officers approval of minutes discussion of discussion of pace heathrow and other trash disposal disposal issues i want to talk about forming some internal study groups for some special first meeting of the new fiscal year welcome everybody i thought of since we do have some new and new members i would like us all the introduce ourselves and in so doing to speak loudly and slowly because frankly tucker in the back would like to get all your n much i wanted to just begin since it's our first meeting with a couple of general points about how these meetings will be organized first to repeat what you just heard from belmont media center it's very important not to keep your phone on the table even if it's on you or anything like that because when it vibrates it still is very noticeable on the microphone generally because every one of our meetings  is televised or we expect it will be televised it's important for only one person to speak at a time so that it's comprehensible to those watching the t v it's also important  loudly and distinctly so those on t v will be able to understand you i want to remind everybody that the war committee is governed by the open meeting law and all subcommittees that may be formed by the are governed by the open meetings law all meetings of any committee or subcommittee must prepare minutes in a timely fashion and must submit them to the town clerk in general  lisa will maintain meeting meeting minutes for the general warrant committee every subcommittee will a lot of minute taker who will be responsible for the minutes we will vote on minutes as soon as  practical after the meeting takes place ideally we will vote on minutes the week after the meeting or on the next meeting after meeting takes place in order to keep current on that otherwise it becomes a big housekeeping chor so what my practice is just to punch the highlights to summarize the key points and then i will go what i've been doing as i send them to jim and he doesn't overview i incorporate his his adjustments in perhaps the chairs and then you'll get them i'm going to pass this around this is just for our group it doesn't it doesn't have a wider complication new members if you could just put in for your information i don't hand igs previous numbers if you can just give me any updates thank you and i would add to that  apart from taking responsibility for your own comments in the minutes if you see anything in the minutes that you think is just wrong you should certainly bring it to be attention of the of the chair and and research in general every meeting because we are governed by open meeting law every meeting will have an agenda that's posted at least forty eight hours in advance the goal is to post the agendas as far in advance as possible but  frequently the situation is so fluid that it's not really feasible to get an agenda posted much before friday before the following wednesday vote will do the best we can  i've already distributed a tentative meeting calendar through december with that if topics but that's that's just my best guess as of a couple of weeks ago it's all subject to change  one thing i would like to be very stern about is having the meeting start promptly at seven thirty and then no later than nine thirty i am so insistent about ending that by nine thirty that even if somebody is in mid sentence we're going to end because  we just it just gets too late everybody's already had a long day if any member of the public is present we will stop at nine fifteen in order to let members of the public speak at the microphone however any visitors from eight speak only during what i will call the public contribution period that starts at nine fifteen unless recognized by the chair before that and if we have a topic where there is an extraordinary turnout i would consider starting public contribution earlier earlier than one fifteen to make sure everybody has an opportunity to speak want to ok appointing the nominating committee that then takes responsibility for identifying candidates that said we are a self governing body i don't believe we're subject to any other town ordinances or bylaws we make up our own rules and then we stick to them in this case the charge of the nominating you to identify at least one candidate for each of our three offices which is chair of ice chair and secretary nonetheless a my view is that a member is free to nominate him for him or herself for a particular office if they really want to be considered and the only rule at that point is that somebody cannot second themselves but you're free to nominate yourself and make any statement you like to explain why you would like to be elected but then of course  the actual selection of officers is by a majority vote but with that i understand jeff will be in may have some comments or question so i'll share thank you so i reached out to roy earlier today i was talking to a couple town  town members about the work committee they have to see the john and they're curious about the nominee committee and embarrassingly i didn't really know how it worked so i did some day and i looked at the bylaws i looked at the meeting times to understand if it was anything prescribed and how that works and roy is very very common in that it's termed within so the question was how is the committee determined and are they so what's the what's the process who's determine who good to ask that and let the public know well i can say that i asked three people to form a committee and really out of a concern that there's typically not a great press of people who want to serve as officers in the war committee and my primary concern is that we have at least one kerry for each office so my view of the conning committee is that they should identify at least one likely prospect and if anybody else wants to put themselves forward during the meeting that's fine but i think in this case i did ask five o'clock to head off the committee whether that committee is subject open meeting law something considered serving at only a heartbeat away from being chair so we looked at the same qualities we found them in somebody and we found she also had a great political ins instincts and we settled on schreiber and so in the category of is there any further discussion i would ask if any member would like to make any other nominations they're free to speak up and i'm pleased to accept your nomination and vote this is actually here where the vice chair may fill in more than historically has been the case because i may be out of the country at the time first time meeting in may but will