sorry we've been going for the last hour plus the light board so for us if you community announcements before we get under underway it's going to be extremely significant and important meeting tonight on a number of topics the belmont new general plastic bags took effect january th for a large retailers and it's going to take effect april th for the rest of the retailers you might want to get yourself a reusable bag put it in your car they're really easy to spring and then you bring them out and use them again  the belmont food pantry will not be open in town hall until saturday september sorry saturday february nd eight thirty am so don't be dropping anything off here before or coming to visit before february nd if your forms and paperwork please take them still to the mount hope church fifty one lexington street where they are now or are these days already coming but you can go over to the food pantry lexington three which brings us to the fact that we want to help everyone come and invite them to join us and other distinguished guest for a ceremonial ribbon cutting to celebrate the grand reopening of the belmont food pantry now to be located here at belmont townhall downstairs that will be on tuesday february th at five pm cannot prepare complete complicated returns involving items like rental income or cancellation of mortgage debt depreciation moving expenses extensive investment transactions and casualty losses to name a few but that was quite a few general assistance such as answering questions will be provided to anyone in regardless of income level if you want to go assistance is offered free of charge repairs cannot accept payment so however you're welcome to show your gratitude by making a donation to the council on aging tax prep is by point one only microphone david solomon fifteen fairmont street i just want to express a concern not a complaint but the recent reassessment of taxes in the town in the real estate property taxes so as i started  into it my assessment my taxes my actual taxes went up fourteen percent so it got my attention i've been a lifelong residents st time i've really dug into the process it's quite a process but what is i would dug through it what i discovered which i was concerned about and  i should preface by saying i fully support how we support commercial real estate owners in the town i phone from me believe that we should not place an unfair burden on them but in the case of this assessment what's actually happened is commercial real estate owners are actually paying a lower tax this year than they were last year in the majority of cases so i think we had good intentions to ensure that they weren't you know given an unfair burden in fact their burden was reduced and you know just give you one example for the purposes of time that like the belmont savings bank you're a london street their tax is actually flat to last year that down to a seventy five dollars doesn't sound much except when you go back a couple of years we just invested four and a half one million dollars into belmont center they're actually the beneficiaries of those tax dollars that we put out and i'm not singling them out but if you go through and again i know there are some properties they went down to which and the reason is you know cautious where we have a big development going on understandably that properties offline is not making revenue for anyone but when i looked out in particular what i was concerned about i'm not concerned for myself i'm thankful i've got a good job and my wife has a good job but you know i look at our elderly residents who are struggling mightily with this situation you know especially with the fact that we know we all just voted for a new high school in there to see this i hope that it was not  intended consequence but an unintended consequence and that you know we will look at this and go forward you know make a closer evaluation of what actually is transpiring you know as an investigator you know one of the things i was told is like well it's about fake and sees well no it's not about vacancies i'm a i'm a retailer two dozen stores across and i think northeast united states and all about vacancies i still pay my rent and i still pay all my my bills even when i you know don't rent that's that's my responsibility that's a property owner responsibility so that's all i had to say  consequence where we invested our tax dollars into making our commercial real estate more valuable which was a good thing to do and made our town more beautiful but the consequences that we're all going up or that that i don't think was intended i think was intended to be  know equally distributed so it worked out you're going to you for anybody else have any item they would like to raise before we get into the matters at hand that's not on our agenda already if it's on the agenda we'll get to it so we're clear i'll close that part of the public hearing moving on to possible point to the recreation committee recreation commission i'm sorry this is to fill the remaining time on that solving term as he has resigned much longer than he have handling the wreck actually just marshals here right now so we'd like to give them a full commission i know the chair has made a recommendation out of the applicants we have one thousand two hundred and thirty four applicants it recommended courtney eldridge who had met through the issues the friends of the town the next item on the agenda is community path discussion as want to set the table is i don't know if everybody's been here we've had some prior public hearings on this of several of them we've gone into this in great depth but just in case somebody is newer is watching and wants to know what's going on this this discussion today is going to be continuation of the public process we've been having on the community path particularly section one b which is the path portion which goes from brighton straight to the cambridge line to the clark street bridge we're not talking about the underpass we're not talking about from the clark street bridge to wall fam we're talking about one b the underpasses you know which was one a was approved by town meeting in the fall for design funds of four hundred thousand dollars now the intent is for the s determine whether the previously approved route for one b should be changed based on new information we had previously voted the route of one b which would then which would go from beaumont center on the north side of the tracks go through the underpass and the go on the south side of the tracks out t brighton street that was what we had approved back in i believe november of th memory serves so that was approved however it was approved with the proviso in this was part of our motion at the time that we would revisit that route should new facts arise and in your facts of a reason which is why we're having this discussion the facts being that we do not need to have we've been told we have people here from the state so we can get into that in a minute i just want to set the table st that we do not need to have the path go through the underpass to get the underpass done which initially we thought was true and the m b t aide raised some concerns about having the path from the south side of the tracks because it would entail crossing the tracks at brighton street to connect with the existing path in cambridge which is on the north side of the tracks to adopt the route and now we're revisiting it based on the new facts that have come up so we have to do is we have to vote on the one b route prior to the spring town meeting because we'll be going for one million dollars in design funds from the c for this one be part so we need to have the make sure we're going to change the route or not so we have to make that decision prior to the spring town meeting to vote on those design funds since the construction funds for the path would come from the state the state state's position on the ro has to be seriously listened to because we cannot build the path without them the purpose of the design phase that we're going to be going into with this money will be to look into things like soil environmental contamination survey issues setbacks buffers landscaping all that stuff is part of the design phase that the c p a money is for all we're talking about now is the route and then we would hire experts who would dig into all that stuff so we're not getting into that stuff at the moment and that's what the design phase is fo and we are going to talk about that more at town meeting when the time comes but this is about finalizing the route before we get into what i say russ lay knows here i know he has to leave he's the chair of the community paths the project committee i know he had a meeting this morning if you just want to update everybody ross on what the committee's been doing and where you are before we get into a general discussion i want to go down here unfortunately this for those in the room our normal cameras aren't working right now so we're using one of the tripod so if we get your good side to sit over here you'll be fine otherwise you're just going to you know just a couple couple of quick one of one of the the things that we we put on the table pretty much right away after after organizing it was we had identified a so we've been working with the office of community development time minister's office to put together an application for that grant program hopefully to get some additional funding from from the state that could either be in addition to the the town meeting c p a ask that that the board has made or or perhaps substitute for a portion of that and defray the impact on the highlight it you know the importance i think of the decision that you are considering tonight and perhaps in the future you know i think some of the feedback we've we've gotten from the folks at the at the state is do ideally the expectation would be that if we're seeking design funding we would we would have chosen and and so we're we're you know we're we're working would i think be in the town's interest at least in this in this process to have a decision sooner rather than later on that there's there's a small chance we can we can you know update our application after after it's filed and let them know if we anticipates you know making a decision before before the spring so that's that's you know sort of a question is there a grant submission date or is this i'm going to know that yeah there's one of the deadline is this friday for the for the whole program that they i think that the material said they'll the state will actually make a decision by june for sure something on on the actual funding we may hear sooner we may not but they'll  were talking and all of this one i think yeah that's so that's common center or clark street bridge to right street so if there's any concern about the application being diminished in any way because we don't have a path through on the submission deadline which is friday may be nice to know that we can updated and one of the state representatives are here i mean what i'm hearing the cycling community this is the missing link this is high importance to the cycling community the largest cycling community and i think mass thought another so i mean provide that kind of input but could we substitute within that the underpass i mean that could be put in an application because we know where that's going and we know it's only for it we've already gotten the appropriation from the c p a committee that if you don't use those funds they go back so in fact what we could do as a board i'm just sort of thinking for a moment you know apologize to need to leave if we know that the findlay we know that absolutely is the case and we don't want any way for any our ability to get grant money to be diminished because we haven't yet decided on a path not withstanding of course whatever conversations we would have with us that this committee mission that looks at these and we could updated some point time we definitely know the underpass we could put in for that and then if we got it we would only need one hundred from the community preservation act committee three how do we go back and then we could update our application to the community out c p a committee to make it one point three i think that's a great question i mean it's certainly something you know i'm sure you know tom i want to ask our our friends at the state the only concern i have is i know a component of the application is kind of demonstrating the town skin and again so right now our application is so we now know that not has not yet been voted right but but we could say that we are committed to four hundred dollars if you defray that by three then we got one hundred dollars plus we're also committing another one million for the spring time meeting and the underpass let's get feedback whether that would work and then and then if we got the funding then we could then update our application to the week preservation committee by the amount that we got from the state we don't know whether you can always look into it i mean it's a michael my question is this right i mean what from what i understand from the larger sort of community if this is an important link to link up you know both cambridge and off him correct me i'm not putting undue pressure on you and i  yeah so we are committed as a board and as a community we spent years in a lot of money on certainly working with you i felt absolutely and so we haven't yet decided on the so called route from ale to bright street we will do that soon as understood well we have decided on it however it was with the proviso of new that rights are new facts are coming forward so now it's a little bit in flux and so we think this application is not or whether it's going to be the south side because that's what we decided already i don't bit under the weather and my voice is a little weaker than usual but i think it's important to look at the application criteria and how we as a trail seem the group of folks from various agencies in them against our criteria are our scoring rubric if you will which looks at a number of different criteria that one primarily what we're looking for is projects that are connected to other off roader multi modal facilities we're looking for projects that are efficient in their in their use of funds and also demonstrate that local skin in the game as as you put it ross and in addition that are ready and equitable and experienced all those are  our five big criteria so i think looking at phase one a versus phase one b i think is as as chairman dash put it earlier there was those as we weigh those the benefits of the project and or its other state in terms of where it's at in the design feasibility clearly you guys are at this sort of almost post feasibility phase we would be evaluating what does each component of itself provide for all of those benefits in accordance with the criteria that we've established for frankly our our very st run of this grant program so we have lessons to learn on our end as well just admit you know we we met we noted that we have a fair filing deadline that's a pretty hard and fast deadline but you guys are in a bit of a special circumstance here i'll reiterate that we do the state recognizes that this is the belmont portion of our segment of the massachusetts central rail trail a high priority corridor for those of us working at the state level i know here it's been referred to as the belmont community path it's a bit of a difference in perspective at the state versus local level i'll say that now on the record that you know that is that is sort of why i'm here tonight is because this is a very high priority quarter for us and that definitely weighs on how we're going to view that in terms of how it's scored for in that larger ranking of projects that that we receive or applications or receive you know looking at just the underpass versus the extension of the fitchburg cut off that's going to have different factors but that could be outweighed by the fact that you know you've already got c p a funding application if we if we submitted with the route that we picked back in two thousand and seventeen but then amended it to revise it based on this do information in the hearings we're doing now i think that's something i can speak for the entire trails team on but you know i think if if you can demonstrate in your application that one route over another is