first station that we were going to retire the commission decommission over the last six months or so other projects in town namely the high school have popped up that we're being told maybe our station three on here and just treat may be impacted if that has to be expedited then there's a cost associated with that we would have to you know do more design work quicker them we have planned right now we have to prop possibly bring in other vendors to help build out the system to do both pieces of this project and obviously this cost associated with that so that's two above was getting at and you see on the side it's as if accelerated twenty six million twenty six point one that's the famous twenty six point one and then we had this question about whether that had to be reimbursed or not because you have to worry about misallocation of funds and we got the answer to that and the answer was no we didn't have to close that down so this is the project came in three point three under but we've kept the three point three and now we're working on funding see that's th here and the acceleration piece also cuts both ways because in the one hand you've got the high school project but on the other hand if you decommission for fifty five conquered have then you have that parse that parcel open for something else sooner so there are tradeoffs we're going to it's not as simple as just saying make station three go away which is that your street station stations three into which is oakley and pager street they work their system stations they work in concept together we can't just eliminate one so without you good evening my name is jim williams i'm most lukman and this year i'm the chairman of the board of selectmen i'm calling to order the monday march twelfth board of selectmen meeting i'm joined by vice chair mark polow and by selectman adam dash we just finished a really informative light board meeting and so here we are starting at seven fifteen not two we're thank you jim we only have one announcement which is unsurprising which is that all town buildings not offices are closed tomorrow and tuesday march thirteenth the parking ban is at midnight until further no further notice no trash or recycling tomorrow that is different from usual again no trash or recycling pick up tomorrow on tuesday the remainder of the week the pick up of trash recycling will be one day late there was no school tomorrow i'm sure there is now there are cheers across the town if you have any questions you can call six one seven nine  three two six ninety eight with questions it's also posted on the town website thank you adam thank you all right the first agenda item is well actually we have questions from town residents did anyone call executive session we've been discussing public safety for several weeks now and we've met with the leadership of the town  we've decided to make a recommendation to the school committee and the superintendent in that regard because they've been unable to meet since our initial meeting on that topic and  installation of a school resource officer in the middle school which includes of course funding in collaboration with the school department in the school committee i have a second second all in favor  so this is a topic that we had on the agenda several weeks ago and coming back to revisit or actually to initiate the discussion because we ran out of and glenn have put together this five year forecast that takes us from fiscal year eighteen through fiscal year twenty three we start out with  and then it's projected to go to one twenty six fifty one in twenty one and one twenty three in fiscal year twenty three and twenty two and one twenty six and twenty three now one question you might have is why is fiscal twenty in fiscal twenty one flat and what is the reason for that for revenues for spee only in twenty one and i think it's because the other available funds are you going to pardon me those are in the in the free cash is that where that is yeah that's free cash that's  internet cost stabilization things like that right so the progression this is in revenues you see that right there in other available funds mark you said you have family all right so we're on we're on the same page we go from one ten to do it's reduced over time so the interest patient is that will have less and less money turn backs perhaps from the departments and you know that continue to restore free cash so nation just based on the five year projection that by twenty twenty three will be very low in terms of free cash available for writing and when you remember when patrice made her budget presentation she had that end of the year you have excess surplus actual never hits and then budget and then it's missed no it's misnamed in my opinion is free cash and it's not really free cash it's just what happens as a result of the budget cycle but this this is the way it goes here i think these numbers are directional if nothing else we don't yet know the future but in the absence of knowledge of the future there you are now if you look at the top of the next page it tells you the percentage change from the prior year and i think this is pretty much in line with our expectation to know it's between two and three percent it varies three and a half five point six i think we have can count on two and a half percent normal tax increase plus maybe a half percent in the new growth then we get to expenditures and we get to fix cost now one of the one of the the fixed cost go to the next page so we'll just just look at the difference between revenues less the estimated expenditures sixteen hundred sixteen there's also break even and then then you start getting into the numbers that we need to begin to try to manage right because in twenty this war cast says there's a five hundred fifty six million  thousand scuse me five hundred fifty six thousand not million deficit in then it grows to four point seven six point seven eight point two we're going to have to do something about that now one of the things that can come into play here is if you go back to fixed cost you see the retirement number growing there that's that's not our contribution to the know if you if you have a longer projection but in this series of of projections it's growing from seven point three to nine point three now this is all part of our plan to retire that obligation twenty twenty twenty nine we're about fifty percent funded more in the lower court trial statewide but things are progressing however i think you know to understand the impact of that situation on the budget if if we weren't making that payment the four point seven million in twenty twenty one would be a four million dollars surplus that the six point seven would be a one point or two point two to serve us and the twenty twenty three number would be a one point two million dollars surplus so one question is is there anything that we can do about retirement and the one thing that we can do is to approach the retirement board and asked them to extend it to twenty thirty two in if they do that it will flatten it'll it'll flatten the the amortization schedule it ten million it's not going to help us out in these years in particular because it has to escalate to ten million but beyond twenty twenty three it'll it'll save us that growth to twelve million so that's that's one possibility the other thing that this is is that we're go continue to increase the taxes at two and a half percent and we had the board of assessors before us the other day on a budget and we asked bob riordan if he expected that to continue to coming in right and we're we're going to have to do this does not have the high school in it and this projection does not have the high school in it so from my standpoint i think the high school i think of the high school is more of a solution than a problem because it takes care of the school buildings the school district buildings going forward and what's the new debt service in two thousand and twenty two there's two forty i thought that was don't know it goes up dramatic increase of six point one percent over time right dramatic increase that's the highest increase that's on here me you know it's in the nine to ten eleven twelve million dollar range creases more than  almost as much as health insurance and salary and wages so if you take a look at the top part of the other expenses you know where is i eat generally what's in there predict well i mean that's what everyone says but what we used to do in banking is we would you know we would make reasonable assumptions and then we would do what we call a steady state objection and  know i'm not saying this has to be changed i'm just saying if you want to you can imagine what would happen if you increased revenues three and a half percent and then you you kept this going you know because that retirements going to go up to twelve million and then the twelve million starts with the hope that through twenty forty one and i personally believe that you know we're still in hundreds of millions of dollars off of your direction because