slotman tom computer morning tom good morning and of course as always done mr patrice garden good morning before we get started just a few announcements someone to announce that for we have new summer hours here at the town town offices will be until november second do more than seven will be open late on monday nights at seven pm and closed early on fridays at noon and that's so all you can come out and turns that business at the town offices after work on mondays till seven pm also belmont light is going to be opening early october thirteenth until august thirty first starting at seven am till four pm monday through thursday and then seven am to one pm on friday to allow those who need to pull permits and contractors and all earlier engineer for the town of belmont we've had multiple conversations along with glen clancy as to the incinerator site the capping of that site the recent article a town meeting to demolish the building on that site so there's a lot of things going on now currently on that site and as well as post closer use which will be as you alluded to speaking about on june eighteenth in terms of what we want to do at that site once it's capped by am by d p so i thought bruce would be able to educate you a little bit on the incinerator site itself and also an idea that i had to put on that site which would be a revenue generator for the town and that is called in in a river to just not a lot of people also what this what the town can use the site for the end of the day you know i just as of when a working session i'll just use a quick figure of the landfill site and i was given a little quick background of the site and then some of the things we've talked about over the  is conquered ave to orient you to the site this is heading towards belmont center the site is basically three loaves we call that there's a an area in the back area be in an area c is where the town does leaf yard waste composting the incinerator building is located roughly in this area so this is the entrance coming in there's a woodpile over here i'm sure you spent a lot of time up at the landfill site would pile over here a pile of soil here this is fairly well just overgrown and this is where the believe the belmont landfill consists of really well three three things ok out there that one and then when it was active it was built to take the ash off the incinerator which is relatively a nurse so it's not decomposing all the the decomposable so if you will were burned off by the incinerator but during that operation it's likely we don't have evidence of this but when the incinerator went down the trash waste went directly into the landfill at some degree now we have seen a lot of evidence of a lot of decomposable in there and in the sense incinerator shut down the town is used for disposal of inert materials from the d p w so a lot of that mound that you see there on this area is actually material that came in from town projects town operations that was put there so it's primarily a soil streets you know it's primarily soil type of materials that were put up there and it's more ramped up in here in here one of that's that's that's clean so so over the past eight to ten years we've looked at a variety of post closure uses on the landfill site and they have varied in his report from a couple of years ago that we went through all the different options and looked at it so the options we've looked at and i can to get in a lot more detail but any of the options you want to talk about obviously just you know the baseline option is public works use of the site for certain storage of materials out there so they want to area a has to be area b has to be kept that's ten acres that's ten acres correct ok area a which is about four acres it needs a supplemental cap that was partially capped the town did a partial capping of the landfill when  wife with play area c r we've based on test pits there are is no waste there that requires capping so the proposal has been not to cap every a c all of this is subject to d p final review and it was seventy two so the rest of this is just well it's well anything in the blue is wetlands yes twenty five acres the rest of the rest of the acres as weapons yes and again to levels that what was the lead in oakland it was conveyed by he came to us just ten acres  it was it was the it was a debatable point whether we owned it or not and we just decided to move forward because we were working with the cam and they would get they had for less than what we had spent on remediation correct we had a good home rule petition but there were some questions as to conditions the town never never formally met those conditions and therefore there was a river a clause that turned it back over to the state there was a question towards the end of that process whether there was a piece of legislation that sort of default gave it to the  the only point i would make is but through the conveyance we've been restricted to municipal use so that's that's story is only reason i'm making that point there for perhaps if we did own it we wouldn't good for the public and for people who haven't been involved in this is long as we have the right rights and things so so again some of the uses we've looked at historically are primarily focused on having a public works operation out there with sort of bins around other be used in the other two areas are used a satellite public works operations because they're size areas a and c so we've looked at recreational fields in a variety of from rectangular fields to softball fields a little league fields i variety of different fields of configurations and things like that so just real quickly here's a concept that was developed that shows playing fields you know on that mean parcel up front  whatever the conversation had been at the time whether it's photo voltaic whether it's playing fields where there was a skating rink every scenario that was looked at included sort of this peripheral accommodation for public works right to provide been so that they continue some of their operations and in this particular iteration it also capture that possum back not necessarily that you have to do that but this was just what that concept showed but in general this is the idea the idea is to have the public  sort of on the perimeter and try to unlock the