hello everyone welcome to the belmont journal belmont's own program for hyper local news and community programming i'm your host roger called and over the past few years literally hundreds of belmont residen have installed solar panels on their rooftops through the bell might go solar initiative the state incentive however which pays for up to thirty percent of the cost of installing solar panels is going to expire soon for those belmont residents who are interested in installing in installing solar panels on their badmouthed homes need to apply for those solar panels and for those state incentives within the next month let's listen in to klaus bakker who was one of the very first belmont homeowners to install solar panels to talk about their benefits in the process of installation i i'm tall specker and i am a with solar behind us we have what's known as an inverter it's the device that converts the d c direct current from the solar panels to alternate in current ac which we can use in the house solar power comes from the panels on the roof down to this box and converts it into ac the ac goes to the box over there which is the breaker panel and it is fed to into the home we they are probably consumed by nancy our neighbor over some house right next door the having said all of this gives you a lot of different kinds of returns that's returned to you personally because it's a good investment it gives you maybe six to nine percent on the money you invest which is a lot better than you could possibly hope to get from the stock market these days or any other investment with a comparable risk know you turn it on for you forget about it there's also the return to the town where you help us having out and stabilizing the electricity so the supply it's important to me also that we do something about climate change a lot of people in in this area everybody understands that climate change is a sign to fix the fact it's not enough to just post your outrage on facebook say that houses with solar sell for more which is what you'd expect since the cash flow that comes with the cash flow normally a house is just a drain on your finances but if they're sold on it it actually con welcome to this week in the belmont county and now my its own online source of hyper local news we have with us today franklin tucker who is the editor and publisher of the belmont tourney and thanks for stopping over thank you very much the board of selectmen i here has just approved a new housing production plan for the tannenbaum that's right there approved a plan that was developed by the housing trust and that was approved by the planning board a week before and it's  where and what they're going to do is they're looking they're going to have now goals and strategies the focus is on needs in the town and specifically two groups one is the elderly or seniors where seniors are going from bigger just starting out maybe with one child thinking about growing to a second child and that would really lead towards more to family homes in one of the focuses to the housing production plan is to develop more housing around transportation centers that's correct and where you can really build up it's more it's more of a natural progression in housing supply in making the supply of housing to have it somewhere where it's easy to get to a train or a bus so you don't need a car you know you can you can then work in that way it's just a natural pattern so somebody can live in a new home and then also hop on a bus to go downtown that's that's what a lot of people are doing and if that's really good for younger and older citizens you know it's something that an amenity to them is a relationship between commercial development and housing development and no there isn't really it is a housing plan they're really looking just to to increase the housing stock and especially affordable housing stock there's just not that much here in belmont right now belmont has about seven percent housing stock that's called affordable and really when you look at it about a quarter one in four belmont tony and i qualify for affordable housing so there's real need for increase in supply is it unusual for a community to adopt we now own the or the town now owns the incinerator site so we're required to cap it but what the board is saying is that let's not do it the horse before the cart you know the cart before the horse i should say and capital and then try to figure out what to do let's let's see what would go on to the site you know and and people talked about a dog park or solar farm a d p w use and a skating rink now so if we know what's going to go on top we can then can build the cap that will support it that seems to be something that the board of selectmen is really pushing for in the board of selectmen is going to be seeking input and that's right they're going to have a public meeting just like they had on trash and they're really going to let the mob rule they say and they'll they'll take their lead from what the communities come come out and suggest that's great well thank you very much we've been talking with franklin tucker who is the editor and publisher at the moment tony just a few years back ballmer decided to consolidate the oversight of both town facilities in the school facilities under one person since december however the mind has been seeking a new director of listen to steve talk about the qualifications he has for the belmont job interviewed we had a subcommittee interview a slew of candidates and then john and i went and we interviewed one fair young family and superintendent we're all so i've been with the state for four years and i'm the bureau director of facilities so i have the four g p h hospitals a couple million square feet of space forty five buildings thereabouts and you have thousand acres of parking and such but i'm looking forward to this i've been a member of the national truck for trust for historic preservation for twenty years i love the character of belmont the citizen herald thanks for stopping over thank you roger there are big happenings relating to the high school yes so the high school building committee meeting has been meeting frequently with the designer perkin on plans for the schematic design so now's the time to really pay attention to these meetings and to attend these meetings because they're talking about you know how they're actually going to be designing the inside of the building how many lockers it's going to have will have transgender you know bathrooms it will have at least one transgender bathroom cause that's actually required by law and they're working on scaling down the size of the building to get the cost down so they've actually managed to scale the size down to about four hundred forty five hundred square feet and the total cost is estimated to be about two hundred ninety six million and the belmont's estimated contribution is about two hundred nineteen million after the m s p a reimbursement and even though the building is getting smaller it will still be one of the largest high schools in the state yeah it will be one of the biggest schools in the state bill leval of the chairman of the high school building committee did not deny that he couldn't say if it would be the biggest ever but he didn't deny it will be the biggest in the state so there are some very important upcoming meetings april twenty sixth is a design update and workshop so people really should make an effort to attend that or tune into that and they going to be looking for public input on the exterior area between the pond and the building like for ideas for uses like dining or or education uses for that area and traffic is an issue that will be discussed more at an upcoming yet in the next meeting for that is may sixteenth you should market calendars for that and on may eighth they'll be a joint meeting with the selectmen and the school committee where they're going to actually