you couldn't do it any other way you had to have an idea of what's to happen and this you know this is something that that that deficit is probably not going to be cured  specifically by a tax increase or even an override there has to be some kind of structural change there has to be because otherwise it the numbers would be ridiculous so we're not documents financial documents from the town and they're working on well but the one that you put the jim makes is good i mean it's great we can in future projections and that's helpful because you know to extent even after five years against a pretty even softer in terms of projections but if you look out twenty one twenty two significant deficit is we have to plan for that right yes way and so what does that mean i don't know but you know perhaps this board or a future board needs to sort of start to look at other any structural things that we can conserve because this is not if if you raise taxes two and a half percent a year for ten years that's a thirty five or thirty four point nine percent increase in if you had the high school on top of that which again i don't think was the problem i think it's the structural problem but if you have that on top of it you're looking at a fifty percent increase in taxes over ten years and you talk about not sustainable i suppose some people can do that but in effect you're talking about s for me that's that's the question you know i mean we have the operate over right in fifteen of the fifty fiftieth's you get yeah i mean i also remember you know phil curtis from the work committee chair back was in zero nine or something when he stood up a town meeting and said we're to be running off a cliff next year we're going to go off a cliff next year and we didn't so well it's kind of hard to predict i don't think i'm not going to predict what the point is i mean doing doing financial projections which would give the financial task force and understanding that there's operating structural issues that we have to do to address over time it's not to be balanced in twenty one tweak it may be a deficit i don't know how much but it's something it's important to start to think about you know what's the plan because i think that's what summary of results by department and if you look at column five you will see that the total is eighty nine point eight million and this is as of june thirtieth two thousand and seventeen and you might remember from craig peacock's recent contagion we expect that number as of june thirtieth two thousand and eighteen to be nineteen million instead of the two hundred and something only and it was going to be so these numbers are ballpark i mean they're not exact but they're ballpark and they're close so you see that the unfunded actually were a crude liability for the right apartment is three point six million for water it's one point five and for sewer it's nine hundred thousand now i think as we discussed last year when mark and sammy and i were here i think that the light water and sewer the enterprise funds should be paying their their full cost and together they account for about ten percent of the overhead liability if you march down just you'll see a thing called normal cost which is that's what that's what we paid this is as of june thirtieth two thousand and seventeen so that's the normal cost of retiree health care for these three enterprises every year and then you go down to nine and you'll see the thirty year amortization and if you add those two numbers together you get twelve the only determined are that's the famous recommendation for what we should be putting away in order to retire this in at a date certain in this case it would be twenty forty one because of the way that the obligation was restructured do you remember that more you know so in other words right now we go out to twenty twenty nine and then we switch the twelve million over to opec and then pays zero five off and forty one it's right so in making this decision what we're talking about is not necessarily changing you know these deficits that we saw in near term in the five year projection but what it does do is one of the ways to reduce this liability for the future is to begin to fund it and right now we're using we're using free cash to do that and again i believe that we should be you know that like water and sewer should be self funding so when you get down to the thirteen the projected benefit payments the one forty the ninety two in the thirty one you see those yeah that's equivalent to what you see on number six which is the normal cost so it's you know they're just saying ok it's you know instead of twenty five it's going to be thirty one instead of forty three it'll be ninety two and what kathy is telling us is if the sewage department pays forty one thousand you subtract the thirty one from the seventy two and if water pays thirty five in light pays two thirteen that will satisfy that will satisfy the arc going forward because we're making those payments in the budget anyway i'm confused with what numbers so you know the and if you put those numbers into actually into all three of those enterprise funds it doesn't change the rates small dollars but the other thing that kathy's recommending is that we continue putting the free cash that we're putting in alongside this and so what that does is it gives you like thirty to forty five to eighty plus five hundred so you'll be up to about seven fifty so the numbers it really had no impact on the rights or does it do it from a show to to put push additional money aside which which is which is challenging you know in the budget seasons even though if you can't spend it on anything else yards it's what eight thirty six thousand thirty seven thousand for water right correct in the middle of it obviously a lot more for about two hundred and ten thousand for like  benefit does that provide to us from an opec perspective when you get to twenty and it's mine or dollars that you know and you get to twenty twenty it's like we were talking about warren buffett today we call and buffet at the french bank it's the power of compounding interest because if you if you put what we have a calculation that shows if that number goes to eight fifty from the five fifty that were put in there piece of those we can you know we can do one of the sort of like like for us and you like but if there's a actuarial benefit or funding benefit of some reduction in small dollars and i certainly would consider it well and if you look at the town that's the three sixty six the million to the million to you know it's town public safety school we're not we're not suggesting that the town can afford to you know put those numbers in you see what i mean yeah i mean actually we're not seeing the fine art for the for the town we've got to come up with another you know we're not talking about four million below we're saying use use that free cash flow calculation you know to cover t free cash flow calculation to cover the town ok and then have the enterprise fund paid or i'm willing to consider water and swore like the farm and separate if it has some kind of an actuarial benefit to us ok what would benefit be i don't know the i don't answer that's my asking is there any benefit to funding enough to make you know we have we're not required to fund we have the at we have the answer is there any kind of long term funding you know benefit for this for the small dollars or is a pretty small dollars right the way helps you the way is that we say yeah i did things neutral and things are shifting from one pocket to the other i disagree that it's neutral because you have to look at twenty thirty through twenty forty one so instead of paying twelve million the twenty twenty nine to twenty forty one is it's twelve years and to reduce that liability by two million dollars is worth twenty four million dollars like to see that know this is just a simple bow so to whenever you go from bond you have to give a lot of document back to back up one of the things that the bond council requires is a vote from the board of selectmen saying that the selectmen of the town of belmont massachusetts certify that a meeting of the board at a meeting of the board held in march twelfth two thousand and eighteen will give you a copy of this ok then you don't have to which meeting all members of the board were doing and it which a quorum was present the following vote was unanimously passed all of which appears upon the official record of the board in my custody voted that the maximum useful life of the modular classrooms to be financed with the proceeds of the two million seven hundred thirty four thousand borrowing authorized by the vote of the town seven one to be ten years i further certify that the votes were taken at a meeting open to the public and that no vote was taken by secret ballot  secret that a notice stay in the place daytime an agenda for the meeting which agenda included the adoption of the butt of the above votes was filed with the town clerk that was the agenda for this meeting right