more ready i think my colleague assistant general manager ray who's here with us tonight may raise some concerns that otherwise would be reflected in in terms of a southern a that would negatively impact and we put it on the south side i would expect that would negatively impact the the favor ability of a on location ok yes that's more clarifying question is what is it possible for the town to submit two proposals one for one day and one for one b coming in i do apologize that i need to i know you take us by i want to make sure you got to use the beginning so just just very briefly i'm going to catch the rest of us on my phone because i'm sure there's more to come but the other thing we're that the committee is is working on now of course is starting to dig into the real substance of the r f p for the design concern for one and so we're we're obviously in literally five minutes but i hate to interrupt this discussion but we do and we are going to open this up to the public to comment on this don't we're just trying to get all this information st legal help with the comments and we're glad everyone showed up at your home when you can tell we have a standing room only crowd we're glad and i know we been discussing in some of our meetings the letter that you'd sent on november th two thousand and eight team with regard to concerns on the south side route if you could elaborate on that force yes not so much the route itself but how you get to the route from the end of the fre cut off path and you know like i know that you didn't want to connect the underpass up by high school with this but at the same time very good thing to do that great separated crossing of the railroad yet when you come down to brighton street where you know that one of the concepts was to have children using a bicycle path adults using a bicycle path that actually has you cross diagonally across the railroad in the middle of bright provided a sketch on the bottom on the nd page of that letter basically used to try to demonstrate what exactly the concern is she's going to throw up a picture of ok well there's everyone can follow along so that's why i'm here railroad tracks at an angle when the gates are down with the approach of a train the a by somebody on a bicycle making that path across would not encounter one of the gates so want to gates came down and come down across the entrance ways to the crossing but you would be and entering the crossing from the exit portion of people using bright street in this direction and then you would exit again across and never encounter a gate from either direction and that's kind of what the concern is is that  we could if we knew people were going to cross in make a ninety degree turn at the end of the cut off path and go down across the sidewalk and then cross on the cross walk down a hidden heading in your street you know you would encounter the gates but someone coming down the path from the south side that say if her tray were approaching would gates also go down the front of the path i mean isn't isn't that something that could occur as well as to my question so one over here on the side location correct was moving a pole five feet correct is in front of this other and it's just driveway also known by the homeowner assistance yes it's going to be located right at the property line between the two houses so it's not going to be obstructing any something about do you have any concerns about this with regard to the curving sidewalk tree anything like that you want to identify yourself and just explain to us of there any issues with cycling clancy director of community development of the only issue that we raised was recognizing that we're going to put curbing in sidewalk on baker street along with a three foot grass shoulder which none of that currently exists we want to make sure that the pole be placed so that ultimately it falls in that crash shoulder my staff when i met with  paul doesn't have any electrical installation so the electrical department is trying to benefit from the situation so that's why it's going to be big that they will add more more more of their equipment or lines on it i'm going to put a no i think i clarify i just asked a question in the said the not seen on the community pass because i've been asked that question to ask that question in terms of wind when it rains coming down either north or south frankly is that it has some ability even if it's on the north side to have gating come down on the crossing was a separated crossing so you know either above or below the tracks right but right streets not going anywhere it's going to be there for a long time so this really is i mean obviously we want to be safe we don't want   i guess the question would be if we were to select the southern half it sounds like that is not recommended would that be sufficiently unappealing such that the bta might not recommend funding of this i'm not sure the you know the same concept that has everybody has the m b t excited about the underpass behind high school this kind of negates some of that by saying we're going to take a lot of people potentially younger folks on on bicycles and put them across weigh in on our application process certainly we are very close colleagues joe you know i have met on this several times as as as some of you know i would say that and in addition i think maybe there was an implication there just to clarify it it's the state's position that as as i think one of you mentioned earlier the underpass has its own independent utility regardless of a shared use path on either side or both sides or or whatever regardless of the presen there is a great deal of need there and we have a lot of other examples of connecting public spaces like a high school campus to a neighborhood great stuff so that being the case i think the  be that we want to see just the sort of thing that as as we continue down the design process that we engage in national best practices for how to how to deal with these sorts of hazardous locations you know i think there is a sort of sort of amount of practicality and pragmatism we have to inject here of course jody and his team have have raised the red flag but we recognize people can do this today you know there's the path is there  what we don't want to do is exacerbate a potential public safety issue and one fatality is always too many absolutely as as we all know so i think that there is there is a lot to consider there we know the position of the a but that is sort of given a generic design approach is what the job basically does is preserve the existing situation because obviously no one's walking down the trail bad real bad now me if i'm going from my house to go into cambridge i walk down hit enter street go up right and cross the tracks crossed over into the path and go there right which is basically what we're talking about because there's no other way to do it and it doesn't seem as though it's not ideal i understand but much is that good enough to get this funded because i don't want to get in a position where you jeopardize the funding over this but if it's something that's less desirable but would still get funded that's a very big piece of information for us to have i think it would require again i think i have to defer to sort of the divine design phase that  you self pointed out earlier chairman is that there are details like this that would need to be worked out in order to ensure that working with our partners at the t v that we could assuage these concerns and or make the situation safer i don't know of any sort of gate situation like this but it was actually something i was thinking about on my train ride over today and and think that that would be a really innovative thing to do that you know could potentially be replicated responsible for in lieu of potential in the future at tapping those federal dollars that are currently that would be allocated through either the regional tip as we refer to it the transportation improvement plan as allocated by the boston speak the microphone identify yourself st many of you know i wear several hats in this town and i'm speaking tonight as chair of the warren committee and a town meeting member from precinct six i'm glad the  members are here really welcome your presence i've been biking from belmont to downtown for about fifteen years and i biked on bike paths all over the us europe and australia and i fully support fully support the concept of a path through belmont but i have several questions about the northern route involvement that only the t can answer that's why i'm delighted that the representatives are here and i'm asking this because the warrant committee ultimately is going to consider the process and this is my opportunity to do some due diligence on behalf of the warren committee the questions i have i don't believe have been addressed in the public discussions the less far i realize you may not be able to answer these questions tonight however i wanted to present them to you in the hope that the t could answer them promptly the path is important and doing it right is very important this evening is a critical opportunity to get definitive information from the t v that is relevant for the northern route that's the only route i'm going to be asking about tonight the tea knows about running a railroad in belmont does not there are other questions for the northern route but they can wait until the threshold questions are addressed st and i want to thank you for your assistance to help all month get the best solution for this major project and to set the stage for what i would like to ask you about i have a couple of slides just because i'm not sure people have a  visual understanding of the issues i'm going to bring up this is a google earth photo of the end of the proposed northern route path as it approaches brighton st this is cutting through the property at forty brighton where there is a warehouse type building in the middle and then there is parking and equipment storage and so forth so those are the conditions as they are now and the path route would be in between the tracks and the building and just to set the stage the distance from the st rail on the northern side to that building is between twenty two and twenty three feet  if we go to the next light but you see you controlling that so this is a copy of the easement that exists this is the available route the easement is exactly thirteen feet wide and it runs down p well to the tracks for the length of the property the property is about seven hundred and forty eight feet long and this is taken from the deed that went along the property the southern property boundary is about ten feet or actually a little bit less from the westbound track and what nobody has addressed so far is that there is a railroad crossing gate on brighton st it's not on this planet for some reason but there's a railroad crossing gate that is either in the easement area itself or it's directly adjacent to it and that would be basically in the lower right corner of this plot  that go over forty five miles an hour and that's certainly what happens here the recommended minimum separation is either twenty five feet with a fence or fifteen feet with a solid barrier so just to do the math if you if you were to here to these guidelines and you have a an easement which is no further than twenty three feet from the rail twenty three dollars minus fifteen leaves you eight feet next  line these are other mass highway guidelines that the path should have a two foot wide shoulder and it should have a three foot wide clearance from the edge of the path to signs trolls trees poles walls fences and so forth easement will actually have walls on either side for quite a ways and it will have a wall entirely i assume on one side and will have either a building wall or fence on the other side for the entire length next slide grey co which is the t s real estate company gave me guidelines that they work with that says that all trackside appliances which i take on  includes crossing gate should have a clearance of not less than six feet and if you walked over there and when that day comes down if you're anywhere near it you don't want to get caught in it but if indeed the gate is in the area and there is going to be a six foot clearance that makes that there is what's left of the easement for the path is five feet wide or less and incidentally it says that he would like to see the class closed in the wintertime because of ice and snow hazards when the path is very close to trains and next slide please the belmont fire department has an ambulance which is nine feet wide and it has the pumper truck which is the smaller truck that's ten feet wide this easement which is the only way for the northern route to get from the larger rare road property towards brighton center in belmont center towards brighton st that stretch of easement a seven hundred and forty eight feet and that would be a dead end as far as the fire department is concerned they couldn't get down there from the brighton street side and they came down from belmont center would be a dead end next slide please so i want to sum the soul of just with a question and whatever the answer is is fine is the width of the seven hundred and forty eight foot long easement at forty brighton street sufficient to satisfy current requirements for path design separation from active railroad tracks crossing gate clearances and emergency field emergency vehicle y so we get to control the design elements and tell you how far away you need to be the crossing gate that was mentioned frog we dimension measured dimensions for our elements along the side of the track to measure from the satellite anything to well i would just add i'm not going to speak specifically to this location because i think i but i would point out one we recognize our design guidelines are pretty outdated two thousand and six and we're currently working on updating those so that we can better reflect that in cases like this and others where we can allow for flexibility in with us and grading of course when you have vertical obstruction on either side of the path we would be very concerned about some of the safety elements about conflict amongst users and look at those distances and how can we minimize those those pinch points but we do have many passage go down the eight feet in terms of pave surface with some offset talking about the one section between the building and and the and where the barrier the protective barrier from the rail would be i think what we talk about about one hundred feet of length at the building is about one hundred feet deep but then it's i assume it's going to be fenced because that business is a heavy equipment heavy equipment operator and it's got to be fenced and the the net effect if you had a th a wall from the track it any of these dimensions you think these are all workable figure challenging and i think they're challenging i don't i don't i i'm not going to say definitively to my god that one in any sort of design funding these are the kinds of issues i mean i think you set the table well in the beginning mr chairman that these are the kinds of issues that could be fleshed out right i mean early on in the design findings of this is an important point that you can make and i and you follow all the numbers but if fact if there's if there's no possibility because of the with fear creates a danger then we have to sort of turn our attention to an alternative route to strike a balance between some of the issues that jodi and the tea have raised and you know we would we would be looking at in terms of the you want to build something you're safe of the path that has utility you know take into consideration you know any mitigation that we  residents and businesses in this but it absolutely has to be safe as well i mean did you want to have any information i have just a couple of comments i did not produce absolutely kept my name is amy archer i'm with park corp i was the project manager for the feasibility study for the belmont comment was you know where they're hoping to advance the guidelines a little bit more beyond that element that is clipped in the master project development design guide it says that the preferred offset is twenty five dollars the minimum fifteen in a pinch but the length of an acceptable pinch is not currently defined as mike's pointing out there is a limited distance that we would