two rounds with the architectural access board not to give up go back and talk about the reality of transportation options for truly disabled people and make a deal the most if thirty million dollars would  door to door transportation for many many disabled people for decades and it would be a far greater benefit to them than this very abstract not best i can it's it's it's a legislate you know slightly off center from one of those two alternatives will be fully accessible to all persons period well over thirty million is going to be spent to make that will chirk cesspool of hopefully at the existing station it's i think it's senseless could you make the stairs better but not nobody who is in a wheelchair will ever use it so why build a monument to something like that is really i would hope that's not the final decision waltham my my concern is that when you look at the overall system out of the of the n p t and the commuter rail it looks like a whole bunch of points that are connected at all just with single lines but we need to make more cross connections and we also you consider reverse commuters or we be systems left because they couldn't get enough of the recent college grads to come out of cambridge and somerville where they live outbound commute to come out to one twenty eight area if we did have a bus service from originated at waverly square went straight up propel zero to get more workers out in that direction and just do a loop that hooks up more these stations somewhere else it's really difficult to get anywhere thanks sue bassam a town meeting member from precinct three i live near belmont sad are but recent three includes waverly square as you've been told a few times before at the september twenty eight meeting it was suggested i thought adopted but evidently it was pushed aside that you folks would convene a show wrapped and get some of the ideas that you've heard in two minutes here spelled out in more detail i beg you to abandon this five year plus stream of this absurd station and unpleasant street that no one will be able to walk to and instead concentrate on ways to spend a reasonable amount of money not thirty million dollars using things like the federal funding for the community p the engineering ability of begin shamir you heard from him there are many talented people in belmont who want to help you to waverley square for less than thirty million dollars and do it right and and we share what i buy i think is your vision that the train should go faster we want to have that happen we also this is an in a close in suburb and we really ought to have the kind of rapid transit that they have in cambridge and somerville and other close in suburbs and i want to look to the future when belmont center and waverly square will have very frequent visits from the train there won't be in the glare of the reverse commuters there won't be there you won't have to wait an hour at rush hour and god knows how many hours off peak to get a train i'm looking to the future and i hope you will look to the future and take advantage of the very talented people in belmont who can help you make this waverley station an accessible waverley ok place brief comments continue my name is melissa mcintyre and i think i'm probably one of belmont's most recent member of residence we moved in about three and a half months ago we bought a house and when brooke and my husband as a software engineer at google so we could have bought a house in a lot of different places we chose belmont specifically because of the transit options i used to work at boston children's hospital there's a good chance i work in the hospital district again having ability to get to north station was very important to me but besides that if you look at if you're thinking in terms of the future and you look at what is most important to young people who are buying houses these days what is most important is being close to the cities if the two transit stations do not exist if it's going to be one transit station that cannot be accessed by the the local resident communities who be walking to the transit stations can be a much less much less interesting place for young people to buy houses the property values in belmont continue to go up that's not going to continue just a thought thank you very much  actually used to transportation to commute students and the faculty members and i think that's very so those are their first commuters that we're talking about and i mean for me it was a great advantage one of the chose which was belmont blasts both of my kids actually used to move from one station to another and they were high school so this is also one of the great advantages of this town to have this  inside to wait to use public transportation to to go around so i basically agree with the previous comments that abandoning the center switching to just one station will  i am i jim sabbaths from precinct seven in a comment i wanted to make tonight is right around our all day in which we all know all of our roads are being narrow significantly now really to one lane all of my major well it's not just in in all the surrounding communities as we do road reconstruction probably because of federal funds required to do it so that traffic the traffic in the last three or four years has become horrific and i really feel that the the train is going be going to north station may supersede the ridership that we get on the bus and the hobbits we have because the ride the hov it's where right now is bad it's going to get significantly worse as i'm sure all the other bus lines are if there is some sort of a possibility that and i think what would really help i'm sure you guys maybe even thought about as if somehow this train could tie into l y for a port a square and let people get off and to go on to the red line it would make it accessible to the entire city of boston but i think it's very important we do not lose our stations thank you look at both of you you want to be looks with all due respect extremely detached you with all due respect look like you're frustrated and don't want to be here all of our time is valuable including yours and we pay for it do your homework open your minds be visionaries don't encourage more cars look to ways to make that to limit the amount of item bills that are on the road look at the way people's trends of living are going not the way you see it and i will point out the rendering you did of your station that you seem to have chosen is beautiful i wish you would put a little bit more time into the renderings away from the square thank you good evening everybody my name is jimmy's morning i'm from watertown and i am also handicapped ok you look at me got long hair i want music teacher i need the five trains in and out of my hometown every day through the middle of the night train ran into new york city i was spoiled and i love the rail service now you can say what it sounds got a really great bunch of options you can walk to watertown square to walk to any bu i don't want to walk to a bus that i'm going to get stuck on the mass pike and have an hour long commute i just don't want and i'm what you guys are not understanding is where really station is watertown's commuter night we're screwed i'm screwed and the rest of it now i'm trying i want to love keyless i want to see things happen now first of all there's a lot of things better about where we closing a lot of people said some things i was going to say but the seventy three bus if you put it away where you can put the seventy three bus how is the seventy per seventy three bus going to terminate in the same terminal where they were