and a copy the a post in a manner conspicuously visible to the public at all hours in or on the municipal building that the office of the town clerk was located or if a political in accordance with an alternative method of notice prescribe or approved by the attorney general as set forth in nine four zero code of massachusetts regulations code of massachusetts regulations twenty nine point zero three parentheses two parent es lower case b at least eight hours not including saturday sunday and legal holidays prior to the time of the meeting and remained so posted at the time of the meeting that no deliberations or decision in connection with the subject matter of this vote were taken in the executive session all of the cordons with general law chapter thirty a now there's two budgeted an eleven percent increase in health insurance costs and we just want to get some back up information as to why that's occurring first i want to start off by saying the medical and pharmacy trends combined are roughly nine percent so are making or the deming to beaumont of the just in general from industry perspective in general in general so when you get your renewable from harvard pilgrim healthcare the actuaries have made some general assumptions on what the trends would be and the general trend out there combining medical and pharmacy together is approximately nine percent it's a little bit different by product but overall the trend is about nine percent so that is a good portion of why we're looking at an eleven something else that we take a look at are your large claims obviously you have some people who have very small claims you have to medium size claims and then you have very large claims a lot of what drives your increases are those large claims so we take a look at claims that are over one hundred twenty five thousand dollars per person per year or the total dollar amount of those claims from there's it there's a two year period when we look at the renew well so from the older period to the newer period the cost of those claims actually increased by seventy four percent and we have stop loss you do have stopped the act you do have a stock yes you cap right now is one hundred fifty thousand questions or it might answer some questions i just pulled out two categories of utilization that also had a very large increase one was amsa larry services which labs x rays things of that nature those costs increased by twenty percent outpatient pharmacy costs i'm not talking about people going to pick up their insurance when you go through this could you say is their services increased twenty percent is that by volume or is that because  utilization ok outpatient pharmacy costs so for example not people going to the pharmacy to pick up their prescriptions but drugs that are administered on an outpatient basis chemotherapy is a great example of that those costs actually increased by sixty five percent even with the so the quit plan that you just converted to though that's for your medicare population most of what we're discussing right now is for your active plans which would also include retirees who are under sixty five we also took a look at your highest cost hospitals being utilized brigham and women's around auburn a mass general obviously we know that those at the highest cost or especially bergman mass general those are very high cost hospitals but you have high utilization at those providers and he's emergency room visits population because you continue to cover people even into retirement and in a municipality you do have people who retire prior to age sixty five when they would be able to go on to medicare and so comparing yourself to the private sector it is an aging population that is that's correct one of the one of the things that we take a look at when we're setting the rates every year is the trust fund so mass general our chapter thirty two b requires that a self  plan have a trust fund where you're required to have enough funds that are available to pay for claims that are incurred regardless of when they're paid to be financially prudent and this was a back in fiscal zero eight when the town first consolidated their plans into a self insured plan we have very lengthy and serious conversations about the trust fund because in years past the town had had a portion of their health insurance on a self insured basis but it was not the entire pool for a self insured plan to be successful you really have to manage and run the trust fund properly which a ton of belmont has done since f y o eight however health insurance costs are also very cyclical and again i keep referring to the last bullet point which maybe i should have made the first bullet point but we'll get to that in a minute health insurance costs tend to be very cyclical and you've had many many years of very small increases so you have to expect or it's not out of the norm to have a couple of years where there have to be adjustment was regress to the  made some adjustments to benefits plan design changes and so you actually had some decreases but to have a ten year average of three percent is actually pretty phenomenal out of those years you had a low of a negative four percent and again that's when you made the plan design changes and then last year was nine percent and there's generally just from an industry perspective you know what's the in utilization metric you say the trend is in general that's just the general services to choose who to nation whatever might be going up nine percent correct more massachusetts because we're fortunate to be living here because of the quality of the care that we get we have all the teaching hospitals there's a lot of technology right but we pay for it right so looking forward is self insurance still a good idea risk number one they set the rates and number two they build in a risk factor so your premiums we know from the renewal that we got from harvard pilgrim that your rates would have been a lot higher had you been fully insured and the eleven percent correct are correct ok so we're talking about what are things that we can do when again i just want to remind you that with an average of three percent over the last ten years you've done very very well and again you have to expect that there are going to be a few years where are your utilization is going to increase and you just may have to readjust the rates to get back to where they actually need to be ok so what what you're experiencing i know it's not great for the town it's not great for your budget for the employees you know it's not it's not out of the norm to see this after having had so many great years so different things that we can take a look at there were plan to sign changes back in f y thirteen so effective july two thousand and twelve and things have not changed since then with the exception of the change that was just made to the retiree plan on january one by going to the plan which is the medicare part d plan for prescription drugs so we can take a look at other plan design changes we can take a look at tearing of different benefits right now you actually have tiered rick so you can look at tearing the philosophy behind tearing is to not take choice away from employees but to say if a local community hospital can provide  service more cost effectively than going to a more expensive hospital if you choose to go to that more expensive hospital you're out of pocket expense is going to be greater and as you can see on this chart you currently have that with your hospital co pays because there's a split in the tier in the hospital co pays other things that you can take a look at limited network plans are starting to come into the market if you remember many many many years ago when h m o's were first introduced there were a lot of different plans because they were all sort of geographically located the h m o s the massachusetts now are like the old days of master medical under cross and blue shield almost every single provider participates in these plans so it's almost like the old indemnity plan one way to control costs is to get back to having a select network where the carriers can negotiate greater discounts and maybe you don't have choice of every single provider or every single hospital in the state but there could be good quality hospitals and in exchange for not having one hundred percent of the providers you would see greater discounts which in turn mean lower rates i was talking to harvard pilgrim today about the mail order plan to see if we should encouraging more people to use that and i'm actually waiting for an answer to see how much less expensive the prescription drugs are under the mail order plan but this sheet that i handed out really it's just to show you where the town of bel mont's benefit plan design is as of today versus the g i sees tops navigator plan and the reason i'm that i'm showing that comparison is under the statute that you've negotiated health insurance changes under which is mass general law chapter thirty two b sections twenty one through twenty three the town can negotiate