be up against that to pass the building but it is certainly a constraint the other thing i wanted to point out was on the south side and jody i don't know if you have any feedback on this we had discussed that the building on the south side was still in question as well and if by chance there was an under delivery to acquire a portion of that building  continue the past st it may come out the end of the high school property through hit injure if it did that as it comes to brighton street i believe it would approach in the same manner that the vehicles in the  now in would face the existing gates that are there bright and street so i don't know if that helps the whole situation of crossing braintree fair that the users would approach it like any other vehicle or pedestrian spur of the rail that delivered into that building so it seems that that bay that kind of jumps out at the eastern portion has its own structural integrity that you could take down that outer wall and speak in strong favor of getting this path built i am not wedded to any particular route but i am wedded to the importance of having a path through  belmont and i will i would just like to you know reiterate some of the points that you all were just making mr epstein got up and talked about some of the issues with the north side but it is worth noting that the issues on the south side of the tracks are including the setback issue the pinch issue are at least as daunting and almost certainly more daunting than the north side as you've said it would require an imminent domain taking a private property or the acquisition of that property that would likely cost the town millions of dollars adding to the cost of this project for the taxpayers of belmont no such impediment exists on the north side there is certainly a issue with some of the setbacks with the mahoney property although as amy has suggested it seems certainly like there is room for a path there and the other major impediment on the north side let's be clear is a political impediment it is the resistance of the butter's along mostly chinning road to the construction of any path of budding their property it is not a safety issue it is not an engineering issue it is not a cost issue because it will almost certainly be cheaper it is a political issue the result of opposition from the a bugger it's not in my back yard to this path a path serving a community of twenty five thousand people connecting the three major commercial districts of this community with the strong and enthusiastic support of the mass department of transportation and the bta with significant safety benefits for the students at belmont high school and the commuters of this town who are risking their lives right now out on crowded streets the opposition the issues with the north side are political issues and it is falls to you three men to put those aside and make the best only responsible decision the safest decision for the twenty five thousand residents of this community to get this important piece of infrastructure built for you to continue to atten decision and sit there pretending that there are you know huge unknowns when we have a very detailed and thorough engineering port by pair that lays out all of this respective routes all of the pros and cons of each segment of this very extensive project is just defies belief you've read the report i know you have your intelligent men do what i elected to have you any way to do and make a decision that star i really do miss the mark i really do appreciate your work i've agreed to do and make this path a reality and do it soon because i think as a building committee has indicated at this point we are in need or certainly in search of funding to make this a reality and they continue the towns continue continuing indecision on this important design aspect is beginning to potentially put at risk monies to make this real so i really do encourage you heard you to make this decision tim thank you very much i just did this board's intent is to make this decision soon and as i said at the beginning we have to make it before the spring town meeting at the latest but i don't want to drag even that long because we do have to move it along as you said i mean the one the one of the main issue in the big blind issue would be if we left the if we had the path on the north side from bright from belmont center it goes under the underpass goes on the south side to brighton st can we get that funded and i don't particularly have a allegiance to the north of the south side i have an allegiance to having the path for the all the other health and traffic and safety and other reasons that i've stated many times in public i mean i want to have the path to the north through the south side i voted for the path that went north side under the underpass outside because at the time we were told we actually had to do that i don't really feel the need to change it if we don't have to change it but if we have to change it because it won't get funded you know then we may have to do so but don't you have you clarify what you mean by funded you mean funded in terms of construction money your structures right well i can't speak for all of the entities which which exists in making these decisions just one but i think my guidance to the to this to this group has been let's take manageable bites of the apple and we continue to build momentum and consensus in both the community and at the state level i think a very accurately represented is the fact that we are very enthusiastic to work with you guys to advance to advance this local agenda which is making the connection between cambridge and and wealth and if we and i'm and as i've said earlier i mean i see construction funding available for one phase to connect to the existing path and another phase to build the underpass whether or not those were done in two segments or one leaving the rest of the town even off the table for the time being again taking manageable chunks out of bites out of that apple it's a very big apple as we know from the feasibility study this would be one of the most expensive per per mile paths in the commonwealth when everything is said and done that the state would feel that the state has a belmont resident said ok we're not talking about belmont town money paying for it so we're didn't change the route we would forward with the route that as we sneaked into the path is that something that that you think the group would look favorably on or not is still viable i think those other issues that perhaps jodi and i are not fully vetted on are informed of that you know my focus has very much been from high school to to brighten and i'm my project understanding so just to be perfectly transparent about that if there are other issues that we need to resolve later in the next subsequent phase we i think we would need south side approach to brighton street i mean we talked about a couple of new design elements that could be incorporated you know that was an eyesore you know blue lines on a on an aerial photograph basically that said this route or this route  that we looked at so there was no design concept for how you would actually cross there right but in the absence of that i can see that the shortest distance between the south route and the existing freight cut off path is a diagonal line across that cross i mean and that's what i was commenting on when i when i wrote my letter i stand by that but that could be changed if we had a you know further conceptual designs on how you would actually handle or deal with the present possibility that that's you know that's a route that we want to prevent we don't want to come diagonally across this it's not a it's not a what was the what was the term the pear used a fatal flaw if it did not i i mean i don't think there's a fatal flaw here there's complicated i mean the west route is more complicated than the shoot and the last thing is paul i really don't think it's productive the vilify some of the residents in our community they have concerns as well we're going to address them and i think it's going to hold me back or this board back in terms of making determination so we don't want to be like the current administration in washington we don't want to vilify residents in this community that love this town as much as anyone else and i think it's important that we work with them if they have concerns about if it is on the north side was a mitigation i'm committed to do that i know community values or committee has we met with them to do that at the p c as well so i think we helpful for future folks that are going to speak here we're not going to tap one another we'll find the best solution for bama but we are committed we are committed to moving forward productively let me just respond and say i did not vilify anybody on channing rhodes certainly did i merely know excuse me marc i did not i said merely that they had objections as a butters which i completely as a property owner in this town i completely understand and i'm sympathetic to it's the job of this community and this board to make it right for the residents on channing road i one hundred percent agree with them in there and side with them in their right to have deep concerns about anything that runs  used to that you know what i am but what i didn't appreciate paul if you keep you got up and said what you just said then i would have made a comment but your tone of voice prior to what you just said i think suggested that somehow they've been obst the truck to where we're t to do here so i appreciate the latter comments and i'll put it to bed and we can move forward thank you mark yes cosmo catarina channing wrote one of those about us could you do me a favor and go back to the brighton street overlay that and the fact of the matter is what was said was incorrect it is cheaper in safe to go on the south side and i wanted to address those two issues now i understand the n b t a's concern over the crossing there but that is only one safety issue there are at least five so different safety issues that have to be considerate and if you really want to make a decision based on say safety do a safety risk analysis that includes all those things now one of my st concerns is if you look at the crossing we would say that they would cross diagonally if you're coming from these sell side in the vehicle and i said this is the very st committee that crossing there really does not belong there because when the vehicles come from the south and they're crossing the tracks bikes and i drive by there every day a bike that shoots out means a vehicle stops on the tracks and i know the signs there but that's heavily trafficked area and people basically are in  zone when the when the driving down but instead to myself i don't know how i get home sometimes i show up and i gotta get it but you have to stop on the tracks to avoid hitting those people making that crossing over and it industry eliminates that problem so you have a three way conflict you get the pedestrian just the car and the rail versus just the rail and the people that's my st major issue but i also you mentioned the guidelines on the railroads when we st looked at the committee message two says the guidelines on the offset were not based as far as i could find any in engineering facts but great northern pacific did and actually the distance of the off based upon the speed of the trains because of the ballast trucks and if you look at and i'm not saying you have to follow a great northern pacific that offset would have to be fifty feet and i know for a fact that there are broken windows and stuff from the ballast trucks at the mon property so having the them that close to the rail there also present the show then you can talk about a half a mile without any grass point for the safety of the pedestrians on that the axis of the vehicles are the speed of the going in linea and impacting press so my point is do a safety risk analysis if you want to based on safety and i agree i wish there was a safety risk analysis but the basin on one safety item is is flawed the other issue is the cost i went to well st of all the para put strictly says that the south side is cheaper than the north side at some point up to two and a half one million dollars cheaper but i went to the planning board meeting for the high school the other night they were having a meeting pam proposed as proposed five alternatives for one b the high school is almost implementing two of those completely the a putting the path around the pond a multi modal path they're going to convert conquered avin that area to have the off road track just like in cambridge the going to make upgrades  underwood in hidden joe which you could also do the off road path it would cost next to nothing to comply and they also put aside space for the path on the south side at the lower level which you won't have to deal with any issues the railroad the cost would be minimal compared to the north side it's already cheap and that would blow it away by corner you could modify a contract you'll have your equipment you'll have your labor you mud that contract that's almost all that's that it would cost the town next to nothing you amy kind to ask you a question you didn't i'm so i haven't read that the par group report in a long time is did did was the come out of the south side as being cheaper not that we're paying for the construction but the way that we did the cost analysis was to look at the most costly option on the side so on the north side running adjacent to the channing road residence on the almost his farm property there were two options that we had considered one was to keep the existing slope work and much of the trees and put the path up at the elevation of rail puts it a little bit closer to the rail but farther from the residence but the more costly option would to be to shift it over a little bit more and it would be on retaining wall for the cost that was carried for funding purposes to try to make sure that the town was covered in any option that they may end up going because we anticipate the changing route piece continuing to be vetted as this moves forward if the north has chosen was to carry that cost of the retaining wall so that so the answer the question is is it more expensive or cheaper is kind of it depends it's definitely more costly if you have that retaining wall if you use the sloped approach and maintain that that edge it would come closer i can't remember off the top of my head i could try to see if i have it with whatever we would need to do with it so on the sound on the south side we had assumed that it would not be included in the high school project although it seemed there may be some opportunity as cosmo's mentioning to well this isn't going to be part of  include the taking doesn't of the it right including taking so i understand the issue our understanding was that the high school had to they had to do clear that they did not need that amount of space for the educational purposes of the site so they would essentially turn that over i'm not sure it would actually cost anything but they would have to make that declaration that they did not need that amount of space for their education on the site is one point you're trying to tom's point i on greed i just want to people behind i just want to let amy know two things the school did allow for the there on the proposal for that space and i also want to point out in your report it said that if you couldn't work through those lot of discussion we've go back quite a few years with the community path people we need access we need access to the trail the actual community path but we also need access to the railway  have an active railway it's different challenges than our counterparts in arlington lexington i've spoken to them they pull up they drive on deal with what they have to they drive off they have plenty of room not an issue we need to be concerned because we are going to have issues on both the community path and the railway and we have to be able access both trucks as mr epstein said ten feet wide eight foot wide trucks ten foot wide marius you have to open the doors doesn't do any good to have a ten foot wide and have us get there or not be able open the doors so the design is going to be critical pinch points we understand pinch points should be a minimum and they should be shortened duration  not i think these meant the air on the north side