say just a heads up six months ok the next item on our agenda is approval of minutes from last june which has circulated recently if you want to chance to take a look at them on these minutes that i was pleased to read that in june i said that i thought that the work on the p w and police station could be done for about five million dollars you having heard already the proposal by the major capital projects working group for the d p w police station will be just slightly below five million dollars we knew something back in june so  other disposal disposal options for the town of elmont in the next disposal contracts in some sense this topic is a little moot because the selectmen have already voted and at the time this topic originally occurred to me and even when the agenda was submitted the exact status of the r p for the trash for the next trash contract was not clear to me but it's been clarif barrel and put it out on the curb and the barrel will be picked up by a truck with an automated arm to be dumped into the truck and placed back on the curb  and that will be the system for everybody in town with the exception of those who will petition basically d p w to say that the sixty five gallon barrel provide creates various hardships and the alternative for them will be a smaller barrel which will be roughly half that size whether or ability or storage or whatever there will be that option in addition if somebody generate so much trash that it doesn't all fit in the sixty five gallon barrel the option exists to purchase so called overflow bags which will have some fee attached to it so that you could set out t robust so i attended the selections meeting where this decision was voted on and at the time i spoke up because i had a couple of questions about how the automated system would work versus what we have now and so i would say the down should call the downside but the practical difference is that currently it can set up as much trash as you like and it's picked up manually so when the truck comes down the street one or two guys chase after the truck pick up the barrels through other men and so forth  change into the automated system will obviously entail changes in behavior and i'm sure that the town can adapt what was not the  what was not discussed in any detail the selections meeting was the financial advantage of going to an automated system over the current manual system and then secondly there wasn't any real clarification of what happens if the automated system runs into practical difficulties of collection such as a truck or a car blocking access to the barrel sort of the arm can't get in  the truck and jimmy fallon asked me the other day with all the existing in his trash barrels that people have isn't that kind of wasteful to dispose of them and i don't know the answer to that the the bottom line of all that was these the question in my part about what the financial gain would be to the town from automated it versus the alternatives of staying with what we've got budget from from several years back and i went back as far as two thousand and fourteen but by far this is the largest single item in the solid waste budget is what's called trash collection trash collection is the actual driving of the trucks around the town to collect whatever's on the curb the second largest item is called disposal figures the trash collection is really something over a million dollars and the supposal is something over half a million dollars in terms of growth rate surprisingly since two thousand and fourteen it looks like the disposal of the disposal fee has been almost flat which i expect reflects two things one is that the the disposal fee i imagine has been going up i don't know exactly by how much but it's going up but at the same time even with our current disposal system the volume of waste that's generated has been falling and the net effect is  faster than revenues and it's sort of thing to control i mean so yeah just on that i mean revenues you know are tax tax on levy can go up two and a half percent and and the new growth has his historically been about zero so it's really closer to three and a half three o four which is which is which is fairly close to what this growth but in in this it's this is one of the largest single items in the entire budget and so i guess at best it's growing just a little bit faster than our revenue so it's i think we have fun and interesting to control this particular category as best we can and i at this point gather that we are committed now to an automated system but i i just don't know how much more effective an automated system will be compared to manual control in the us so it's good to let me as well  short term first person contract that it would be maybe even slightly more costly hold off because of the cost of the trucks and the bins that have to be sent out to all the residents but that in the longer term we would ship safe and he estimated about one hundred fifty thousand dollars a year or more but not much more on the labor costs for having out of a truck that was his response to my question of after start a period there would be a hundred  recycling program with the green well used in my neighborhood is green bins that that won't change the the modification right now is that if you have bulky waste like a mattress or a large piece of furniture you will now be limited to one bookie item per week which has to be a sticker yes i'm just a quick quick come quick but so i was also at the meeting and for most of the meeting and you know i think it's sort of a done deal but i was a little bit puzzled optional the automated collection with the sixty four gallon bins and so at this point they'll get back proposals and the cost information they will get back will be solely about that option and and but ultimately we don't know whether mean this whole topic it's really sort of being under under the you know under the control of the board of selectmen and if i clear to what extent they've invited the ward committee to the tomb if i use them on it we we are we are here really to support eating right and you know rather than sort of getting into the you know getting into the details of how trash pickup works i mean i you know we're we're a we're a bunch of we are we are a bunch of them analysts and in some cases condoms that's number one training and if you're talking about you know trying to cut cut down on the cost of trash i mean you know a basic economic principle is that if you charge for it you will get less and i think that's what the board of selectmen must've had