up to the level of the g i see what's considered the benchmark plan which is the toughest navigator so i'm just showing you a comparison here of where your plans are compared to the say your region this would all be possible to appreciate all the percentage increases so to sort of frame for me please would be possible to get the actual breakdown of costs how much we spent on pharmaceuticals how much was in patient no patient do we have all of that we can get to that degree yes thank you because you can reduce prescription millwater if greater percentage of our costs related to a patient so you hear earlier earlier this evening yes did you see this number twenty twenty three benefits we're talking about managing offering budget on the town that goes from four point six to six point two in eighteen to twenty three that's two million you agree with that yes and then on the schools goes from seven to the nine point nine that's two point seven yes so that four point seven of that number yeah so health insurance is something that columns needs to always ha you know by one in two million dollars and i think if the board and to focus its attention on those matters you know these numbers can be managed down you know this is you know but you know employees one right now i know but the opportunity is in the us and i think that's right and i think that's something that we need to focus on especially this kind of a spike you know and considering the fact that perhaps the number employees are aging you know need more health care are redone the sidewalks are not to stretch the money to do more streets but now that the worst streets have been redone we got the sidewalk study done twenty fifteen over ride past partly for roads and people driving less so i wanted to revisit the sidewalk policy that and to do something which would prioritize sidewalks to be done as those associated with heavier use such as by schools public buildings parks and cetera so i drafted something i gave it to patrice who gave it to glenn who revised it made a way more precise than what i i'm sorry and so we say we're considering a change or or that this is something we want to discuss this is a new policy that we have that we're looking at the i would like to see us adopt to this is a policy that where is right being recommended by glenn that is correct right thank you so i have a brief presentation adam thank you for the introduction you fire that i had known you were going to do that you would have saved me like two hours of sweating my introductory comments because you just boiled it down nicely and so as a result of the concerns that were raised by the pilot haven't you residence in your direction to come up with a curbing policy i went back and i began to look at the issue in what became apparent to me was that this wasn't necessarily a conversation that was framed curbing prosy the issue that was raised on violet avenue was the lack of adequate separation between the roadway and the sidewalks after we constructed barlett avenue because we didn't have the ability to put curbing and there was no there was no adequate separation between roadway and sidewalk and so that what was really needed on barlett avenue was the ability to put curbing in so that would allow us to reestablish the grass shoulders on bartlett avenue which would then in turn create that buffer between roadway and pedestrian so as i began to study the issue town wide what i came to recognize was that the vast majority of roads in belmont either have some kind of a curb treatment already in place granite or asphalt and or a grass shoulder that separates the roadway from the sidewalk a lot of the neighborhood roads have a very well established crash older that's providing a nice buffer between the roadway in the sidewalk and so as i begin to dive deeper into this what i came to realize was the importance of that shoulder treatment ok and what that really meant for how the road functions for pedestrians as they use that road in belmont they're primarily for treatments that you'll find on the shoulder of the granite curb an asphalt curb a grass shoulder or in the case of  avenue and a few other roads in belmont an asphalt shoulder shoulder treatment may or may not include curbing shoulder treatment must provide a buffer for pedestrians that was sort of my working premise as i really peeled back this issue and got to the crux of it the shoulder treatment must provide a buffer for pedestrians just to give you a brief overview so the top top section of granite curving to the appropriate for major roads prior to two thousand and seven when the focus of the pavement program was mostly on the major roads all of the roads that we were able to do in that time we put granite curving in so if you look at a network of the top of the town and you look at the major roadways virtually all of them have the granite turban already which really puts us so far ahead of the game asphalt curbing is appropriate for local roads there's an example of asphalt curving there you can see how the asphalt curving has helped establish the grass shoulder between the sidewalk and the roadway we've used it on the pain management program for motion control purposes because the policy didn't allow us to put it in in places where it was really needed our focus was limited to areas where we were concerned the the grass shoulda woulda road and so we put the curbing in to help with the roshan but that was really the only latitude we had to install the asphalt curving grass shoulders as i said exist on many roads it's a photo there because of the shading but what you see in that picture is a nice vegetate aggression older there is not a curb treatment there so you've got roadway you've got a grass shoulder you've got the sidewalk the grass shoulder provide support the protection for pedestrians because a motorist who's looking to pull over on that roadway is inclined to stop at the edge of the grass where you have an asphalt shoulder which is what's  depicted on the bottom of the slide there's nothing to prevent that car from pulling off the road talking up on the shoulder and in some cases you are in shock yeah and in some cases parking right on the pedestrian sidewalk under no circumstances an asphalt shoulder ever a good idea that is that is the condition that we are trying to get at most with this policy there are functional benefits to having ra allows you to plant trees and one of one of the things that you come to realize as you study this matter is in terms of an adequate buffer between roadway and sidewalk the grass shoulder is great when you introduce trees into that crash old and i have created an additional element that provides a buffer between automobiles and the sidewalk so reestablish ingrassia was where they where they don't exist currently allows us to do that storm water management there is that there is a storm want to major benefit because you're now taking it impervious area of asphalt and replacing it with with grass and soil which can absorb some of that runoff keeps vehicles on the road we've talked about that off the shoulders and sidewalk provides a visual buffer for motor vehicles the same thing of a motor vehicle traveling down the road let's say you pull over to another vehicle pass or make some kind of movement like that the grass shoulder it provides the visual limitation of where you can be in that vehicle so you're jew you're less inclined to drive up on the shoulder or are on to the sidewalk so one side one  b began in my mind to frame that this was really an issue about shoulders and having an adequate separation between sidewalk and roadway it then became a question of scoping scoping the town wide how much of that need existed  did that and what i came to find was that there's approximately four hundred roadway segments in the paper management program only ten percent of that four hundred forty forty roads have the need right now are either granite turbin because they're a major road or we have some some other areas to complete couple of ends of cross street a segment of grove street a segment of school street those three come to mind so there's a limited number of the main roads that we will we want to put granted in and then there's you know i approximately thirty to thirty five neighborhood streets that have asphalt shoulder that we want to reestablish so in context of the of the town as a whole ten percent is really what we're aiming at with this policy so once i had the scope down then the final question was can we funded ok so what i did at that point was i looked at what we had for funding in the program i want to give some historical context here so back in two thousand and seven when the decision was made to remove curbing from the policy the backlog at that time to fix the roads that needed repair was forty one million dollars what that means is the that means that in two thousand and seven in order for you to fix every road that needed repair in that year you would have needed forty million dollars the backlog in two thousand and