was seven hundred and fifty feet that's two and a half football fields it's a long way to have to schlep people equipment and all the rest and then it being a dead end so you have to turn around and go the other way so i guess two good thing i'm glad to hear and so then our use would you say then that either the north of the south would work for your purposes keeping in mind design has to do its thing i think regardless of which option we choose we need to make sure that we meet the minimum design criteria to meet the people that are going to be using the path and what potential problems we may have we've had train fires we've had fires along the railroad white a right of way they've had fires along the bike path we've had injuries on bike paths we've been injuries on the train we've had derailed train so we just there's a lot of things that happen but we're saying you could accommodate you could work with either side you feel i am again we're not at that level of design understand and we just have to make sure that if we need x amount of feet we have x amount of feet regardless of whether it's in what the south is we going to be able open the doors we got to be able to get the trucks the access i think needs to be worked out in design i really think and i've expressed this in the fire chief that once we start design he will have an active role at the table to make sure that we're meeting all the public safety needs of the community i mean i guess is that the d either the north or south side provided the fire access i'm not familiar enough with a sigh conditions to know that but i think that there are there there's always there's always ways to to provide a fix i mean i i live in east boston and for those of you i mean for all of you for your information and we have a wonderful greenway it's part of the reason why i'm so excited all projects like this and it runs along the blue line very different kind of rail facility but there are a number of different places where means vehicles can  our wood island t stop to the constitution you know judgment you may be familiar with with some of the work that massport did out there so it's a very wonderful facility and it is very so it's narrow but there have been ways to find  design mitigating effects here so i think you know i can't speak specifically here but i do think that there are design solutions to a lot of the emergency access and the grass type issues that that you've raised i mean i'm wondering if if you had the if you had a train accident let's say and you had the the trail on the south side you still have the thirteen foot easement if you could use that for emergency access to the train i mean you get to the path part at least you get the train between the path and the rail if there's a wall there and you need to get to access to the tree what would you do you go down there you know we talked about design elements that we need access points so many every so many feet down the  instance vincent stanton member of the community path project committee i don't want to get down into the weeds but i do want to point out that some of the numbers that have been presented are slightly inaccurate i have here the memorandum of agreement by between the department of conservation and recreation and michael mahoney and the easement is actually thirteen point eight feet for whatever reason these meant says in words when they describe the meat some bound being said portion being a strip of land thirteen feet wide as measured from the southerly property line and then it's got a plan attached to it that says thirteen dollars so i would go with the words over the the plan is just an example typically we do deeds like this we would go with that so i would i would agree that it actually is thirteen feet wide but that's just my opinion i understand there is a discrepancy though between the words in the plan i have these opportunity to actually present to residents specific designs that can address concerns and they can move this from kind of a line on a piece of paper what's this going to look like from my backyard from my kitchen window from my nd floor window and i think that it would be an enormously helpful to be to be at that stage thank you understood thank you next would feel in this moment so we have have the opportunity now i think to get the ball rolling for the whole path not just for the for the honor underpass at the moment i think we do have skin in the game with the funding for the for the underpass if combined with the plan that moves forward to the state as a proposal i do think that the the we have feedback from people who know paths and people who know trains that it's safer to go straight across and keep on going you know i can't speak i don't have the numbers in front of me to the cost of just going straight forward but we're just going straight forward there's you know obviously we do i think it's going to be an opportunity if for us to really engage the people on the on the north side attracted to do some improvements and that that might that might make it more expensive for us i'd like to see the town do that i think it's prudent for us to do that i think it's beneficial for the people on the north side i think they're going to love it when is there i think and i just i don't feel like there's a conflict i don't feel like there should be a conflict right and i certainly don't want to vilify might my friends and neighbors on the north side track i think it's going to good for them so long long story short i was speaking for the people you know i've spoken to numerous times about about the plans here i really think it's prudent for the town right now to put the proposal together to the state that that that proposes the north of the track which we're hearing preference for there is no requirement that the underpass be part of the path in order to get state funding for it and secondly some of the safety concerns if you were to go through and re evaluate based upon that criteria do you think that you would end up with a different recommendation north or south  we are actually looking to potentially do some of the to try to take all that into consideration look at the evaluation criteria we had knowing that the funding for the underpasses there kind of y i don't think that was the driver initially to begin with we were looking at the cost of it the access to which some incorporation with the high school property did have some preference since there's going to be so much going on on that site and people wanting to make that access the link there had some weeks to it and we had assumed that as it moved to design any crossing at the intersection designed in a safe way whether it's additional gates or terrific in time that's a great question you know as part of that and i know we need to design some of the numbers are being thrown around here can't follow them all frankly but if if you know what side we decide on that because of some of this these many issues and pinch points not say that you know that that's the issue or not i guess what i would ask is that we continue to sort of engage you to look at because i think the south side the fatal flaw there unless we buy the pure call building is that it's to from my point of view it is that you know would there be an alternate route gentlemen i mean that we come down on the set underneath it and a pass at the south side and cut across with a substation is going to be to commission at the end of the campus perhaps down here and you're how that would look i mean it's not ideal because you know you and streets and now you're at grade perhaps we experience where your analysis to include that as well that a i don't know we can gauge that i think that's great my question is how long would that take you have to ask the same is it some we have to end this i don't want i do agree with mr roberts this has to stop i mean we have to move forward we have to get funding we have to do something we have to get the path and it's something after tonight i thought we were missing some pieces of information i maybe or the missing last little  is some point there's no more information is just making a decision and not everyone's going to love it but it has to be made so perhaps and i grant application we can indicate you know that coming up this morning the meeting that we have a date certain that by the at some point in time  know i would suggest if you have a voted route and you want some an application based on those circumstances that may be the most favorable way back however the circumstances are changing that's one of the problems that we're having right now if they hadn't i would remind you i would i would rank remind you chairman that this funding program is brand new it is we are figuring it out as we go this year we're very excited to have it in place it doesn't guarantee any application even the best of applicants a application four million dollars which is the funny we would need i think you've suggested for the one they designed for yeah so the money we've committed to that we've submitted hasn't been voted yet on by that is we're waiting for tommy right so the point is that think the money's there either way so it's not like we'll lose three hundred grand we still have the one million that's there but nice to have the three hundred grand and cut it down to seven hundred thousand so completely agree with you but the point is i don't think it's going to slow this p i would hate to not take to have a voted route messed up the application and it turns out we never changed the route we could've left it alone that we have a bad situation so for clarity purposes then to save jeffrey a heart attack in the back  as a bicycle rider i know that railroad tracks are dangerous but not because of the train just because of your front wheel getting caught in the tracks about experience bicycle rider will cross t people are going to get their front wheels caught in the tracks thank you and not a cart because it's more to your points or anybody else or a close up portion of the meeting so we have a deadline gentlemen and i guess it looks to me like we're not going to have it lets you wanted to vote on the route itself or if you wanted to wait for the park group to come back we wait for the park group to come back we would be voting the route on february t it would be voting to change the previously voted route on february th yes if we wanted to submit an application we could submit an application with the route we got which honestly i think legally is the thing to do because we have a ro we did vote it we're looking to change it or you could in the application if we so chose i would hope that the funding source would understand that the situation that we're in that it's just not like it's not our fault we're trying to do a good job and listen to everybody and do this in a smart way here i know i've been a bit cautious with you all tonight partly because i'm not used to being on t v at least not in this side of the state  but i think the i talked earlier about our scoring rubric and the five main criteria that we're using to score all of the applications and i think the way that that gets applied to one route or another probably won't really have much of an impact on your final score so if for the sake of a in reviewing application i will be in the group obviously in on the trails team and i can certainly relate this to to the team but i think there's a lot of mechanics and in sort of bureaucratic procedures that have to happen obviously you have to pick your consultant you have to negotiate scope and he you have to go through all of these processes that are typical for any major design effort for a large infrastructure project of of this nature criteria and i think that you could have the comfort of deferring this until some final analysis is done i certainly do not want to provide any sort of semblance of a preference for your  action but i don't think that there will be a major difference in you know i sort of advised patrice offline that it would be better moving into this knowing what we're going to do but i do was unaware of the fact that there was a route that was voted i think you sort of pointed to sort of legality of that and that is the stated on the record position of the select board if you submitted that application i can't see how it would really fared out much differently from a scoring perspective and i think that there'll be an opportunity to work with the trails team on special circumstances i would think even the during the design phase if you came across a massive impediment to design phase you would have to change the route i mean we did we could we see these sorts of things all the time so i think that that is not that unreasonable i would say the only the missing piece we're putting it in if we put it on the south side i think would be the the school committee piece right well  side sneak in under the sounds geoffrey wheeler senior player there was a statement earlier that said the school committee had taken a position on this the school committee has not taken a position on this but the gentleman who was i believe the gentleman was referring to was the belmont high school building committee has shown it on a site plan that they're now discussing with the planning board that high school building committee does not have authority to release school department property so there would be something yes that we would have to go to the school committee with this plan to show what area we want them to say it's ok for us to use i agree with jeremy on that they built a high school building committee which i if we filed with the route that we were talked about on the north side from belmont center sneaking under the underpass staying on the south side to brighton street that that wouldn't cause this whole guess the best way to phrase it would create a fatal flaw in your mind or the entity wouldn't wouldn't go tell the funding group don't do it we would we would spend the time and effort to work with what the final design is going to be to find the best way to bring people that as we get into design whatever route we choose there may be issues that come up along the way this is not an easy route this is complicated but we do have to move into the next phase design to move therefore to discover all of these issues and if we have to work with the residents in the businesses if it is in the north side i mean a geisha will do that commit to that i know that this community path project committee has stated as well please don't take my colleagues statement that we don't want the money choice to make we think that we have was library already path yes we hope that you take that into consideration the point i'm making is that if we don't get the grant funding we are committed as a board to move forward with funding for the design phase we're not backing off this we need the project i hope that that demonstrates our commitment at the state level too to really helping you guys advance this again as a really key strategic priority cord or for our for our agenda maybe a little less on the tea side  specifically right here but certainly statewide this is a goal of the baker to lead a administration and we're here to support to support that and we're we're very thankful you came i know this is unusual and i really i mean we  ok we're going back into session please everybody take place is turn off your silence your devices if you have to talk please go out because this room is microphone and you're going to be broadcast all over town i'll make a couple of programming notes  running way behind although it's been a very good discussion on the community path we're going to be continuing the matter at the executive session for the fire chief contract to another to a later day which would be next friday morning on the february th when we have a small meeting on a matter so that is not going for tonight if you're here for that we're also going to be deferring the quarter to review we are meeting a week from tonight on february th so we can take that up i don't think one week's going to kill anybody so so we're going to get you some of that we've got to do we've got two small issues we're going to get to and then we're going to skip out of order and hit the incinerator sites so next convening his board of park commissioners paysan park music bandstand i want to just set up briefly this is got to do with the c p a