to factor in to consideration when when they thought about the pay as you throw it is because that was the only real proposal putting a price price on the trash and if they want i mean i mean that's that's the kind of contribution that we can make at a big at a big one level just to sort of point out what the financial incentives are that's when you know you're getting into exactly whether these trucks are are large enough for the streets of me that's a separate that's a separate matter i wasn't proposing that we get into the operational practices trash collection but since this is a large budget line item and it's something of interest to a lot of people in town i think i think it's useful for us to get educated on the topic and  conversation almost two years ago during the election season and the promise was made that we were doing this two year contract and then there would be a big public process where people could participate in the conversation  watched it on t v it was to be there but i haven't seen other public meetings about it and granted the committee that investigated stuff is a public committee but i was expecting public meetings and so we haven't had that until the meeting where there was a public meeting and they made a decision on the on on the spot because there's a deadline and i also was expecting the r p to have some options in it where there would be price options i know that the committee has also investigated financial benefits of the different solutions there was the sixty four gallon solution one of the ones they discussed at the meeting was  thirty thirty five gallons thirty three thirty five thirty five gallons solution in addition to the pay as you throw so there's lots of permutations of all of that and i also from with this ha partly because of the size of the budget but partly because we really don't know what the price variance is going to be until we get the prices and so i'm also disturbed that we're not sending out an p with different options in order to get numbers back i think for all of this the devil is in the details and you know here we are we've made a decision we haven't looked into it i know there's a committee that has but we don't have their financial knowledge no and i am at this point relying on informed conjecture i guess  think that a kind of professional level my assumption is that he has actually got a lot of information about where the market is with these different alternatives what we did here at the meeting last week was i think a very definite belief by d p w that putting out multiple options in the r p actually le to less competitive bidding which surprised me but at the same time the town did in the past let out our piece with a large number of combinations of five or six for options and so they've been in a position to evaluate the type of response they've done and it's not just a literal bid but bidders often submit questions and inquiries before submitting a bid to clarify  i guess the intent of the r he and so forth and it looks like in light of all of this experience d p w felt very strongly that letting out a single contract or a single option was actually the most efficient way to go and i don't have any basis to question the wisdom of that until it seems to me that they felt that doing it any disposal and other then how we might feel about the process that played out is there a particular decision path or action path for this group or is this merely just kind of kicking around our feelings about it is there something at some point where our committee is going to be asked to officially a part time on time this doesn't sound that way to me it doesn't sound like this is a town meeting vote and other than it being embedded in the budget it doesn't sound like there's any kind of particular financial ramification that would be asked to weigh it up well it seems to me that the decision has been made by the board of select to potentially say something about this new contract in our report to town meeting in the spring only because there aren't that many light items over a million dollars in the budget and i thi nk it's worthy of some discussion i from my point of view of view that ellen that i was surprised how brief the public discussion period was on this topic it really came up for the first time in june of two thousand and seventeen when the topic was really broached in january of two thousand and after the one meeting in june there was the other meeting last week and that's the extent of the public discussion that i knew of as a process question i think it would have been beneficial to have had to have had more public discussion like it would be a useful project for the public works subcommittee to continue inquiry inquiries with the department public works to get a sense of what the r p responses were and i think anything that would help validate an expectation of one hundred fifty thousand dollars long term savings would be useful if it turns out that we don't have better business for that and i'm not sure where that leaves that everyone here that it wasn't exclusively and effort to look at the least costly method available for collection of trash and cycles and everything that's included in that song goes on because there were some sort of some there are some things that could have been looked at that were  i think the effort here was to try and explore the options before another bid was put out because quite honestly bed that had been put out in prior years with every conceivable option out there could have been put out again two years ago and i think that what was said over and over was that people wanted to have consideration of what the options were and now there are fresh look at that to the three categories of pay as you throw automated collection course status quo no change and so you status quo on one  of with a thirty three gallon bag on your end and so i think there was an effort to look at not only was a cost cost a factor but trash generation was a factor and recycling was a factor i think that that group of people would get those various options and try to weigh them and see if there was anything new to add and they were there were other options such as five day collection that might have affected the price and people were adamant that those would never five day collection would never be acceptable capital and and the high school and everything that faces us in terms of having enough money to operate the town but ultimately the department wants to provide the most cost effective service we can for everyone change is always hard