seventeen ten years later has gone from forty one million to twenty four million ok so we have made a significant dent in that backlog ok so that right away right there it's like ok you know what maybe there's some hope here right so now we look for the kind of some background that  we got obviously got some positive results by taking sidewalk and curbing out of the out of the policy at that time we're very aggressive with our crack sealing and patching maintenance but i wouldn't want to seven two thousand and seven dollars in two thousand and seventeen dollars if that was in two thousand and seven so it would be more surveyed every road in town so we have an updated pavement condition rating on every road in town now that is what has allowed us to really give an accurate snapshot of the of the condition of our network today for programming purposes what i'm doing  budgeting i figure a lifecycle of twenty years for the major roads ok so you really reconstruct a major road after twenty years you've got a mill an overlay and you've reached its lifecycle twenty five years on the role on the local roads when you look at the budgeting for the next however a number any number of years ok with what you're trying to determine is whether you've got out of what funding to meet the backlog for the funding cycle that you've identified the life cycle we can do that ok and not only can we do that but there's an additional three hundred thousand in you only of capacity that we can put towards curbing and sidewalk we're hearing that from its beak because of the work that we've done in the last cen it's well he's got to get to the sidewalks piece of it but right yes so so the question then becomes of the three hundred thousand can we find a curbing policy the answer is yes can we also fund sidewalks to a certain degree yes and i say a certain degree because i've looked at a five year plan i put a five year plan together now based on this funding model based on a three hundred thousand dollar amount ok using the sidewalk condition report that public works commission last fall so when i program a street for reconstruction i look in the book and i see what the kind of condition of the sidewalks and will they need to be replaced if so what is just to be the cost to replace those sidewalks in the next five years the funding levels in it right now that's ok so it's important as i said i'm looking at right now a five year window in that five year window we've got the funding to cover that now in year six we could be faced with a list of thirteen roads and every one of those roads in the new sidewalk in which case the three hundred thousand dollar budget for sidewalk will be blown ok but it didn't happen in that first five years and so there's some flexibility there in a given year you may decide you know what i'm going to cheat a little bit on the money i put toward roads so i can address sidewalk in that given year and then them in the next year the sidewalk required than the amount of money required for a sidewalk for that list of roads maybe one hundred  thirty thousand because the up with one if that sidewalk condition report told us anything there are a lot of really good condition sidewalks in the town there's a lot of bad ones but there were a lot of good ones too and so it's really a luck of the draw from year to year outside of f y e team because i was all we are already kind of tied into that with my budget and going into this year but outside of eighteen so nineteen twenty twenty one of the subsequent four years after that i don't have the two hundred thousand dollars d p w sidewalk money in my budget ok so that's an additional two hundred thousand dollars that could either be available to spend on a paper mansion project or give it back to public works and say you guys start chipping away at your backlog of maintenance work that you need to do so you now no but once that road comes up for pavement management and if it's a candidate for curbing that'll be programmed in if it's a candidate for a sidewalk that will be programmed in and that's all been considered in that five year plan that i that i took a ok so in in my mind to prioritize the retroactive work that needs to be done really sort of come up with some categories of you know different uses for on these roadways so school walking routes asphalt curbing would be installed to reestablish grass network whereby as a pedestrian you leave your residential neighborhood you want to walk to one of the commercial areas for example eventual your walk is going to lead you to a collector or an arterial road that is going to have a concrete sidewalk and grim kirby and most mobility town wide used to man locations these are locations that are their destination points parks playgrounds houses of worship public buildings schools  the policy would would have the town put in curbing it depending on where the use is located whether it's on a local road or a major road put in curbing along adjacent to the frontage of that area so either asphalt or granite depending on the location once again the good news with that is if you lay out a map of the town and i did this with that in the trees if you lay out a map of the town and you highlight those so called used to man locations for actually every one of them already has curving inside so that the number that we the number that would have to be done to close the loop on that is very small it's part of that that the pool of forty that are doesn't include grass shoulders threshold is a fine for now if you have a  providing an adequate buffer already the challenge we have on that that in that pool of forty the challenge we have is there are a lot of local roads that do not have the grass shoulder it's asphalt and the goal is to reestablish  in the beauty of the policy here is to is to base the work that's done for sidewalks on merit only and not responding to whoever the noisiest neighborhood is or having some neighborhoods feeling like they're neglected more in favor of other neighborhoods which is things that i have heard if we have a policy it's democratic it's fish based on merit only it's based on the things that glen decided this boom boom boom you can just point to the policy and say that this is what we're doing in this is why the fact the fact that glenn took this little thing i wrote in them blew it out into something way better written i should say and then also was able to find the funding source for it which doesn't change the budget is it brilliant i'd really like to pass this so we can move forward getting the sidewalks taken care of because i think they've been the confinement are too long you have a couple questions if i've been part of a level throughout the whole three years ago that's the case well my first question was going to be how does this compare to what we were doing i mean it's not like it wasn't out of control or anything it's you know you  d your list and you had your priorities and i mean what is the difference between the way things are in the way this is proposing the difference is that before we would fix the road and give no consideration to the shoulder residents of that street we have to pay for it that's right no people have always complained about the quality of the roads but as you point out that they're getting much better right because the backlog is down the streets have been upgraded even though you still have your plan right that's right and so you just open road yeah that's right i just want to also point out that oftentimes people will complain about the condition of roads because of utility work that is ongoing situations now for example clifton lower clifton prospect street up to the belmont hill school where national grid is working ok they're doing a number on that road but but they're still in the middle of that operation so somebody driving on that road is going to come away with the perception that point these roads are really difficult but the fact of the matter is public works in this street opening permit process has not run the full course up there yet once national grid is done with their work once you know once public works invokes the final paving requirement up there just like wall street grocery coming from washington people complained about that for a year with all that the work at national grid did when they finally reached a point in that process where they could restore the road again under the street opening permit they paved it and now everyone's like wow this road is great again so well i wanted to ask you to tell us again how many miles of road there are seventy five they go seventy seven point on bart road was but you said that's going to be a priority then to right yeah as discussed last fall we identified five or six roads that will be retroactively addressed now that we've determined that we can do that funding wise ok and then a lot of people  consider grass to be bad and i'm just wondering is it is grass good as a median or is grass bad is a median you know in front of my house there's grass there's no you know there's