application that you've submitted for this year for the patient to build a bandstand for music in payson park of course for the festival that you're so generously  work on that what we need to do is the park commissioners we need to determine whether to allow bandstand to be built in a public park this is like our what we did in the veterans memorial down the clay pit pond when they wanted c p a funding that people just can't come and put things in public parks without going to the parks commission which only makes sense right so we would need to vote out were prior to the c p c voting on the funding for it this went to town meeting last spring and the design funds were approved by town meeting and now this is the application to actually build it i would assume it's correct and the c p c the community preservation committee makes the decision on approving the funds and sends it to a town meeting which actually a program the funds we don't do that as a c p c in town meeting but we have to green light that in fact it can be built on the public park otherwise the entire thing is a complete waste of time as you know some are at it that's very good very thing you want to say about the project just that the location of this is and i and the founder and producer of the pace and park music festival just wanted to say that the location of this bandstand which is designed to be very minimal provide protection for the the band instruments mostly most band most of our band people are used to getting wet but the instruments don't do well when they get wet so that's the purpose of it and the location is actually right over the concrete slab that already was that was donated by an audience but brian saper with the of the highway department he laid it so it's not intended to be intrusive i have had many discussions with the record creation department and we don't want to intrude on on  any ball fields or soccer fields it's wonderful to have a big open space and that's the way we want to keep it so this is the design at present and again all i'm looking for is what you documents and they're talking now actually i think the last i heard when i spoke to peter he said he'd been in touch with jay and that he is actually talking to a company that would build a company in new hampshire that could maybe build the whole thing and what we want to do is to make it as easy to maintain we don't we want to use some materials that will not need highway department just looking for your for the selectmen approval of the concept and then the c p c still has to i think jay is working with with the architect and we'll see data that we're looking for but i think it's now coming together and i think this letter of support from the parks commissioners is one of the key remaining pieces the c b c is looking for so i'm supportive so charile entertain a motion i do that the the board of park commission is our new regulation to our rules on naming structures it seems to me that it meets all of the requirements that we set forth in order to name things in town graduation the chair of the town field playground committee as well this is the st time i have heard of this i'm fully in support my query is the timing of how everything might roll out here where we are looking to hopefully replace the court so i think i nice if this was potentially part of our appeal when the courts are redone and i'm eager to learn about the gentleman who we have been naming potentially the courts after it sounds like all the due diligence has been done i have no issue with that i can imagine the rest of the committee or the town would have issue would name them in the name would be there i mean there is no after be a sign going up until you're done with the whole project there's no sense in putting up sharia sign and tearing it down and building a new sign i get that but with the name would be there for however it wants to be whoever would be designing story he didn't even know the story till he started looking into it and as you know some people have moved on and don't aren't here to tell us about the story it isn't actually a fascinating one well researched and yeah there's a lot we have a lot of information on the details if anyone was interested  going to do them tonight we're not going to do them at the moment and we're going to skip down because there are so many people here on the incinerator site discussion and review landrover digester feasibility study which i assume is what most of the crowd is for and we welcome all of you and thank you for coming it's i was over the mass conference was a week or so ago and patrice was there and i was talking to slacken from another town she was like you know we have these meetings about redoing this entire structure in town in the center of town we had two people show up we had this other meeting on this massive money item nobody showed up and i was like we have meetings on things in the entire room as far as the how do you do that and i'm like well it's been almost just amazing that people care so thank you for coming we're glad to have you we will we're going to talk a little bit numb we're going to let people talk from the public but what i want to hear from him so i guess i want to come out so the reason why we're bringing this up is that we had just to give you a list of the incinerator site we started with seventeen uses last would be the end or a big digester so those are the five that are still under consideration we do have to make that decision fairly soon although it's not going to be this evening and what we have done is because we were trying to run down all of the due diligence and do the facts on all of these five items and we have been pretty much done that i would say on most all of them the one thing that we needed more information on was the end of a big digester because it's such a technical thing and we don't have that expertise but fortunately langdon has that expertise so we've hired langdon environmental very in depth statement a letter here that's been posted on the town's website for about the number of days now so many want to friday when we got it i know a lot of people have read it because a lot of people the e mailed me evaluate the potential for an interim digester the syllabi at the concord ave landfill site as one of the post closure use options i think it was looked at because it was a potential of a revenue source for the town and the potential for you know green energy and some things like that so what we did is that this is just back around d p banda disposal of what we call source separate organic waste of our food waste type materials from disposal landfills waste energy finance in two thousand and fourteen the band is prompted  development of a lot of different technologies one is in a row digester where the material comes into a facility it's digested essentially generates methane that generates electricity and then generates a byproduct that can be eithe composted or disposed of at the end of the day there's been a lot of work with grants and other to changes in regulations of the state is done to try to foster the development these facilities and to facilitate them and there's been several you know a lot of advancement since two thousand and fourteen in putting these facilities in place you know one of the two big questions that we're trying to answer more globally were how much of this s s o of food going to call food waste was generated in massachusetts and how many facilities are out there are proposed to be out there that could accept the real out there and that was one of the questions i think the board asked a lot of questions of me and a prior meeting about before we really got into the study there's about one million three  year of that of this material for both residential not including leaf and yard waste obviously residential and commercial generated in massachusetts out there currently about two hundred and sixty thousand dollars or about twenty percent of that is diverted to one of these real big digester an existing composting facility out there and it's two thousand and sixteen data the states always a couple years behind in getting the data compiling it and presenting it out there they've done some generator database and they've  taken a look at some of the generators out there you know there's about one hundred and seventy thousand dollars tons a year generated within a twenty mile radius of belmont and i'm going to give the high there's a lot of numbers in the report but just sort of back out for that and it's twenty mile radius was sort of chosen if that's what somebody might drive to a facility directly to get their material here you know within that kind of radius from a generator commercial generator within a reasonable distance away out there there's some there is some push or some communities have taken on a residential program on the city cambridge has about half their households served by a residential program that goes to a facility in charles town which is a processing facility which processes and ships it to distant facilities out  there so there is a fairly good amount of material within the boston metropolitan twenty mile radius of of belmont there are about eight operating ady facilities in massachusetts at this point which have a total permit a capacity of just over four hundred thousand dollars tons per year none of those are within thirty miles of belmont currently a couple are just outside that in lawrence and a viral area outside of that radius out there there are three additional facilities that are permanent under construction those bring the total up to about six hundred and sixty thousand dollars tonnes a year and again their weight management facility in charles town would be a direct competitor although they don't have an inner digestion facility they feed these food they can put all that material put i larger trucks and feed these facilities that are a little bit more distance out there so that would be a facility that we have to take a look at and has a fairly good capacity of what can go through there so the sense of the conclusion is there's a lot of material being generated but there are several facility a lot of facilities that are servicing that material although there are somewhat distant from belmont not centrally located to the boston area out there we have to go out to proposal receive proposals evaluate them go to private vendors and so you know a lot of this is sort of perspective in trying to put the numbers together that could that you know the could benefit the town without knowing what exactly the you know the vendors would choose what their business strategy is and have a sense of it but also not including some of the tax incentives and things that they might get out there so what we said was that the maximum we based  payment on the value of the property on the town's rate twelve dollars or fifteen cent rate value rate now could be up to six hundred thousand dollars a year we did note that most of these kinds of facilities the goetia payment a lot of taxes are pilot that would be sort of a agreement that would go with that the product the project would include a lease payment which we just made an allowance of about fifty thousand dollars for which again is just a requirement to have some form of lease payment much like you w solar facility or any other similar kind of development up there on the electrical generation would be sold to a developer and we assumed zero dollars eleven cents per kilowatt hour based on the green rate that the town electric company has and then we said well if the town could that could be up to sixty thousand dollars a year so the net potential benefits are you know protein seven hundred thousand dollars a year out there you know if if everything went you know again that's the maximum that we think you could attain from that  and potentially from the planning board and zoning board of appeals out there there are a lot of nearby scented sensitive receptors there's a neighborhood immediately to the north of the site there's a there's conservation land pretty much surrounding the other sides of the site  out there and what one resource areas including brooks and river from protection areas and things like that and we talked about that out there it would also require some permits from mass d p to operate most likely in you know to be a financially viable facility out there and those would engage your local board of health out there we just how large some very small some simple steps of the town wanted to move forward with it with initial evaluation obviously one of the things is to do continue some discussions with the cam about the post closure use in the transfer legislation that limits the municipal use and to make sure that that that's viable out there before the town spent really any funds for moving this  further we need to meet with nasty pete evaluate grant opportunities identify any other facilities and we did talk extensively with b p to put together a list of potential facilities to give the most visibility to the board about what the options are obviously meet with belmont light talk about the implications to them of such a large facility generating facility within the community and then you know conduct initial meetings with interested stakeholders you know to be identified as part of the process so that's a very a quick and brief summary of the report and i can certainly answer any other questions that the board think they're going to be a few yeah i mean i know patrice reached out to the d can the department capital asset management the state which has a restriction on the incinerator  which can be broadly construed but did you ever hear back from them unfortunately not we did let them know that the board is meeting tonight discussing this issue but given the timing of when we sent a letter which was about a week and a half ago they just haven't been able to  we talked earlier about you know area c which doesn't need the cam approval because we we own it you know as far as it was for it was not under arrest or story not on the restriction that's only three acres so they're pretty much take that entire site out yeah i think because of the a for profit entity right that would build this digester it could create some sort of capping effect as well presumably right on the ten acres digester it could you would you know you would i think one of the points we try to make is the try to develop the post closure use is similar to  as the pilot payment what have you seen because that seven hundred thousand dollars which is certainly a significant amount of money for this town you know we could benefit dramatically from you know is that sort of the optimistic estimate of what it could be mean considering the tax rate of and typically what have you seen a pilot arrangements typically they're very they are a percentage of the i you know again it's not all it's generally the place but it's hard to say but it's wouldn't be that full that full amount of might be something less and then they would negotiate some other benefits potentially with the how long would we have this facility in place i mean so we would enter that lease agreement with them i mean i want to simply there would look for a twenty year type police agreement to  greatest concern was the overcapacity question raised in frankly the uncertainty of being able to negotiate sufficient agreements to ensure the tipping fees two questions  that i guess one how do those contracts typically work and is it possible that we could build this and then have it be kind of meaningfully unprofitable if we can't secure those those agreements and do they tend to be very long range agreements that if all the suppliers are sort of locked up we could be years from being able to secure it and the same question i would have is is it possible that the state was it likely hard to predict the state changes requirements such that there would be a far down this path and someone of the financial benefit factors doesn't work out and had to for lack of better term there and that the did the deal with fall apart you know you are the way this would be set up is you're going to rely entirely on a private entity to finance all all of this but you you are the town needs that private entity to be successful ok so so that you know that there is always a chance a chance of that and they need to get financing and they need to do all the