us getting underway we have to take up three short matters the first of which all of which can't wait we're going to take those up first then we're going to go and turn it over to bruce housecall who's the consultant for the town is going to go through our five remaining post closure uses for the access to information today's media environment is critical for the healthy functioning of our community and whereas community media organizations provide a means for diverse communities to tell their stories hear each other's stories and create new stories together and whereas community media organizations provide information to the community that is not covered by mainstream commercial media and where as community media organization provide people with the skills necessary for the creation sharing and consumption of knowledge and ideas through media and whereas community media is an important resource for participation just baiting in local democratic policy in processes and whereas community media connects connects community organization schools and local governments to there are situations in where as in many communities people are not aware of the verse and valuable programming on public education and government access channels or the community radio channels and where as communities will benefit by encouraging conversations about our common interests increasing discourse around policy issues fostering understanding of local cultures and sharing information to improve our lives board of selectmen adam dash chair mark the next item on our agenda is policy regarding electioneering and campaigning in person early voting and in person absentee voting sites discussion and vote requested by town clerk brian cushman is here you want to come on up it's fairly straightforward just to make to extend the hundred fifty five people in here to extend the hundred fifty foot buffer zone for electioneering outside of polling places all election day extend that to the early voting period as well for those same location you next item assigning town meeting warrant for the fall town meeting i should note this is not a debate about the articles content it's just about whether the articles wording go and the articles themselves go on the war and obviously it will be debate on the merits at a future time i should also note that there is a petition was filed there was one citizen's petition which will be added on to the warrant which is to extend the marijuana moratorium beyond december thirty the planning board submitted to the planning board by the board of selectmen in the plain board have to have a public hearing on them before town meeting to take them up so the board of selectmen have fourteen days from the citizens petition filing on october seventeenth devote to submit th petition only amendment to the planning board for review as the board doesn't meet again before the fourteen days is up chair and determining that we can vote tonight to submit this is a petition to the planning board because it was under one of the exceptions which is and favor as promised those are relatively short matters the next and last item on the agenda is discussion of remaining feasible ideas for the possible future use of the former incinerator site i guess i said i'm going to turn this over to a bruce haskell to talk about the site for those who are not familiar or don't remember the details and then go through the five remaining post closure uses and then we will turn it back to us and we'll kick off a public discussion you should have a microphone one where the other i think so if you want to come up here that might be  evening bruce haskell and the town's engineering consultant providing regulatory and engineering assistance on the closure of the town landfill in also with the post closure used to be selected by the town and here tonight to talk a little bit more about the five municipal use on the site is currently used for public works material and storage and those need to remain as i mentioned the sites about twenty five acres about eight of it is really about seventeen acres of upland area the five options are passive use open space which you could include like some limited pathways connections to some of the surrounding conservation areas and small parking areas out there obviously that that kind of revenue caps of whatever maintained in that manner there is no significant revenue source from doing that in a cost to do that additional maintenance of security cost obviously to the town and again this can be made compatible by separating the know very seriously so please let us know what you think i should note that we're not voting on this tonight we want to think about what we hear tonight but we do hope to vote on the post closure used by the end of the year keep in mind we cannot do all of these we might be able to do is as bruce had said maybe two at one time but we can't do all five at one time so some uses are not going to happen and i would also note that you please be civil in your conversation the site may be contaminated but the speech does not have to be extensive discussion the ground lease for that one is set at a thousand dollars a year it's kind of a you know a low amount intentionally  payment on that is loosely based on the value of the of the a rate and that's at about forty six thousand for the year and so the interesting just a quick s six one and initial question on the p v while we are still not topic if you have storage revenues and the town is getting the money primarily through property taxes where the benefits of the components i also had a couple of questions on the whole digester process i heard a presentation earlier in the summer that had sort of an overview of the way this facility would operate and i wanted to kind of present it and see if it's so i heard some discussion about the need to look at transport impacts and obviously road where would be an element of that and i guess i would ask as well that any further review of this actually do scenarios because i  think there's a lot of economies of scale in this industry and i'm concerned if elmont is one step of a more complicated process that we can get out by some of these other facilities that are getting the wa first they can add capacity there and because we have trucking in and trucking out the economics kind of erode on us quickly and i wouldn't like to see us kind of locked into a situation where we have a private vendor we have fixed capital on for the cap and a stabilization fund through town meeting we are still something like six hundred thousand dollars short or something like we're capping it so bringing in someone to cap it for us would not only eliminate us having to come up with the rest of the money  site like eight thousand something dollars that we need to understand the trips the trucks and all and all the impact to the external neighborhood as well and any of this because we understand skate park we understand open space digester right i don't understand the now i want to return to solar for just a second you probably saw in a letter i wrote to the paper i am concerned about putting a solar facility adjacent to conservation land where we do have wildlife particularly birds because solar facilities are known for killing birds i've been informed that this is passive solar for state will not kill can someone comment on the difference between a solar facility that does kill birds and one that doesn't and which one would we be looking at now kristie you know the answer to that are you are back or anyone well it's one of those things that certainly we could i mean