do maybe possibly a virtual reality presentation with goggles with actually going to put these goggles on and all make be like they're inside the building and actually seeing what's going to look like so it's really incredible it's a major very intricate project i admire all the people who are on the committee working hard and they really do need the public to be involved and give there in so the takeaways are that there are major decisions that have been made yes high schools getting smaller less expensive but there are upcoming meetings that people need to attend have important him pay attention because all of a sudden will be november and they'll be a dead explosion on the ballot and you want to be educated about what you're voting for and let's talk about one of the other schools and yeah  there's news with the belmont day yes cool born there either topping off this yes that was exciting we covered that last week but then the next thing i know there was an issue a pretty big issue that residents were concerned about and members of the cemetery commission were concerned about they closed concord avenue for one week for construction for storm drainage and they didn't feel they got adequate notice for that that was one of their complaints they also complained about signage being too big the construction company put up some really big signs that violated the town signed by law so they were upset about that but the thing that they were most upset about roger was that they learned that the they wanted to put an above ground utility pole and over head wires on concord avenue you but not the side where there's already existing poles and overhead wires the other side where there's currently none in who oversees that is that is they have they learned they thought that glen clancy was the one that would make that with the argument that right but it turns out it was really something that had to be decided between belmont light and the construction company and the school and so today's big news april eighteenth belmont day said that the greed that they would install everything underground and incur the cost so the town is very happy and i think the neighbors  cemetery commission are very happy the only thing they may not be happy about is that they're going to have to close the road again in june because they couldn't get can't get it done this week simultaneously with this project so deaths that the happy ending there that's great we have had a couple traffic accidents over in that part of well they were there were two on april twelfth at the intersection of winter and marsh st that is a frequent site of accidents and one of the accidents actually injured the leg of a forty nine year old belmont motor cyclist so two accidents in one day and and i know that that's a frequent sight of accidents because i do the police log every week so i was curious i asked the police how many crashes have been there this year and how many have there been in the past they said this year so far for last year is eight and the year before that six and glenn clancy is aware that this is a problem intersection and he's doing a study and he said he'll have the results of that study very soon and we'll see what they decide to stay tuned to the masses making honey for hopefully thank you and you that this week in the belmont citizen help we've been talking with joanna jubilance who is the senior multimedia journalist for the the belmont public library has installed new technology to help people who cannot easily read a newspaper or a book a new technology called the low vision reader machine allows people who struggle with reading newspapers and books to either read those documents or to have the documents read to them so libraries chris tremblay explains how to operate the new technology my name's chris tremblay i'm a reference librarian here at the belmont public library and today we're going to be showing you our merlin o c r low vision reader so what this machine will allow you to do is in on anything that you want to try to enlarge if you have any issues reading t especially with like a newspaper or something like that or even just enlarging photo that you were given maybe that's not coming in as clearly as you want and the o c r side of it is actually stands for optical character recognition which allows the machine to be read  text back to you so if you have something with a few simple paragraphs once again like it like a newspaper then you're welcome to bring in your own headphones and have the machine speak it back to you or you can buy headphones right from us for a dollar right at the reference desk the most basic feature for this device is that it just allows you to zoom in and zoom out on what whatever you're reading so you just use this wheel here and as you can see will just bring you're right in close to what you're reading now there's a few different modes that you can play around with to make sure you get the right definition for you so you just flip this key here you can do an enhanced positive or an enhanced negative which allows some people that might have contrast issues to get a better picture you can also just the brightness on the screen and then this little tablet here allows you to just move around what you're reading so if you need to go up and down a page because it really far as zoomed in then you're going to be also at the other side that we have is the o c r so we're going to just hit this button here and it should capture the image that we're looking at and going to start reading it to us we want to go a little bit faster just this control right here application of them has caused problems in the process of recycling and we can also make it go a little bit slower on foreign countries pause and take yourself out of it if you're ready to move on to another section if you have any questions please give us a call at the reference to six one seven nine nine three two eight seven zero we'd be happy to hear from you and we have to have you come in and use this great device we have a special community calendar this week jane peters has been working to develop a special treat for our viewers so let's listen in as jane reveals her surprise while letting us know what there is to do in belmont in the coming week i'm jane and this is your community calendar for this week this is april the case in week out some of you may know and b m c is hosting a kids k through four t v production inspiring poet signed up to read your work at belmont books or a tree open mic on tuesday at six thirty whether it's your first home or you've been writing for years you can sign up in the store to books in store have you ever wondered where where things go when you throw them away join us in the in and finding inches in here inspiring stories of kids around the globe taking action to protect earth and enjoy turning trash into treasure crafts on thursday at three thirty seven hundred thousand bucks yourself published last year and we could learn a publisher of over forty years will demonstrate how to publish your star for under ten dollars the presentation takes place on friday at one fifty on friday and saturday at and others visit mount trash electric dot org for more information back at p z five k road race celebrates back as a two time world marathon challenge champion sign up to run in com and that's it for this week's community calendar if you have some vent info that you'd like to share with the belmont journal you can e mail your event info to jane at belmont media dot org see you next week them up world film festival continues this week at the belmont studio cinema entrepreneur road disappearance tells the story of an unmarried teenager couple roaming from one hospital to another to find a surgeon who will fix a botched abortion you can get tickets to the showing on belmont film festivals website the film premieres on monday april thirtieth and seven o'clock at the studio