different things  that any entity would have to do in a facility like this so you know you want them to be successful and there is a point where you can get to the final you know the close of the end and it falls apart because you can't finalize some agreement or they can't get the amount of materials out other people trying to negotiate with them too and that's where the competitive you know the other the compete competing facilities becomes an important part of that you know that that sort of equation out there there's a long term fifteen year contracts are they much they are generally to probably tend to be shorter term contracts there it's not you know communities will sign up for a long term waste disposal contract for example out there and you know some of the with his one project is going for new yarmouth which is relying on piles all of which we're not relying on but that's you know the  state right now it's one ton per week is the limit for the generators that are banned from disposing of waste energy plants they have talked about lowering that i don't know what political appetite is for that or for you know really capturing a lot would be getting down to the residential level out there i don't know what the op i don't i mean i would guess the appetites not strong for you know mandating you know residential banding whereas that's all sorts  that's close to concord yes yes i also if i read correctly that this structure is to be thirty feet tall from the top of the hill yes up a up to that yes so you could have it up off of concord out not too far back already i don't know what the grade exactly would be but it could be thirty feet up in the structure could be another thirty feet roughly yes so screening it from kind of the neighbors and anyone driving by becomes particularly challenging i would imagine right or yes i mean you you would probably do some screaming at the top of the peak of the hill and we didn't really show this on the plan so much but it is you know on the top of the hill to try to block the view from somebody sort of at the concord out of the neighborhood level looking up you know that they be looking up at it so they would see it as much as as little as you possibly could is it possible that a thirty foot tall structure not entirely know the you would you would do that would be the efforts of men that's a good question i'm not sure i want to know what the  euphemism for but yeah you've already guessed so i mean it's kind of a conundrum because i mean if you want to put off an override as long as possible in the town we have to do some things to be creative to find the money and this is very creative but on the other hand you don't want to do something that destroys the entire area and save you twenty to thirty trucks as a way more than i thought you were going to say which is why i'm glad you did the study because we didn't really know this information in thirty feet tall right by concord avenue seems a lot higher than i thought you were going to say so that's not not good that said you know seven hundred thousand dollars a year is also very badly needed and we're six hundred thousand dollars short on capping the site  so you're one you've already got that money back so i guess i have a bunch of questions some of the my colleagues have already asked but let me stick to these what's the long term of viability of owner of it i just i'm not talking about how long the facility will last time but like the market place is there any idea about i don't want to i want to build something be stuck with an albatross because let's say the folks in charles town decide to vertically integrate what they're doing instead shipping out the solids they just build a digester on their own site and cut everybody out of the process which case then we've got this thing that's been built and you've got no one using right i think a lot of it will depend on the partner that you that you that you build it with so you know waste management runs a facility in charlestown they also run collection facilities so they they are there integrated viability of this because it sounds like and you say in your report here that over the past several years that r p s have been issued over the past several years and the towns that have failed to result in a private commitment to build on public land towns are trying to do this they're putting out our fees and no one's responding it i would hate to see what happens if we choose a use we go through all this rigamarole and nobody wants to build it it's a risk i think that one of the ways we talked about is just getting like a request for information to see if see what the level of interest is out there because people are already interested in where is this do we have any idea i say i was i mean it's been known that we've been doing this study but i haven't been pro choice i have been approached by anybody looking at that site out there they've no i don't know of anybody sophistical seem to watch because it would soon as we talk about sidewalks i start getting e mails from side what companies want to do to get you know i would think that if we were talking about this you think of some more interested they would have reached out well i made i may have a few e mails coming in right now actually they do any of this stuff so i'm not so sure that as far as the permanent approval process that this has anything special to it doesn't you know i mean there's an air quality permit because you have an emission out there and you have a there's a special permit for these kinds of facilities  honestly i kind of in my mind there was some level of risk that you could build it in you know waste management for instance just vertically integrate cut us out of the process of the sum of money to kind of surprise they haven't done it already that there's other risk that hadn't even occurred to me  and then the impact i kind of figured maybe four trucks a day or something and it would be back off the road and it turns out in fact night you know this is true so this is not as with most of these post closure uses the incinerator site it's always you know nothing's on incinerators it's come to the mike you have to come to the mike and state your name please and then if you could please keep it to just a few minutes we have a lot of people good evening well thank you for the report and thank you for the opportunity we definitely need financing in creative ways but i understand in our neighborhood you have certain concerns about this type of project belmont has the least amount of open space compared to size of the town itself compared to other towns now we are giving away open space for a gigantic structure this structure will be all th have surprises down the wrote the other thing is if by any means you go ahead with a project the more details people will know about the project when it's designed the more  people will have for this project the most important thing in this case is the anticipated profit as you objected it's very difficult to maintain most project i can i can tell you want to pick a lot on the channel tunnel that was my thesis between england and france and everybody predicted they're going to make big profits big cost benefit studies now it's subsidized by the european community and the governments so all these big projects besides that environmental concerns that are serious concerns whether the profitability will be as expected as anticipated it all depends how it is run how it's managed how the demand is where other competitors are doing what it's so valuable another thing we have now a problem with belmont light getting difficulty with solar light panels we're not getting enough credit from belmont light i don't know how belmont light will be integrated serious opposition to it i can state so many other so many other concerns besides besides the devaluation of the whole day but what it will create a blight from town planning point of view so i don't think it's great to have the revenue but all the other issues concern out balance the revenue issue this type of projects are not typically built within such neighborhoods they are typically built in more remote areas so i can say knowing what my neighbor is in my friends in the neighborhood i live on how frode which is between went to sleet and concord ave i would be just to be couple of one hundred feet two hundred feet away from the site and i don't want to see such a such a structure from my window and i don't want to drive concord ave seeing trucks every half an hour at a big truck and waiting for that specially when our school bus is not taking our kids to school and we have kids waiting in that and that area to go on the busses so i don't think this is a viable project from many points of views preach i want to get two points before we get to the next bruce i guess i am asked this before but other than the the trucks in the size that we talk like you talk about any other impacts on the neighborhood that this kind of used to have that  have to be a lot of engineering controls to deal with potential for orders out there that would be you know there'd be an order control system that would deal with that and similarly you know a potential is noise you know from the equipment going that would have to be mitigated out there with it within structures out there so we really wouldn't be an issue for runoff from that but if they get paved areas rooftops things like that there be sort of substandard stormwater controls and i guess chris rock you come come on and chris is the general manager  of light we had a big discussion earlier this evening regarding using the incinerator site for one of the other five uses which is battery storage of power where you would buy power at night where it is cheap and then stored in the batteries and then draw down during the roy general manager of belmont light so she's been an inner connect for any end use really looks the same whether it's a digester or a storage or solar basically it's the same type of line extension we would in a connect with the you know the lines and poles that you see running throughout town so there would be no difference for this type of arrangement the biggest change is how we'd bomb golden st and a couple of comments i want to make as a starter i'm a townie i grew up here and i grew up on country club lane so that area which we're talking about was my backyard growing up and if i were a neighbor today i wouldn't want tw and forty trucks and eighteen wheelers and potential orders and it's a lot to ask that neighborhood to do so sort of his out said i think you really think seriously i love the idea of revenue to the town but this doesn't sound like the way to do it so that's part one part two i live on golden street so what i want to talk about is that when we make individual decisions like this we need to have a town wide perspective my neighbors and i have spent the last year and a half trying to make concord out and that area safe we have a new school building going in there we have a lot more kids coming down that street it's already very traffic e we have an enormous numbers of committees and people putting time and energy into fixing that problem putting a skating rink unconquered av that is a rink and a half seems like adding to one of our already biggest problems in the town so i would advocate that we seriously consider a skating rink on this location i am not an expert but i would love to have solar panels on the roof but i think we should do this what i have heard is a couple of things one i've heard that you know it's not near the high school and so if you're thinking of sports it's nice to be near your school the reality is most of these private public rinks run lots of hours they run very early in the morning till very late at night if you know anyone who plays who's on the skating team who does club skating hockey they get crazy like people tell me oh yeah i know i got ice time at twelve o'clock at night so to make i'm serious to make money they start at five in the morning they sell their ice time and so that means enormous additional traffic on the concord area parking problems  it's already a pretty big concern we have had not good experiences with people getting hit we've got more younger kids and so i think that's concerning the other thing is i've talked to parents who have kids in sports and they say well practices aren't usually just after school anyways and hockey kids have a lot of equipment so we're already driving so the idea that we have to drive somewhere doesn't seem to be the biggest issue we also have other teams that have given up things the tennis isn't a good example there's been lots of gi we're asking a lot of give in that neighborhood we're asking a lot of give for the kids and it seems to me a really reasonable thing to put a rink there and to you know move it back make sure it's not of light for the for the neighbors and make this something that community can benefit from the thirty two things one i guess is that we had the big form of the beach center on the rink recently enjoyed with the school committee and it was discussed that time of the r of p that would go out for the public private partnership would limit  the size and the time in the parking and all of that stuff so it would if we would determine what when we went out to bid what we would allow it to be used for i don't think anybody's talking about two in the morning i mean that would not be a very bomb and secondly bruce you would  done an analysis of the site for the skating rink and i guess now it's been brought up could you summarize that there's just very quickly there's physically the room for a skating rink with associate parking and stormwater controls and access out there and the biggest issue with the skating rink was just the structural foundational issues out there when a landfill built on top of wetlands and it's just you know the biggest question i understand skating rinks have very little tolerance for settlement and the device is very thin and they can accommodate a very much of the be some additional work that would have to be done to sort of understand what that is and even that way at the end of that work it could be not viable for somebody of the cost of a foundation use of uses other than the others between the rink in the digester i think the ring clearly we can make an argument is for recreation as we use perhaps it would not sort of be sustained simply because you know would be a private about potential commercial traffic might be interesting to see if we can get some additional traffic study work done to determine whether or not well i mean you know that traffic would be substantial or whether or not it would be diminished in the grand the grand scheme of the traffic right there significant amount of additional traffic and we do what we can time and you and i you know have to approve the number of recommendations from that group yeah i think without question seems to me that the skating rink at concord i mean you likely i do think any r p that goes out whether it's iran car or an interrupt i just said the bombings have to be done right unless you had it is just that was the open space option of the black skate park option in which case then you're doing the boring shit in the g s of course of action force mean i would say optimistically four to six weeks but i think i'd have to check because my recent experience with drilling car is everybody's extremely busy right now so we have to get them on the schedule and find out what and develop the program and get them out there perspective forty feet of ash you know me a cup few feet of that it was you know really determine to be a very difficult thing to foundation want to try to put on our feet for public private partnership but we want some private entity to build this they're not no one's going to respond if it's this that was certainly on the table as well and what you don't share we need to do what's best for the community and if i'm not here for the city and that's fine but from my point of view the more information we have the more form the situation makes i would support you know less is cost prohibitive and we find out on monday you know to move forward with least test boards and see what the answer comes back and if it's consistent what you seem to think will be the case then we're done with it whether it's going to be would that be from the stabilization fund money for