no curbing but that's ok because the grass is there right i don't water it or feed it or anything else and it comes back every year so i don't think about it you know i do most thank you  but i don't think of it as i don't think of grass as being a bad thing out what's the consensus i mean to the the stormwater management people do they like grass for oh i have absolutely no any fact if you're looking at a purely from a storm water point if you're you would not want curving because you would want the ability for the water shutting off the roadway to leach into the shoulder rather curbing is going to prevent that he also has been said this is not just grass it also has the opportunity for you to put in trees there right but right ok so for the public then we have seventy the just in terms of execution implementation we vote in favor of this policy tonight you merely execute on this start the process of considering you know i am already prepared to implement this thank you very much really behind here because i want to hear i'm a big item i want to hear your ideas and i don't know where it is we have the soup you folks here but the demo delays of we have demolition delay coming foley's here and we have to do presentation is going to be a little unusual because what we're going to ask you to do oh hush what we're going to do we don't have that we need permission from you is actually to withdraw one politicians based on our discussions with his star commission and ok so the petition that we're withdrawing is forty nine through sixty three so we have no action on that ok so we could we could vote to allow the withdrawal just to close the loop if you like with love i think of  the historic commission the demolition bylaw with some clarification so what is happening is that we respect the forty nine through sixty three we're withdrawing the application because the his start commission and luck itself we have agreed on a letter which we're going to deliver to them actually the commission is going to deliver to the polling in spite of that clarifies the application off the demolition buyable to that particular building and we have a plan that's been submitted this i have to say that outcome that this appeal went you know really well and and we were it was a really constructive discussion and it the big issue that after much discussion the start commission can concurred was that the macy's pool and of what was listed on the demolition delay has been altered so much that it has essentially lost its historic integrity so the local telly team was able to produce drawings and photographs to demonstrate the level of alteration which is in fact one of the criteria so this wasn't a challenge to the by law this wasn't a criticism of the historic district commission which was great it was simply following the criteria and  having seen the documentation the commission concurred the other issue that came up which we were very sympathetic to is a concern that is shared  many and that is the degree to which the demolition delay might affect someone's ability to do work in the future now we know that that it's only demolition but a lot of folks worry about that and the local team was particularly concerned that there might be a question in the building department when they had an immediate need to renovate a storefront for a new tenant so we agreed to sort of do a clarification memo for the file that would clarify that those sorts of of that sort of work is not subject to the demolition to it and it is something that we've been thinking about anyway this used full for all people who are on the demolition to lay a list and in fact we've had two other property owners who've come to us for clarification and leave we've you know in one instance put a note in the file that said the garage is not subject so we're happy to do that for any any property owner and this was just a very well organized and very constructive dialogue so it means that for one of the properties that listed we would propose removing a portion of it from the demolition delay i thought it was great that you guys all settled down this out i don't think there's a whole lot for us to even have to do the only question i have though you want your you're withdrawing the appeal forty nine sixty three but then yes there is a note in here that would be subject to the provisions of the biologics the upper story so what's what's where jets that's just as i that's my mostly african nation of forty thousand sixty three no that's just a clarification about how one applies the demolition delay by law to this particular property which would be true for you know in store fronts can be renovated but the upper part of the well could be demolished it just it just will what it will do is when a building permit comes to the building department there won't be a pas owed us and the scratching of one's head do we need to contact the historic district commission it will be very clear it will be in the file and the work can proceed so all right so so i want to start with a more simpler motion i move that we accept the also green lauren that the site will be removed from the from the demolition delay list yes so the proposal is to remove sixty five through eighty nine no seventy three through eighty nine seventy twice right for him for his yes and certainly want to allow the optimists tables to command and present his case we we don't we can figure in the first time to allow you in he just said yes i think he's been here before you twice and then people to think of us like the bud light commercial you know we're to do a deal you know we're we're not we're not dismissing uses of life right now but yeah yeah point but it's not that way i think that there's there's   local historic district a town meeting and kathy will be making the presentation a town meeting and she put the slides together that are in your proposal in your packet  in the town of belmont and also in the commonwealth of massachusetts so in effect what the local historic district does is it provides a design review process for the exterior portions of the home that are only visible from a public way so we don't cover any parts of the interior we're only concerned with the exteriors portions of the home and only those that are visible from the public way  voluntarily she did yes i did what i really special about this historic district is that will be our first single building historic district in belmont those are being utilized more and more by towns in massachusetts there's four in wellesley right now there's one inside barrie there's over two hundred single building historic districts in massachusetts resettles eleven on the ways that over two hundred were to be well one of the reasons why it's being done is because it  really is a great tool for protecting houses and it does provide that layer protection that's more than a demo delay by law which are being used more by communities it provides more protection than a national register listing  and there's really no reason not to do it when the when the massachusetts general laws passed the ability to create historic districts the wording is always been in there that they could be single  buildings single buildings or single properties and i'm not sure why you know historic districts did originally always seem to form in clusters but that ability to create single ones has always been there it's just narrative that there's one other thing that i want to be prepared for to which is that we're working with a vial of review committee simultaneous because this will get incorporated into the general by laws and when we met with a violent review committee and they looked at the historic district commissioned section of the general bylaws they had some recommendations for sort of some housekeeping so they'll be they'll be kind i'll call it it in ministry of article that deals with some moving into you know of not nothing changes any content but it's sort of a cleaning up of the general to my office hours and talked about the food pantry and i'd been to the food pantry about a year ago which is now on the base for the true and it's a really bad space and it's gotten a lot it gets a lot of used as a store window as they used to be in the module as the high school now it was fantastic with the one thing it's not something that we're looking for a vote on but i think that laurie can describe it better than i can but just to set it up is that or whoever would be that talk about finding a place for them that's going to permanent whether that be back at the high school when it's done or whether that be in one of the modular is that we will not need any more once the high school is done in the enrollment has been solved and we don't have a need for the modulars at the generally or the high school or the burbank that we could repurpose them in some fashion having as a high school was good because the kids you know have a community service program requirement and they were able to deal with that by volunteering at the period through that having to drive