front possible for some of these and just public works currently need that space or do they have alternatives or is this like critical to the operation it was critical of the time i'm going to assume it's still critical consolidate the things in the bins out there the other thing is materials they used in their day to day you know site operations you know some construction materials that they could buy a quantity of it and are spending their time going to pick up a load of sand you know they just had to do to do that they have a source here for things like just not just day to day things but emergency water breaks and things like that that they need to access material and then to when they can presumably there's no space in the current you know reason i ask is you know just even this concept takes up a large portion of the space if that's absolutely required for a normal an operation that's one thing it is alternative is that make under this scenario i think this was considered to be sort of above and beyond but certainly the bins in here were the necessary i'll give you an example tom so right now asphalt concrete that's generated from public works projects is taken up to the transfer station put in bins separated put in bins and when it reaches a certain quality quantity someone will come in and clean those bins out so they're recycling that material they'd like to continue an operation like that and this would give them the opportunity to do that again because they generate a very small quantity in a daily basis that actually reduces costs right now you can actually store it you don't need as many runs for it right right and the idea was that we looked at the highway in the garage installation we met with miscible late about that we looked at relocating the public works operation up here and that just was not feasible just there is not enough room for that i really never think entire building everything operation whole operation we look to relocate the police station up here in from a whole point of view it was a boy and i'm going to talk about the different options i'll talk about with some of the downsides of a couple of those options are two i think we don't need to get into great resolve them otherwise ok not just  listing off of things and then we looked at ice rink option alternatives out there that war of interest both from a private developer point of view prior to the land ownership issue sort of raising its head and then more recently so the skating option at the time was was to be a collaborative between the boston skating club in the town of belmont boston skating club would have developed the site think they were looking at three sheets at some length so yes you know three sheets of ice there would have been in there for the town to use that facility we developed that idea pretty far along and then it was the ownership question propped up sort of at the tail end of that investigation and then boston skating club went somewhere else then the question would be whether or not that's a public use if you've got a profit well that's what i was going to say maybe we couldn't have that conversation today i don't think because of the way the legislation narrow we identified how that possible can be used it's a question of whether or not the top could enter into that kind of agreement today well that's one of those things we can negotiate with the state if that's some show that we wanted to do so one of the biggest issues is to consider when you think about buildings on top of a landfill is that it's you know this is not a stable subsurface and the foundation costs they looked at the the additional cost of putting the foundation supports for the sheet of ice and i think that was one of the reasons that they so it's want to look for other other locations out there but anytime you think of a building there is an incremental cost to just getting a you know getting the foundations and having to drive basically foundations down to below the landfill to support the buildings and remember if the landfill shif the building supported in the landfill the parking lot shifts where the utility shift those all have to be sort of integrat a there see i don't think we've done enough with this isn't waste but it's fill material we haven't done enough investigations but i mean i would assume that that would be the case the biggest difference is that b is much higher so that down they should have to go the environmental department of environmental protection or whomever regulates that vary based upon the use so if we build a building we need a different cap than if we turn into a soccer field or is the capping process the same regardless of  cap is much more complicated if you have to tie it into a building so that the cap cross section essentially is from the bottom is the you've got the waste material you've got a six inch c and you've got this plastic membrane which is the cap material and you've got twelve inches of sand in any of topsoil on top of that cap you know that's sort of the standard cap now when you start putting buildings on things and other things you can tie the tap into that you can use the building as a cafe you run the cap underneath the building you run around utilities and you get so much more complicated concept base here or that's foundations or it was a cap or is it a combination of both so the did they want to see every piece of area kept was something ok so if you if we can get d p to approving everything subject to their their concurrence you know that the building itself of the footprint of the building the roof would essentially act as the cap as it would shed the water away from the area but once you've got outside of that area of the capital that you still have the capital side so it's not like you by putting a building you'll meet three million because the building really is a very small in but it's been approved in cases brooklyn has an approval for a public sort of the same kind of public works operations that you have here in that the that the pavements a cap but the public isn't really allowed on there and that's their real constat surreal consideration that you know is having the public on the site and you know questions about about that on that would be would go on there i mean again we're we're just getting back into you know