because yeah i'll support you also find out what it would cost to potentially do a traffic study that is well maybe you talk about it yeah that's a great point a lot of data already over there you could but i think if you go back to the existing traffic engineer that's a question that's question construction could start because of the permitting process or what was the i mean the well the timing would be good if it's the time it would be difficult i think right away remember the exact time when the high school rink was coming i mean we've talked about this in the past  out there with timing would be difficult to get through the procurement process that you'd have to go through the design process and then the permitting process for the rink you're probably talking at least two or three years out before you know traffic you know it's i think it's misleading to say twenty or thirty trucks because they come and gone to twenty turns into forty a sixty and that's a very big impact to the neighborhood the other thing i would say that that hill that i'm pretty familiar with this probably about fifty feet off the grade of concrete avenue and then you put a thirty story building on top of that's going to eighty feet on top of the whole thing the f a a might have a problem with just building  so saying that you know we had that meeting last week and i from my point i would like to see some kind of recreation facility been built up i think as the last impact to the to the neighborhood and i think  serves aton very well the skating rink that we talked about on caucus have to get into this and i know we don't really want to do this but i think it's important to understand if we build the building across the street for the library and that meeting had no provisions  location of the rink was for why a stand after reviewing the plans to link the rink was suggested site was right across the street from the library if you build the rink with a rink and a half that impact square footage and then you're going to have to build p far that size rink and that means that you not only lose a soccer field you you lose a guy you lose a softball field in a soccer field to that really impacts that that site down there i think that chile should be looked at i'm not sure if that facility up there is the right site for the rink i hear a lot of negative stuff about it but i think it's something we really should research and is it four years as at four months there's a lot of conversation there that i'm not sure anybody has the answer and for us to move forward on that we really should know what is the permit process how long that will take and can the soil take conditions take that rink i think that's an important part of it because we're going to be talking about something that's a mute point because we really don't have the right data to support it so i'm totally against the impact of the bill and you're proposing obviously because as i live adjacent to the neighborhoods across the street from norman on twenty two through all of this with the wastewater treatment plant and i'm also going to talk as a lawyer i can guarantee you from the phone calls that i had that the selectmen vote in the affirmative you don't have a lawsuit  at that stage right and i would have done this a long time ago i wouldn't have called anybody to ask them what's the definition immiscible you i would ask town council if there's a lawsuit against us can you defend it and come up with a definition that this can be considered an innocent use from what i'm hearing you know into town council never asked if you folks through  ration came down with five uses and this is one of them i hate to think about what were the ones that you described it i couldn't believe when i read this that a board of select with pulsating brains would consider this or that location just think about the money i don't want to be facetious but if you're worried about money maybe you want to look at  marijuana emporium up there it'll be all green all right it'll be beautiful will be a big green feel the thing is that sometimes people know the price of everything in the value of nothing so number one you should really talk the town council and say can you defend this if a lawsuit is brought and i guarantee you from the personalities that live in that  you're going to have a lawsuit on your hands it's insane number one number two why in the name of god somebody didn't go to lexington and say tell us what experience have give us your report say some money no i know we desperately need money in belmar as someone who's an empty nester in a single family house paying the taxes i pay and expecting it to go up two thousand five hundred dollars in a couple of years the issue here is we got a fine ways not to drive people out of town i remember the superintendent said if we build a high school they will come more people are going to move into town and more people like me are going to get driven out of town so lawsuit can town council come up with any way and i've been practicing law for forty five years in a supposed law etc nowhere can i find a definition of municipal use that would bring within its ambit what you folks i think a considering but from what i heard i think that you folks are all going to vote against it but when i think about what you put these people through how in the name of god did it get this far how did that happen i don't want to talk about anything else except a sludge digest i said to somebody foolishly joking well you know what since there's all this ash and everything else why did you dig a big hole it's an aerobic put in the ground cover  money on a program like this i talked as a lawyer let me talk a little bit as an engineer you folks have selected to put this on the high ground that's possible be foot of the state sold to us and that's the one that says municipal use d p w that's sort of thing this is not going to fit into that definition you took the best peacefully and up there right the high ground i'm not sure that if you take borings under that high ground i'm not sure you can help me that you're going to find ash there because the incinerator was down the other side ok so you do have to take moorings and when you take borings you hire an engineer and the engineer high is a drilling contractor and the drilling contractor takes the borings reports the engineer and the engineer and tells you what's there so i think i've overstayed my welcome i don't know how in the name of god this thing got this far and why these people have to be put through this if i were the attorney i never will please put this to rest and these people have suffered enough i will guarantee you a lawsuit as sure as i'm standing just look at the personalities that are standing here council what you should have done way back at the beginning any lawyer would say but if think about this we fit this in under the definitions and the disposition agreement and i would go to town council to give me his opinion and a story thank you for listening to me and you i would note that we have talked of town council we do have lexington's report we've been passing ways to keep people in town we're continuing to do that that we generally don't make decisions based on whether a neighbor is going to sue or not because to be honest i think most of the time if he would end up with something that makes somebody upset we have five uses each of which with a constituency whichever one we pick four groups of people are going to be happy we have to do we think is best we have done a matrix to analyze all the seventeen uses we've spent a very long time with multiple public meetings going through them to see objectively look after them this hasn't fall off but then we didn't have langton to report langdon's report it may fall off i don't know we have to continue talking about it i'd say that there is there is some level of municipal benefit to it digester being belmont lights involvement with  that benefit from that which we own however just because there's a benefit just because it makes money doesn't make it the right thing to do either so we're just having a conversation we're talking about it as with all of them and we will ultimately have to make a decision at some point  tanita member precinct six chair belmont light advisory committee i just wanted to caution about assuming that this is going to be the cash cow that the one could read the report as indicating i think there's some variables in there some assumptions that may not be as lucrative as may be suggested i can point out to one just in my brief look at the report and that is the assumption that belmont light will buy back the power at zero dollars eleven cents per kilowatt hour when the market rate for power is much much less than that so that essentially means that the customers the residents of the town would be funneling the money back to make the project successful unnecessarily so i just would caution when we thinking about it and long all the other considerations to think to understand that there are  may or may not play out thank you seize against any one of these projects i think it's pretty clear that all of us in this room would really be upset if this ended up being the use that was and i understand you need to consider and i understand you've got an issue with the budget for the town  but i just can't imagine a worse use in that neighborhood surrounded on three sides by conservation land and a neighborhood just to the north than a solid waste treatment plant with forty trucks coming in and pumping out methane gas and  just seems like spending any extra money or time on it just i just don't get so which is what we're all here because we want you to know that were really not happy about this even being on the final list i can also say putting on a different hat i sit on the facilities committee at the model school and we're looking to places and i you know mr brown ellis here from belmont hill school i don't know if you've been talking to belmont hill or not and i haven't heard a thing about it as my member of the facilities committee it to be worth at least having a conversation with them to see if they'd be willing to spend some money i think that they probably would help investigate some of the uses and i think you know they'd be very interested in having a hockey rink close by that they could share with have been running all of these down we look at it we have a we have a matrix with all these different criteria that sort of we're trying to objectively just look at the ideas and then we're drilling down into the remaining five and this is sort of the drill down into the  her idea in my mind the answer wasn't glowing as i expected it to be you know i know you know whether this is any more viable an option but we're going to have to make a decision as i said before may as to what we're going to do with the serious side because then we have and so they're very very difficult they're complicated compared to other types of projects and i guess what i'd taken away from that anybody talks to me i'm out doing a deal now great technologies are a lot of stuff being developed economics can work in the right application but number one where you're feedstock coming from if it's on a farm your cows poop you know in that poop it's simple right but i'd be very skeptical about going to the market and trying to offer a fee you know some kind of tipping fee to be competitive because this is a government for fifteen years as so right so if you had your own source of your own sewage there or something you had control that feed stock to me which always seems to be the case we have anything technical come up yes travis frank road bruce i just have a question about this is an combustion site and i haven't i heard that the facility is going to be thirty feet tall but isn't there also smokestack and in and possibly a flare so the tallest structure on the site will probably be the tanks themselves out there on the flare is actually not anywhere is not probably not going to be thirty feet tall close to that in the smokestack there's an engine that runs basically a natural gas engine that will have a smaller stack of c are going to be needed that's the biggest tall structure with actually the tanks and but there will be flaring in like possibly an open flame if there's too much pressure in the tanks and they need to digest if there's too much pressure or if the engines go down that's flared but it's in a close flare so it's not like a once in burner in a chemistry lab for example  and i guess i would just say i find i would just echoing some of the financial constraints is when i think about this type of project compared to any of the other four whether it's the open space or in the house i guess my personal thought on this is  is that there's a lot of financial risk a day just mention like fifteen years with a feedstock and i think as far as like i do the seven hundred thousand dollars number which has been mentioned but is actually again just a reminder that that's the high end of the range and you know the tipping fees reason i would be we've this is still alive is hate going cover the capping cost but that's actually they had to double the size of an array of digester to become viable and it's not helping with the short term it depends on how you structure the tax agreement and you c the tax agreement to cover the the capping cost i mean it's really all part of the negotiation sure but i guess that that's also part of the risk is moving forward with this without there's so many different variables and we know the developer is going to make sure to get they get their return on their investment and i the anybody has the right to put me through psychological pain for so many years to have such an ugly structure in front of my house not my house our house in here that's one thing the nd part is the psychological impact on potential buyers of all properties some day we're going to sell regardless of how you want to sugarcoat it and say this is beautiful this is whatever this is controlled by heirs are going to be impacted immensely which would be at my expense to build this is structure all of us i think we're going to lose a lot of money when you think all these houses around it if i lose two million three hundred thousand dollars on my house and there is going to be far exceeding what the town is going to make who has the right to do this at my expense i don't think anybody and definitely if that happens i will do my best to have a neighborhood a coalition that we will get together as the most of lawyer said that we will go to a legal action against  it therefore i'm against it all my neighbors are against it and they are all the wonderful people that i have met a lot of them in here please do not consider it thank you thank you thank you i'm jane audie and i actually have a question and that has to do with the timing of possibly of the possibility of the skating rink being up on that site  it seems that people who are against having the skating ring up there talk a lot about how many years it will be before it gets built but would the skating rink as it stands now be kept in business limping along during that building time and if it isn't well if that but if it isn't then there will be a year or so when the skating rink is being built on the school property where people will have to go elsewhere out of town i assume for skating and i've seen that also is considered very disruptive that's i think the idea was if the skating rink went on the school site it would not be on the same footprint as the current one of the sort of three way behind the mobile station so the current the current rink could operate while the new ones being built and that's what one were to do but of course as you say the the new rick is the current rate is on the verge of failure at any moment in the honest and you're talking on the incinerator site i think is bruce's that pretty much anything is going to be a two to five year wait till you get built up there at any rate  structurally like a rink would probably take longer than something like a bike and skate park it's less of a structural but it's still going to be some time before anything happens up there it's just that we have to cap it and is there name is made carrick ario march treat i just want to thank everybody for coming i think it's amazing that the neighborhood shown this kind of support for each other i just kind