i read i read the article that you wrote about about disorienting birds and being a hot surface so they'd be attracted to and burn but i don't know anything about it ok there is now is a lot of data on birds being killed by solar facilities up to six thousand a year and one in california has a problem with counts because many of the counts of been done by people who almost solo facilities  have a festive interest in not having problems with and the government has not really and gotten serious about it they've done some counts but not enough so i don't think we should be and i think we have a lot of athletic facilities in belmont i understand that the ones that are being proposed off are duplicated is nearby is cambridge cambridge is a very wealthy town column today even if it's just a wait and see situation with all these unknown's maybe we could come up with something that gets more people more people are enthusiastic about  this i'm intrigued by this i guess a couple questions i have utilization of it it's somewhat of a remote that although we can certainly once it's there perhaps people will calm what your sense of the utility and i like the and so many of them have recently been built i think one of the main ones is in lincoln park in somerville and it has turned into a really popular place for people families to go and so what is is winter it's probably a three season that's not to say that you know currently cross country skiers and rock meadow and beaverbrook north there's it's not to say that a cross country skier couldn't come in and you know just make that of that to send somebody up to empty trash and mow the lawn and whatever they've and clean the bathrooms or whatever shovel the parking lot whatever happens up there for a bike skate park would be an additional day we'd have to find somewhere that we don't have the money for doing a one megawatt array but if there's not enough money for anyone to build it it's not really so so i guess the question becomes then do you since we have the area a as well right so there's two areas here not like we this list and one of the things that i think about is just like how much of that list is truly hypothetical and a lot of it to me seems like it's hypothetical and dependent on the contractor in the private person and whether or not the town would be able to reduce it solid waste is all dependent on that and whether or not you know whether or not they want to accept it maybe they want just a compact revenue stream that comes on trucks that they hook their pipes up to and not have to deal with a drop off site whether or not there's they're going to offset the cap or not all depends on negotiations whether or not there's you know the viability of the size of it and so part of me wonders and worries and a little bit to the town's risk exposure is if this was what was agreed upon when you vote later this year then how much time do we have to really negotiate all this find someone to do that that's with all the terms favorable to the town because all of these sort of you know the full study finding the right contractor willing to do the cap put the money up in front of time and everything else by seems like you know it would be under this pressure and you know the private entity is going to make their money somehow if they're putting six or seven hundred thousand dollars up front to do the cap or to pay for it all they're going to lower the tipping fees on the route revenue sharing set amount and so i just i want to say like it for as many as this there's two revenue sources in all of this stuff it's actually all negotiated by whether or not that and the other thing is bruce i know you mentioned and i don't know so the question is whether or not when you listen to get can we do two of these things at once you know two of the five whether anaerobic digester was one of those two because the other thing i'm worried about is if this is going to get cited in plot b and it's going to be an industrial site you know and i don't know if you need to wear hard hats but like do they really want public access to like say a bike park in site or site b or some other open space are they going to want traffic and other things to this area when they're going to have semis coming in and out and  public around that and if i were an industrial thing i'd say no and i would make that contingent with a town like i won't do this unless i get full access to the site from everyone you know i think the second there use solar would accommodate but we didn't talk about  not to say that they're single use but there is a high probability that those are single use decisions yes you can abuse over the  single use like i think the honor of digester is what's going to be on that site because i think it's going to be hard to really have other uses especially anything that's open to say public access you know whether it's just you know doc park or somebody i know it's i that's honestly market like whether it's just open space or whether it's access to rock meadow through the through there and the park i think that's going to be really hard and so that was my main point around this is i love the idea i realize the town is in strong financial situations and would love to have additional revenue but i just don't see this is like the thing that's going to answer all those questions but i also feel it's going to be a restrict a lot of other things and now that's just and that's just like i just want the time to get in a situation where  to be possible downturns possible risks we we agree that this is the direction we're going and we get to the point where you know it doesn't turn out to be the sweet deal that we thought it was and because of the negotiations and situations and i don't know when we can pull out so and i certainly wouldn't favor doing it digester unless we had that study from someone who would go through all of that because it's too complicated thank you very and i'd like to clarify that with bruce if we were to conduct this study could we get  negotiate you know just like when you buy a car interest rate and everything else down payment everything they are going to do somehow there's three or four different degrees of freedom where they can make the money but on the other hand if they pay for the cap and we get free composting curbside there's something to be said  and ultimately there will be a revenue split of whatever value is actually created so i don't yet have a sense of how much value they can create with their other digester and based upon that we would negotiate some sort of split maybe it's particularly advantageous we don't really know   the road map the climate action road map and where this all fits in is i think the solar and solar and bike park when we proposed the idea and this was the map that we've already kind of pointed out we we mainly stuck everything on site b and the effort to try to be a good teams player and leave site for d p w in sight see for wetlands or or maybe a soccer field or something but if i had to say what i think would be a better idea now would be just take a b and c or maybe be in and do solar and buy park on both of the land lots and do a bigger array and you know the bike park would be where it's currently sited or maybe one of the options that i know is it could move to somewhere closer to the actual trail system that rock meadow but that we basically use more of the site maybe we leave c as wetlands and open space because that is what it's sort of it's natural state but a bigger array would allow for a lot more value and then we have the public  town all the revenue