i think one of the steps here is once the town is really sort of more focused on one particular couple of different options we can take a good look at you know some alternatives and trying to trying to get d p to buy off on it but there is precedent for both the building being a cap and pavement being used as an alternative cap so we just household recyclables but it goes to refrigerators tires and other materials they have a goal of trying to increase recycling and one of the things they're trying to do is they've been organic waste from schools supermarkets anybody who generates you know think about somebody one general larger quantity of that as part of that program being it they need to find places for to go in there really is two options that the state is put out there one is to have a compost wit it preprocess it's preprocessed and you get some of these things can happen off site there's a lot of different alternatives here it's preprocessed it's removed so it's just pure you know organic matter and then it's put into a digester of some sort it digest are the best analogy and i want to be clear we're not talking about waste water sludge is and those kinds of materials here the best example is the eggs at the large the huge exit to rile and they get ours would be a much thing would happen here be a much much much smaller scale than that in the digester the organ equates it broken down with anaerobic without oxygen into basically methane which is natural gas the natural gas is burned it generates of electricity and electricity is used in the grid so back to let you know it is used in some manner out there so then at the end of the day there are some leftover material within the digester that material drops out  facilities to be permitted because they want to they want to see these permitted there so they about two or three years ago they exist basically sort of exempted mostly exempted all recycling facilities including in aruba digesters assuming they operate in a certain at the site so it's just like you pay to be fee for solid waste to go to you know out of town somebody would have to pay a tipping fee to go to prevent illness or to belmont well to belmont or to ever the private entity operator is i mean this would be a facility these  century proprietary technologies that are out there so this would be a facility that you would you know put it go out to an r f p and select a vendor a partner to operate in they would build it they would build it design build permit everything in it they are the state is encouraging these kinds of facilities so stepping even a step further back the state as a goal of recycling fifty percent of the waste stream by two thousand and twenty ok there this summer cycling has you know is the standard things that sort of stagnated as far as and in fact it is so they they they looked at that as a as an opportunity to bring the material to expand the the the list of recyclables essential so they started with the larger generators of the organic waste of ton ton per week so there wa ton of food waste per week out there and then their intent was in again their did their tent still is i think to ratchet that down and you know that to make that you know me half a ton of you know just to keep coming down over time to try lot to try to do that but they have a locally local farm that will take the material and compost it so that you know that side of it's fairly literally it was in a ravine digests to take the entire site up you know we would probably would it would it would go on area would probably consume two to three acres in the middle of that and then you know you could have the public works around the edges of that so you know area c would still be left as ill and things as we could still consider commercial business plan you almost want to make a proposal to say ok we're going to do two and half million dollars worth of capping out there and that's you know that's part of it and then there's revenue both from you know something from the tipping fees potentially these are twenty year agreements that you're making with this talk to some vendors talk to some people and see what the the level of interest is on the do that but the facility itself is going to cost you know millions of dollars and so it's not only drop in the bucket based i want to go yeah  are people up on confidence yeah no i think you know that it's a facility that needs to have materials delivered to it you know so i think one of the biggest issues that we've we've heard is traffic and i think the trees shared that we did i did a project in  lexington trying to look at their landfill which is much more actively used and if you're familiar with the lexington hartwell add landfill they they have a regional leaf in yard waste composting operation up there that takes used to take arlington's leaf and yard waste they do all kinds of problems work processing have for years it's a revenue generator for the town they have much more room than that you have you know out there but the they did the location was off harwell avenue which was the  sort of one of the town's economic development focus areas that came out they came in a lot of the traffic issues and what you know along that area and while at the jughandle it's not great traffic wise now so that became one of the one of the most significant issues out there you know the second issue is you know you are bringing in organic materials and how are you going to handle the potential for odors and things and though you claim yes what is the potential for well i think what they what the state wants to see a connection right to the tank it gets pumped right in and so you minimize odors it's things are done in buildings you know things like that and i think that might be you know that would be a prudent approach to take to try to take here there are facilities  there's one charlestown and there's no one that's permit is i don't believe has been built yet on the charles told both in charles town that are going to take this material from some of the greater boston area preprocess it and then you know bring it out to bring it out in that kind of form here so the the energy generation burns the gas through imedi pretreated and things like that and again we'll leave that to the vendor out there but all these facilities would