of want to talk a little bit very briefly about you know a lot of people the neighborhood and that there are some real health concerns that are associated with these plants and that's a big concern to us and that when you talk about the seven hundred thousand dollars a year for the town i feel as though you're saying that the impact to kind of our quality of life our  safety our buildings which other people have talked about the value in that that somehow that that that's what you're saying we're worth and that you know what you're going to make is you know kind of our sacrifice and i really think that that's unacceptable and i think there's a lot of other points we can all make here and if you're not able to take this off the table today i think we all deserve to know when you plan to do that and when we'll be notified when you're making a decision this is really creating a lot of stress for everyone in our neighborhood and i think we deserve to have an understanding of when you're going to be making a decision that's it that is a good question i would stay just be clear again we're not proposing or recommending any particular of the five remaining options we'd a public meeting the public gave us seventeen options we whittled it down to five we're still doing our due diligence on them we're not advocating or doing anything we're just getting information so we can make an informed decision the seven hundred thousand dollars and all the rest of it came out of the investigation that we're doing we're going to take that information i'm not saying that this is something we're going to do we're not going to do we're just getting the information as far as when we're going to make a decision at the end of all this i think we were i was going to talk to my colleagues about that very question because the question is whether we have to do something before me clearly that's just legally we have to do something for me i don't want to wait even that long but some point we have to we can decide whether we want to will the five could pose something or do you know we could pull something off the list or we could just keep it all five on the table do the test boring or whatever it may be and then come back as i would like to do mr cherry poker thing that's what i like to do as chair and again  you know so we kept on time if i'm going to be part of a tape it's by april st they may not be possible to do it by then the boardings take six weeks than that those would certainly would be done in march and that would be that yeah ok so the point is i think that by the end of march suppose presumably will make a final decision perhaps i i would love to make the final decision even sooner than that but it sounds like we're doing the boring that's not going to be possible ok thank you so feel like the information is really clear to us is the public like when you say like you're going to talk about this you're not really making it clear to us what we need to know and when you're making decisions and what we need to do to make sure that you take this off the table because we don't have the information from we've decided whether we're going to do the test boring so when are you getting that information well we're going to be getting that information for monday night i guess because we were asking bruce to look around see if you could get the information for a meeting on monday night february th about whether what the time frame and cost of the end of veil ability of someone to do this in the schedule is if they say we're busy we're all booked up for six months we don't have six months so that we're not going to divorce so i think we need to get that information that monday night when we have a regular meeting on february th we'll have some more clarity i think but it's a good thing that we can all come to our so he's going to meeting like mr probably less well attended but it'll be february th we meet usually the st in the rd monday at seven o'clock and that will be the st and i want to speak for everybody if anybody has other concerns i know a lot of people have taken time to be here and i think it's important that they are able to tell you what all of their concerns are right it's very important for us to hear this firsthand and understand what people's concerns are and i think what we heard from bruce here was very sobering so yes hi wholeheartedly with what everybody has said in opposition of this project i think it's just again really not fathomable to think of you know i live directly across from rock metal so i watch hawks diving for their dinner i see you know all kinds of wildlife over there actually grew up on the streets so it's just an amazing jewel in belmont to have that kind of open space and to put something so in can grow into that is really just it's unfathomable to me so i really i'm vehemently opposed to that as it was all my neighbors are and i guess i just also want to ask for hopefully and i know you've got to do new diligence and i'm hopeful that you're looking at some parity between the trapped extensive traffic studies that were done as i tended a similar meeting very well attended a year or so ago where they proposed major shifts in the traffic patterns in upper  ave one of which i thought leave which actually has delayed the delayed the final decision the they proposed to add a nd rotary one rotary was ever was in favor of one rotary the nd was also on open space so they needed to idea of the volume that we're currently dealing with so i just i also worry that when we're proposing something like this and there's traffic studies and meetings going on there again where's the parity to sort of say if we're making all this effort in putting all this energy into to mitigating traffic we're on the on the flip side you know i agree it may be financially driven but on the flip side we you know kind of you know kind of moving away from the fact that we're trying to mitigate traffic and then now we're adding multiple upwards of forty trucks full of biosolids you know a day it just doesn't again hours and traffic off of went to street going over to concord ave they're elderly when they back out of their driveway people who zoomed down rather wood road every day it's not for residents only it hasn't been like that for quite some time so i just want to bring that up traffic is obviously and we're against it and i don't know if there's any possibility of just removing this off the table deceived and considering that so many residents can thank you very much  town light traffic study that was done and b h p may have some information as well from the concept planning that we did for the roundabout ideas at the intersection so i can see what's out there march th if we're starting from scratch maybe a little tight but we may have enough data out there already will we could pull something with both of the potential risk sites i guess same comment applies to both traffic definitely any of the data that was gathered by the high school building committee may also be of some help for the congo to have a new site you know the current site so i just have to see what's out there and see what we can you know we can piece together if you started from scratch on either one of those sites by march th might be a little tough thank you thank you anything else you already spoke there's been mention and i know there are you know that there's four other options and then ice rinks come up but as far as the other options i would as the person who kind of how propose it they sold the farm in the bike park are both low rack you know low n i guess the concern is that and we talked about it when we met with cathy is the number of hours that staff would have to dedicate to be eligible to apply for the grant so glenn and i have been talking about that me cards to who could do that so that's that's my only concern that i  you can kill it with the one big meeting that's required pretty much it's not like one person said everybody is out there talking if you could go outside please we still have a lot of business to conduct and i know this won't be for the energy committee i don't know when they were on prepared miss grant program which the baker police administration has made available to communities for climate change and natural hazard the resilience basically so it's a two part grant program the st part is planning grant and that's what dominant is eligible for we've met with our town administrator and with glen clancy we also did meet with the energy committee at  not something that is necessarily in their purview but that they generally thought it was a good idea they did not take a vote may didn't feel like that was part of their what they would do  this is to become more resilient to increased floods or existing floods increased teter existing heat so there's an opportunity here to do some nice work in terms of flood mitigation and also take care of projects that you might already have on the table so for example arlington is an m v p community they're eligible for the nd round they got  a nd round about four hundred thousand dollars to revitalize a park and do a river some very small river resilience portion of the project to make them eligible it's going to be a question i mean the main part of this for me is th state and you generally have your municipal department leaders attending so or so a representative fire police health d p w engineering school conservation if you have eight or ten of those people attending you've knocked off almost all of your you know eighty or ninety of your hours then there are there are a couple of steering committee meetings because you're making you're setting the priorities for where you want the funding  to come into the town later on so you have a couple of meetings that will probably get you another thirty hours and then maybe there are ten more hours where we're coordinating with or whoever it is coordinating with the town leaders on  world of much higher funding and so i've seen communities get between seventy five dollars and four hundred thousand dollars right so we're not guaranteed if we spend two hundred hours to get any kind of a grant right the st if we apply actually taking the money and doing this if we do have the application and then just when we don't have the man will we wouldn't we and we might not have the matching funds i think the other concern that that the board has to consider is this is another project that the community element would have to be in or have the resources i mean we're asking when to do traffic studies we're asking the him to do to plan on the rink to do the incinerator site i mean unless you're looking to some additional resources to community development i don't i don't want to add any more responsibilit budget unless you can seriously consider any resources there say you know can we really do something it's a one more thing he has to think about doing let me just add one more thing before you kill it another day also gives you a head money for hazard mitigation plan and your hasn't been a geisha plan is out of date so you can get your two plans done with the the so this is not competitive in the st round if you have a complete application you will we have to find another one other two hundred hours it does seem unlikely you could take it is it possible that the work that you are already doing sort of fulfills this requirement comes you have to do it after your to get the ground you can't  more we're going to ask when to do much more that we have i guess seriously considering doing most within this year's budget which we have been asking for for nine years additional resources in community development i mean i think all these programs are wonderful how much more can we ask clinton do when he's been pulled in nine different directions on traffic issues as well and grant where we can apply in time down there you can apply up until may rd unless funds run out earlier so it is a rolling grant and it wouldn't i mean i think i agree community development has a lot on its plate there's no question and i've known glen for a very long time he works extremely hard so i think this we would not be looking to put more work on glenn but the work does get spread out among a lot of your municipal leaders so that in the end maybe there is an extra above and beyond what every municipal department heads will be asked to do his office might have another twenty hours but when you have somebody from the fire department somebody from the police department school going to an eight hour meeting if you have a dozen of those people that's one hundred of your one hundred and twenty hours right there but again i don't think it's just the hours that's the concern it's once we do get the the planning done and in place then we have to go and get those matching funds and that's additional work for that department i think it's a i think it's a great program i just don't know if we have the band with at this point time to take it on that's the only concern that i know i have going to make a decision is there a similar plan next year or is this a one time well it's been in effect for the last year and a half under the baker administration my guess is it will continue for the next three years and then after that i don't know if it will who knows and cares right we do need to do some work on the has an indication i mean i think the way to look at the shown that is if we want to participate in this program along with all the other programs that we want to do if we want to do traffic studies which is the most acute issue then you have to seriously consider is how can we add additional resources to these departments that are already completely strained and then we can say look we have some capacity with ninety different directions all over town people are asking about traffic issues how much more can we ask this department to do without adding resources to it i mean actually you know not not literally the figure only pounding the table just please consider and that's fine when we tabled until we can see if we can maybe go in brainstorm some ideas and maybe your group can come up with some honey i don't know if there's some way you know to get a consultant to do the work or you know that's ok and well yeah you would either do the other work that you get the funding for through a consultant or that money would come to the community and the community would you know pay for a part time help or somebody for the staff labor or could to say it's only staff but you know if you had somebody if you had a volunteer who wanted to do something for the town and had a little maybe it was retired and could come in and organize you know meeting space and stuff like that i there are other people who can pick it up the thing is if you can think about your projects that you might want to get done in the future like if you have intersections or areas that flood obviously we do have a lot of those my basement  so there may be projects that you can develop that you wanted to do already to do anyway and you can hijack this so arlington getting a brand new park is an example of  we table is a bill if you to come back with like a list of those things we've got all we could use that we've already done and maybe someone is willing to volunteer their time to be staff that we could deputize you know that would be helpful but but under the current funding and staffing scheme we just can't do but if you can come back i'm not going to kill it i mean if you can come back with this information like concrete this person will do it and they're qualified they were qualified staff and you can count these five things you're already doing that changes the entire equation ok that's great yeah that sounds great thank you thank you so to approve one day liquor license for patrons of the more performing arts at the beach street center friday february th this is the annual trivia night i'm going to have fun for my team actually won last year so  questions we can talk about it and then finally i would ask what's permission to seek there's a grant that to do by the end of the week for some reason for st the state wants all their grants and it's it's an opportunity to do some feasibility work on earlier and we can you touch base on the actual schedule i think we had originally said the end the end of february will vote on something that they haven't yet voted on but it will likely be voted by next month whether everything