anywhere because they're already there and move those modulus from where they are as a from  campus is just such a broad expanse of campus easily located and not to get in the middle in the way of what he said take place here from a building perspective but there's got to be some space at some point that we can look at on the high school campus and clearly the school  school department to understand that as well work with them at the denture that's where this could be located and so that i don't space and i know the high school as it is it's a tight it's a tight project so it's going to be a difficult thing to do but i think it was one of those to supply us with a space when we had none there was no place else for the school or the food pantry to go there are challenges to it but there there is such a welcoming community and they open up their doors to us so th they you know that his it's doable space what we're looking for is five years down the road because even my own home knows and i can feel it too that this is just really a temporary situation there's many reasons why is a temporary situation one of the things about being the site being in the high school was that we weren't in a residential neighborhood we are now in a residential neighborhood we've had to change our hours on saturdays because we were always open to eight thirty in the morning never realize that there were people who started lining up at five thirty in the morning and high school space it didn't impact anybody it didn't make a difference that we never knew the other spaces that we had it didn't really impact the neighborhood until we moved to mount hope and then i found out that they were coming i had a time earlier they're standing outside and there's a house right next to the entrance door and they love to talk and they don't realize that it's you know impact  pretty early in the morning they're sitting on their porches as they're you know because once they realized that they could stand there they would get there early they put their bags in line and then they've walked the neighborhood and then they're sitting on the neighborhood this is one of the responses that we got from the the e mail from the survey that becky did but so we're finding out it's really impacting the community itself the immediate neighborhood more than then we even expected because we just have never then in a residential neighborhood so this is you know one of the challenges for where we are now i know that you know we've parking is a challenge i think some of that is due to the lack of parking and lack of place there's not a lot of space at the site to wait so i think if it was in the high school you wouldn't have people wandering around the high school at five thirty in the morning it would be because there is ample parking they could be in their cars mean there's the need is great i was with people who require food assistance we have between i guess a regular basis and we have between one hundred forty one hundred eighty people it goes the numbers go up during survey for the residents was like did you know and like would you questions and about ninety percent of the people didn't know that food pantry has been opened since like ninety ninety two and been serving almost one hundred seventy families each year but also about like eighty percent of people said that they would be willing to support to find a new home for the like interesting how high the numbers were and people didn't know the information about  you remember what exactly cmu was involved that was involved as well to some extent so is there is it is very very is there a two step process here is a short term three to five year plan and i don't know with the hope and i don't think there's any plan mean do we need to think about and ask you know straight or whomever else this thing is or a short term solution to lead or the just the hey we can wait five years and hopefully with the high school building find something or maybe the high school building would open something somewhere else in i'm not seeming to the site tonight frank is there i mean can this survive if if in fact families do increase it's a residential neighborhood can utilization of the space in the next five years work for us so that you could be some challenges and council and a pastor in town and it's got support of the business community and i really do think the town needs to shoulder some responsibility for  because it's a town service and it serves the residents of the so i think having it ideally would have an ideal like five year solution and if there's a way to be a better look it would be hard to do five years i think now because it is a challenging space and because there's a lot of storage i don't think we need a vote as much as i write i think also i would like to actually point out and make sure that at the general public knows about this is the the pantry is self funded there has been never has there ever been any funds coming from that the actual town government the community has supported the at the the part that the town has supported the government has been a space you know we're in the fire station we're in the town and we're in the department we're in the macho building that was behind the high school and so it's always been the site that has been the  permanent home you know prospect a plea and you know from my point of view the primary home seems that make logical sense to me is the high school campus although you know there's so many things that we need to do the right i mean the issue maybe we not being that i was all working with the school department school wait another year and then we get a modulus so finding a short term solution that gets us through the five or six years for a more permanent home makes sense to me so thank you thank you  make the point out that it's ben the belmont high school students that developed our website that developed our logo that have supported you know in many ways the different  if you think about it if we can if we repurpose in march of last and we have fact have bought something or two that's true but i don't know about the location of the high school so you guys will have to figure that out but if  you know if you wanted to raise a million dollars you know to get into a lot of those guys raised almost four hundred thousand dollars you would bring in i think it's possible to raise a have a couple items really to go over one is just our annual report i can't remember i think we talked you guys last year around this time and the others just to review a couple surveys that we put together and that we're hoping to release to the nine member committee appointed by three different committees so you know all of point four members of the school committee appoints four members and the library board of trustees appoints one member and we have a fairly broad mandate we are by and large supposed to provide guidance to the board of selectmen town departments and committees on technology matters address matters of information delivery ensure access to communication technologies increase efficiency enter of transactions involving town departments work to ensure the deployment of infrastructure and town departments and citizen ri and engage in strategic planning and provide advice to the various departments one thing i  sort of say for you to think about us as we are kind of we are basically a valuable resource for the town we're sort of in into we're sort of a consultancy within the town with expertise in areas like networking cybersecurity application development telecommunications cloud computing open source supply chain so we've got a tremendous amount of talent on the committee and what we could be valuable to the town in a number of different endeavors so some of the recent initiatives that we've taken on just in the last year first and foremost the creation of two different subcommittees so historically and i've been on itek going back to a number of years when i was on school committee i was a school committee liaison provided assistance to the town really and some of the earliest adoption of computing technology and networking technology now of course we have wonderful animals mr petro and mr m with the issues that they have so that's an ongoing part of our committee and so we meet with them generally quarterly to talk about those issues in the meantime we work on other issues and that's kind o of the changes i think that's happened in the last year is just the committee itself beyond that we're with the liaison's in the various town i t department says engaging more with the community and among the things we've done this year our series fireside chats at belmont public library around cyber security so who is one of your appointment to the committee has done a great job glen works at a company called recorded future and brought a couple  folks in cyber security experts in recorded future to talk to the community about cyber crime fraud hacking and online threats or yeah it's a good service to the town you provide tremendous we had a