have a backup flare system that if the for some reason the engine went down know probably your local board of health and you certainly don't want to help the environment on one end of them heard on the other end and issues and because you know because this is a program that they're at their initiative and we think it probably wouldn't do that yet there's really no i guess the question you know is there any noise that comes from this sort of things running you know twenty four hours you know no i mean the noise the digging have to abate any noise in the enclosures and things like that i've seen i've seen the noise one rutland and the noise is you know close to it is pretty is pretty where they do these in europe right oh yeah this is very very limited you know like unique oh no no no this is in the fields of here i mean this has been done for waste water sludge for years in the united states it just it just hasn't been cost effective because we don't in europe you have the command again you know what you can limit in the lease yeah you can limit in the lease where you going to limit so you know limited hours of operation perhaps delivery as well acceptance yes absolutely the other thing we talked about to the other day was accessing grants to maybe share some of the roads in that area other number of people items that we have one time you absolutely mean that would if we could get this the else of the money in the landfill stabilization fund for the site is short the actual on out i like about is that it can go affords us an opportunity if we could you know think about the develop a piece of property you have to have a legal front edge i mean that that that comes out of state's own law that the challenge with this parcel is the only logical way that you would gain from you know to try to pick up something over here idea in my mind that i don't want to share publicly at the moment because i want to have a conversation with george hall i wonder if you look at if you could take part carve out part of the band around here subdivided it take a strip around there give it to that parcel and then it has it's got in i energy component i think somewhat what i mean to spend on the docket for upcoming light board meetings would be how that you know we look at generation forms and how that potentially advances the cap climate western mass and so you know the same sentiments were echoed that the state is trying to promote some of these things but i think it also it also is in the same conversation as well how we want to source obviously with other benefits that come along with it but from from an electric sector standpoint you know how to sis fold into the mix of what investments who want to make in generation   in the projects i've been involved with do require quite a level surface and so depending on what the future is for smoothing out the topography and not quite sure which section is  a very high level solar feasibility analysis which i've been a ball with in the past on an actual on another landfill in a different community where we had a consultant come in and just say here's the layout here's what we could expect here's what might have to be done with the with the land to make it viable and then i guess other things could be you could use a for hiking trails or something or other kinds of recreational chris a question or chris so sure so i like the idea  ballpark of whether there's an economically viable i will say disappointed in my experience you know the vent those vendors are interested in the already capped landfill so that you know there's they're not going to come in and expend you know that there isn't a margin there studied would be d p w needs is obvious and we have to make sure the town has what it needs that talk to vendors maybe bruce if you talk to vendors and see if they'd be interested as if no one's interested in this doesn't work then we're just wasting our time and i don't want to do that  then third solar feasibility analysis or getting bids or chris you know you've worked in this field before which is for two of us here so you could take a look at that and see whether that a or a b c or some permutation or combination how that would play out and if you know if it comes out that financially it doesn't make sense for anyone to come in and build a solar farm on just a then there's again i don't want to waste time talking about something along work that will ease rooftops at this point i as bruce said earlier about the stability of the soil and you know if you run electrical lines and then everything shifts to the lines get screwed up because up it's a special kind of line that would have to go in i'm assuming so it's a it's not your simple as simple as it sounds but for public purposes we're not taking comment this morning from the public because the whole point of this was to get ready for the meeting when we are taking the public comment on the eighteenth so but on the eighteenth the idea is to get i think all the i it is on the table and i know a lot of people who've contacted me are coming us i think we're going to get quite a few get the ideas on the table if we have a whiteboard or a piece of paper or we can write them all down and then start knocking them down and we have because at some point we have to narrow this because this is been this roundabout for way too long and i think we've  agreed we need to do something that we're going to have to make a tough choices some point about what we want to do this is the center of the country there's intriguing and it's the only use that i think we've heard that we could actually make some decent money off of and meet climate action goals process a sort of three fold it will four fold you're doing assessments are you figuring out what the level of contamination what's going on out there is going in we are in the process of wrapping that up with that assessment process will tie down  subject to d p proof of the type of caps that are going to go on the landfill and anything else that has to happen in wetlands and things like that so she from historic activities out there then you go into the closure design process this is called a corrective action design and that is the catch and if it's just being capped that's a cap design with that it's best to include the post closure use whatever you're