that's generated from the solar is it goes back to the citizens of the town and to the ratepayers and basically the customers of both and i think it's really important and recognize that one of the studies that was shown that storage bridge is has a net present value over a twenty year period of one almost one point five million dollars on something that would be on the size of a bee in a sea situation and one point five million dollars over twenty years is not a better return that's the profit farm of that size would give approximately and this is all bar park but i did a low estimate of around fifty to sixty thousand dollars a year of value to the town and the rate payers such additional and i know some of the numbers for the jester weren't super big digester in the private entity come in so the risk is less and the value is more guaranteed going forward both with the technology the study that i mentioned about one point five million one point four one point five million net present value is actually two years old and i bet it's probably higher now and so there's value in the storage values in the racks which are renewable energy credits that would go to the market there's value and power system regulations and energy quality which are all things that the storage and the belmont because we have a new name we are all we are concerned about as a town so there's other value we're getting with running just a good electrical system some of that i don't think would exist in an anaerobic digester we might be getting power but it's probably going to be a different situation and again i think that all of this does fit with the natural landscape more than a digester with its industrial site and just a really quick answer that the birds question is i believe  wind is often often the case where wind and turbans kill a lot of birds that is known about that and there is one other solar technology called concentrated solar power which possibly could be and i never heard of it possibly could be but that is not what we're digester if you guys want to go forward and do a study maybe that makes sense but i know that these have been done or studied in other places and i think it would be very useful to see if there was a cost model done for example in the heart while out what criteria do they put in are their order of magnitude estimates on the net revenue to the town and the risk associated and i think that we could probably learn a lot just from looking at that as to what risks might face and then the second transmission connections or would there be transmission connections to the solar array that would enable the site to actually do a broader storage mission than just for the if you could level the whole system i think you might of the generation source source be solar digester storage so that's a key component to understanding what the magnitude of the generation source would be so t recommendation that if we chose the solar p v slash storage what you would recommend and if indeed we chose bike skate park or one of these other ones what you would recommend and whether any of those are viable because if you say to us you know you can do one megawatt at a skate park but no one's ever going to build something that small then we need to know that i'm not saying it kills the bike and skate park idea i just i want to know if it's real or or not  chair i just to does question and maybe it's really for bruce we can we could do a study a thousand dollars which would help us clarify some of the things are there are existing studies that have been done that we could draw upon that would help us realize figure out whether or not this is there an analog anywhere else in the state or in the region again that would just help us get an order of magnitude assessment i looked at some of the i there are some that are out there and we could probably provide you with some kind of an order of magnitude based on them but mercy from bracing j i listen a lot of information about the solar panels i think if we do the solar panel i don't like to see them put on the ground so i think there's two things you can do get the solar panels up off the ground put just storage facilities for the electric underneath and also raise the panels and utilize the area where the public works is get the panels up high enough so they can use a storage underneath these panels to conserve on your land area and the other thing i think is important when they bring up the skating rink i think the skating ring might be a good idea only if it's privately built we cannot afford money can be used for and we don't know when and how long their program is going to be an operator on because we're getting less and less from the states of the public might decide they don't you know want us and so i don't think we should view relying on the possible order preorder issues if it's run correctly allegedly these aren't huge problems but there are a lot of human variables and it's a bit the hands of a private private private hands who's who's running it and be depende north reservation is probably the half mile three quarter mile from here it's connected by the trails it's a dirt path like bike park i've been over there several times but my children hung on the locks i've never seen proximity to this i don't know why we would need to build a bike park so close to where one already exists in waltham one other comment we have a lot of parks and playgrounds and belmont but so i mean i guess other than other than the the beaverbrook skate park you talk bike park you talk about is there any particular objection to the skate parks or idea it's just not something that my family would  that you find a new member of the force like me i'd fall right off the skate board so i mean terms of feel the me i knew we had discussed a gentleman or at least was in the initial sort of analysis and i'm still open minded about because i think you can do a combination of structure that was has been there for many years and it's basically you know clear dirt and it's destroying the conservation land one of the advantages of the skate park is that there were people who wanted access to skate park or to bike parks they would have a real bike park that was legally built and not destroying the conservation land so so the reason nobody uses that it's it's not an official bike park it's just some  no where the public works needs though when there i think that's an excellent place to put it elevated solar panels over the sunny and they can use the wind underneath the site to conserve the land and leave the rest as open space we cannot afford to be operating any more real estate we can we have a very inexpensive budget now and if we start building more facilities which as you mentioned you have to have different maintenance and something happens to have what passed through there and have to ride their bikes really i don't care but at least one got we're not going to maintain it but i think the solar farm could go over the public works there and then have the storage facilities for panels underneath those panels also we're going to have mr roy investigate all this on the solar side so we're going to get we can we have in house expertise and that we can get an answer for those you know i realize that with the physical location i think could a moment ago if this is a significant revenue producer i think it should remain on the list if it's not i think it should probably come off is there any way for us to answer that question of order of magnitude short of the eight dollars is there at three thousand dollars version of it that gets us a sense