presence at me belmont this year i think which might be the first time ever that high tech was at me and and within a subcommittee that phil and i set up or a part of which is the twenty first century committee we're looking at ways to use technology leverage technology is a part of the work that all committees to to engage better with the public provide more kind of participation with the public make of information available to the public in a more public comment to us for churches and yes so we've been able to do that basically for free yeah and google hangouts is a great platform to do it so we've been sort of leading by example that  it would need you basically the secretary of state has indicated that it would it's up to you to indicate whether committee members for example if one of our members was on the road on a business trip oh i used to read wanted to have also the committee to decide whether they want to do that or not so you're basically sort of giving him the freedom to and then it would be so if the law did he choose would welcome the opportunity to have someone like him or you know midcap prince working group you know there are times when three hundred sixty degree camera and then they've and they've written software that basically like if i were to put it here it would focus on all of your faces and all of our faces and then it displays them on the screen i'll send you the link it's really quite amazing but the set up is really just you plug it into the u s b port of your laptop you start your google hangout and it so what it does is for the people who are remote it really kind of puts you at the table where as people speak the camera will there their face will kind of come to one thing that has come up is you know when you when you are meeting online and when you've got a camera that's recording the meeting and the meeting is going on to you tube it does change and i mean dave i know we talked about this it does change the dynamic i mean you guys are used every meeting you have there's somebody in the room with you so for you guys it would be no different but obviously as you know many committees in belmont you have in your meeting publicly but now since this is the committee members in the room this  the list of of each meeting it has the number of participants that are coming in all you have to do is hit that when the event is ready to go live along to it now in it'll give you all the  can do with these four that's right so you know i'd hear all of them and so one of the things we're looking at is kind of ways to in introduce some of those types of platforms and some of the capabilities into the work that committees in town do because you're right it's the world has really advanced quite rapidly and have costs associated with cost associated with the online yet so again so for for what we've been doing now the cost zero i have a webcam and a laptop and the building provides internet we only know the thing i wanted to clear with you is just the only other thing i want to talk about is just the two and i think they're in your packet some two surveys that we put together one to give to other communities in town one to distribute to the public to really well done thank you and again this is really just sort of the jim's point trying to get a sense of what do you do as a committee because every committee and we've done surveys of other committees and it's true across all these towns most towns like belmont each committee kind of goes its own way on things so we're trying to get a sense of where people at what do you do you guys have done a lot of great work to make your materials available before your meeting but we're trying to get a sense of where that is across a task to so that all the community committees yes same with the public what sort of jim's point what technology are used to using have you ever done a web conference have you ever done a you know google hangout you know what technology are used to using in your personal life or your product or your current business life  rumors or did anything else and i think we've got just one last thing perhaps is that we do hear from the community about things like the robotics program that's going on in high school that and you know just try to try to get a sense for what what  technology and education is evolving and how we can participate in that maybe make some recommendations because we can benefit from the survey results yes with that we will come back to you with the survey results and with the report and again we are a resource so dollars for these people to have the antique license stores well there's a number of different groups that are covered under that to know by law dealer and second hand out of bill's registered solicitor taxi cab driver tend meaning a number of years ago voted to require these because of stolen unfenced articles that these antique stores and second to good stories were being sold stolen goods and selling them in this was require making sure that everyone was on the level of not running some  that the town charges yes that's my understanding because the people who have these businesses have been in town along and they're saying that you know to to do the background they're not asking to eliminate the i'm out to be honest with you because i was asked if i would recommend i think we should keep it the way it is this is what town meeting voted the reasons why it is as to dash as points earlier the reason why what we had put a placeholder because we were looking for feedback and we didn't one i don't believe that we should i think we should do this and will if i may just educate you're a little bit from last year me last year there was a rush to get it done and there was a move afoot to say ok maybe because of the circumstances maybe we relaxed the feed last year and then it was brought up again is this what we're going to do i said as far as i'm concerned an all time meeting voted this is the way it should be and we should move now we know we have ample time to move forward then we should go with the direction of the by law that it was just i don't i don't get the reason for take the fingerprints or goes in through the state police then the f b i it's a national check i think where i am on this patrice is that i don't think we need to change anything yeah i think ellen was just following from my understanding and i'm going to push as she is really i think she was trying to just she was going off i guess a previous conversation that this would be revisited at some point oh i said i don't know but i know i don't have a problem with her bringing it up i'm just i'm not hearing the reason to make a change that makes any sense to me it was inflaming thing i'd always been eighty have that this whole big thing i remember you started to meeting and explained all this the reason why inter meeting overwhelmingly in my memory yes approved this and it was only if it's it's a point that i don't ok you know this is something we either a taxicab driver she just told her department that's her that's her department not every department at the police running according to our phyllis and adam committed last year to investigate the cost to the town for all the lies and so's not just this town clerk  these license that's a separate topic and would require a town meeting or a call right that's the point you just mean no i mean the reason why we brought this up because when i brought it up to about all of our fees and whether they were covering our cost because i was concerned that they were because as time goes on the fee becomes almost probably too low yes there become a job right now is it your understanding that we need to give the antique dealers in extension to june thirtieth for anything  owners with information as they requested as well as following up on their questions she took off in england clancy had product on some of the concerns since we last met and i am currently generators i think it was like ok you know through the lens of communication with your counterparts heads have done well but it's just policy and procedure that i will be bringing to an upcoming meeting i have been working with various departments and stakeholders on this policy and how to have it before you in the next month as a buy a last stand currently it does not regulate noncommercial signs placed on t representative from cambridge to me development and senator brown for he is reaching out to have a representative from the m b t a present at the meeting he also i also asked him about state aid and he felt that the governor's funding level will pretty much hold t conduct public you do need for the direction from us in terms of or they want sufficiently directed to sort of short to have public hearings understand where this could be so yes people are waiting for the march fifteenth announcement of the rules which that's this is this is what they were earlier to early so what they also decided was dispensaries must set aside product for registered we should we should put that on the agenda for all that right so when