going to do with that out there so you know it's a sub one set of plans we do in solar panels it's fairly straightforward it's one set of  landfill you know you have those kinds of things but you town will have an obligation and it's important for thirty years to collect groundwater samples and monitor the cap you know for a period of at least thirty years after we finish capping this s sort of the steps there but ideally you know we're in this up in process we're fairly close to wrapping it up with a fairly close six to twelve months from wrapping it up and then we'll be starting down the design process there and you know i think we're six to twelve months though from wrapping up the assessment process and getting d p approval of that of those documents because every everything is commanding control everything gets submitted a d p and they approve it and then go to the next step it's not to be naive thinking it would be faster but this is a multiple year process with yes yes yes i guess could we get i guess glen maybe a timeline of the d p requirements and when we have to meet them since we took title i know deadlines start to run sure but i'm not exactly in my mind what those are we can do that but one thing that i want you to be aware of is you know we may have certain deadlines as the municipality providing the information but there is no deadline and there's no shock there so so that was there was a reason a reasonable reason to push it forward we could we could rearrange the deck chairs a little bit we could work with to do that with this will present the top of the the steps process to the to the board on the eighteenth but again we can rearrange things a little bit the now and if we wait we may lose some of the sort of the people there hasn't a lot of success in permitting inciting these within the metro boston area where most of the food waste is is generated because of this the density of population i think out there so there's there's  town to invest some money into and at this point in time we're in a negative just to cap it so even if you wanted to build fields or build something town why we would have to wonder why we would have the investigate we're going to get them and also anything that we do here and we're going to do something here is going to generate traffic because right now if i can generate much guffey at all terry if you have or if you have a rink they're running you know let's say a runs twenty four hours and you can have a lot of traffic i was so it's not it's not like there's going to be no traffic here whatever we do is going to create guess bruce if you could talk to the vendors and see if there's any interest in this whatsoever sounds like there might be an idea we can explore and seeing if we can do a field trip to run i'd like to see one of these facilities like you so i can see what i can do with that start and i think that's exactly what we should do take in information say that's interesting that make some notes if there's any sort of fatal flaws if you will to use to communicate that sort of terminology that we might say that we have really not going to work for this reason but in general we just get to hear these ideas from the key this is just doing this in the and this digesters one of them whether during that meeting because the public you know it's eight in the morning and i'm the public is seeing what we're doing or not you know right now but maybe it's worth having a small presentation of this at the eighteenth while the crowd is there i mean we're not just so it's clear we have not made any decisions on what we post closure use is the first time we're publicly you know going through this in detail in the end or over digester so it's this is a totally new concept and i mean i work at all but it's an idea don't turn it into all the other ideas which know whether sea could be used or not yet so we'll have some we can throw that up there on the wall on the phone the screen will be in the auditorium at town hall eight o'clock on the eighteenth and then we can throw that out there and start before anyone gets up to the microphone start with an explanation of what we're talking about and what the limitations are then open it up for people to talk and we could one of the presentations we could do is the digester just so people know it's on the table or write it on the whiteboard as one of the other ideas and then we'll putting in for the you know digest also insist the question that we got when i gave the joint budget presentation to the want to me which was do you have any revenue ideas for the town now so this is answering that question as well yeah well obviously creating a playing field is a maintenance and ongoing cost issue although you could generate some susie's of the field obviously the cost of all the fees wouldn't cover the cost for the field where is this would make money not to say that this is going to work or that this is something we shouldn't do it's and it doesn't preclude things like if you came hiking trails in addition to wood or a became a solar farm in addition to it it this doesn't preclude all uses that would preclude the rent so we need to be very clear about that yes to how to proceed so school committee is discussing it i think we should pick up the discussion again i think there is a point at which we have to engage the community i would say as well and see their communities willingness to  in that was later so what's going to happen with that land that's there which was cited for the police station well the d p w is going to end up with a permanent solution after the tip is really doing the temporary with the modelers the permanent solution we don't have the design for yet so i don't think you want to little bit and is there some excess in the in the could you getting it rink no i was thinking storage right if you actually know me well i think the storage here moved there in the excess of this right i mean i think that i think i think it's a great point to be i think you would ask jay or but and any rate this is this is greatest thing thank you thank you thank you patrice so what we're going to do now is we're going to take a recess and then we're going to be convening in room four to discuss the  financial long range planning and working session so we're going take a recess right now