the way we station terminates right then you also have the seventy four bus which terminates in belmont so what are you going to do there you're going to run a shuttle to belmont center if you move the center station from belmont it's going to screw everything up you need to keep both stations open i want to tell you one thing this is very important first of all i am not wrapping my brain around this whole idea that you guys screwed this whole thing up by doing stupid construction that put you in a position that forced you to say oh well we got it now we've got to make it up to code you know i wish you'd wake it up to code look everybody i wanted up to code ok but you know what i'm having a real tough time with this and you know why because i take the patriots train to go to the patriots games all the time because i'm a season ticket holder and when i pull in on that train you know what only the first three cars platform and there were twenty one cars eighteen of them behind the platform that people had to walk up the platform which means foxboro stadium has not been put up to code that they do that for handicapped people hell no so i am aware of this is a loophole and i know i've been looking at this for a long long time that there was talk about waverly being closed for five six years ago  not buying it guys i'm not i don't think anybody else's you know i just you know let me tell you something people in maine in the commonwealth are clamoring clamoring for commuter rail service they just put up a new station up in yaki you guys did a fantastic job why because commerce revenue people are there building it up over there the yaki center that whole fenway center it's all going to be built up right there new balance is building a new station in allston on the framingham was to wind and they're financing it so it all comes down to money you guys got to do your homework and you know what belmont is going to suffer and you know don't close the station you know first of all there's no think about the seventy three impacts bus and if seventy four impliedly if you move it as pleasant shape that's it there's one way and one way out you guys have more problems to deal with ammal of what a town thirty two towns and cities in massachusetts but i just heard about this yesterday from a constituent and it doesn't it affects belmont but also while the i'm residents who walk down from to pearl road north watertown so this affects everyone the thing is that it's very clear there wasn't one person with a disability that came here tonight to say that they have a problem with waverly square and so i'm here i'm here to oppose the closing i served on the commission on disability for twenty two years so i understand when you make a change then it clicks in and you have to abide by the da rolls but you know what is is a person that was on twenty two years they do waive some situations in this is a situation and i know if the board of selectmen writes a letter and puts all the details in all of the information that was here in the letter how it is going to negative negatively affect disabled people with disabilities and also elderly they will not they wouldn't buy this and you could say the tax payers money a lot because it's not necessary you could put you could put less money and make improvements in the wet waverley station and i'm not going to be repetitious they said everything here you could get on a bus and get the train in all of them i just live you know half a mile from here and so the selectmen to write out letter and i assure you they will waive this whole situation because it isn't or it doesn't accommodate anyone i think and so on thank you for the opportunity i just i'm not the same thing more because you have a deadline so you very much post office you name it you put a new station halfway between and you just rock that whole thing and that's going to cost future taxpayers a lot more money ok to be able to provide the services that we currently have at those two humps right now so my sense is that you keep the two stations open and you do whatever you need to do to  make them function ok and this idea of a third hop in the middle of those two to meet is absolutely wrong completely wrong it cannot be substantiated so you should look at keeping those two hubs open and that should take care of it ok over no thank you thank you let me let me let me conclude by a question i had and then maybe maybe some closing comments and direction in the letter which the n b t a wrote to tom hawkins of director of the architectural access board this is the october twenty sixth two thousand and fifteen letter from laura brothers furred assistant general manager it states here this summer the m b t a began exploring the feasibility of closing both waverly and belmont center station both currently inaccessible and technically challenging to make acceptable and constructing a fully accessible station and belmont located roughly in between the two existing stations which is the alternative you showed us on the slide so so no no no no new surprise there but then and they you know ending paragraph you say the m b t a has drafted a capital funding request for the fall design and construction of a consolidated station in waverly are you saying that you're preparing a funding request to the state to construct the consolidated station on selfless and street and if so aren't you kind of boxing us in you know it isn't that kind of forcing the issue if you're replacing the funding for it it is written that way it is not intended to function that way it is a funny question when it's speaks to one of the earlier questions about where is the money there currently is no funding with the in our capital investment program to effect a change waverley belmont or this pleasant to alternative and we have put together a funding request for the capital improvement program for the fiscal year two thousand and seventeen through twenty one that will address our need to make we really accessible in whatever the alternative is that we make it accessible ok so it's not boxing us and it is not ok ok i would you know the purpose of tonight's meeting and i know initially you had requested a charette yes with ten participants ok the board of selectmen felt that we needed wider community import before we got to that point specifically at the location of where the the station would be and i present to you that you've heard overwhelmingly you know keeping the existing station in its location i would suggest i would suggest if you would in good faith ok come back to was commit to us that that's what you intend to do and what what i would suggest is we then set up a show rat where we can examine various design options and and ideas that can possibly help reduce the cost from thirty million there are some property owners in the audience who have offered to donate some land to provide an elevator you know for example there's a lot of possibilities with the existing station but we need to get a commitment from you based on what you've heard tonight and at the previous board of selectmen meeting that that's where the focus is going to be and and you know honestly i'm trying to keep  january two thousand and sixteen timeframe where you want to direction i'm trying to keep with that and i think you know every everybody would would support that kind of a timeframe we do want the current waverley station to be existing waverley center station other funding mechanisms and i think the way to work together you get way with station accessible for no reason mr chairman i support your your remarks thank you very much ok and any other