but trash is one of those things it's very personal to everyone everyone who has it as we all generated and we all as long as nothing changes you're ok for the most part as long as someone comes and takes that away and so that's the objective of the department they're there it is expected that there will be a cost savings that will be seen there is expected and efficiency that will be experienced and so in any contract there would be new equipment required the difference here will be containers an opportunity here to go forward on the contract whichever option they chose and then evaluate the response and the data and make sure that people if there's no improvement then we have to look at a different choice me but i think the effort was to try and reduce the amount of trash increase the amount of recycling and make it as on easy for people to get  contract and there will be a requirement that people who bet on this have experience in the conversion process and there will be a huge effort here before their trash it's amazing what a hot button issue trash is in terms of the financial savings we had some disposal is actually a fairly small piece of the waste budget the town does not save great deal of money even with a significant reduction of trash of our of our trash disposal dropped by twenty five percent the town would save one hundred thousand dollars or one hundred fifty thousand dollars and dropping twenty five percent would be quite remarkable so that  my mind the greater potential for out of pocket savings in the future budget would come from automating the collecting successfully automating the collection process because j market pointed out that towns that implemented automated collection generally experienced a significant reduction in trash above and beyond the reduction that's taking place anyway belmont's on trash generation has dropped by thirteen fourteen percent over the last couple of years just because the trend in everything is to lighten up packaging people don't take daily newspapers as much anymore people recycle more and so forth so what it is about automated service seems to be that when you're compelled to fit everything in a sixty five gallon drum maybe people just compact it more because it really counts and trash is is for disposal as is volume of you can pack into a smaller space  this sixty five gallon barrel could hold twenty pounds look at all the people it was so that i actually checked what happened in watertown and when watertown was using manual collection the per household generation was unbelievable it was like one ton per household per year you know two to two tons per household per year and when they switched self seems to have significant natural and then secondly there is a whole question about pace you throw that was i want to discuss just for a bit so if that's true then there's potentially have to be saved in the disposal cost is that what is that should i follow that logic which we joined thirty thousand dollars a year if that for household and i suspect that it will come out pretty well either way either of the three ways actually because the potential for reduction i think is actually somewhat limited by then in terms of the particular claims that have been made for pays you throw and then the the details about pricing  g views i guess about operating pays you throw about what the back feet should be and so forth which i was prepared to talk about this fall but it sounds like that's operator in the truck can see if using the proper bags in the place he throws and not just using any old bag so that it sounds like the trucks would have to be retrofitted with cameras at some expense in the is that they will on them and they will be responsible for the maintenance and the replacement of their damaged so that the cars they have a real sense to built into the contract yes as is that other parse words i just to when we talk about moving to an automated system will produce disposal volumes if that is because we're squeezing more poun into a smaller fixed size the reality is we're not reducing the disposal we're just squeezing it into a smaller container so it may have an economic impact of reducing disposal but it doesn't have it that's the what's the driver it doesn't have a true reduction in the trash that is being disposed to you're right and i was not thinking clearly when i said that's right if it promotes recycling really does it does yes so i just i'd like to ask process question sort of getting back to the point that i just made before are you proposing that we actually as a group evaluate different options economically in the near term i'm open to doing any type of economic analysis for things that are important but if there is nothing to be evaluated right now and this is something that can be handled by public services i'm just wondering exactly what are we trying to do right now well i didn't have a whole lot more to cover than what we talked about tonight but i would like public services to keep an eye on this and i would like a portion of the work committee report to addressed this things to discuss but at this point it's a lovely have decided we can certainly keep an eye on it and we can present to town meeting information about it but at the end of the day that the decision is now  write that this is the one option we looked at and so we're going to get our fees and we need to write up stuff for town meeting but what it means we can tell them but it's applied to a contract so i think at this point we're locked in for five years unless we give them that we don't like to even then we have to have our service get a lot so just move the understanding of this is not an executive committee we we're really just an advisory committee and i think all i'm proposing is that we be reasonably informed on this topic this year because we're likely to hear disposal i want to do one of the next topic which is what i'm calling project study groups this is thinking about what the war committee could do that might be useful given the issues that we expect to happen in the next couple of years it struck me that there were two general areas that the symptom to be existing subcommittees don't really address and one of them is getting a better handle on the factors that are leading to a prediction of a significant budget shortfall in f y nineteen twenty or twenty  one i know that the town administrator has a budget plan and model that i have not personally worked with there are members of this committee who are members of the former i think it's former financial force that is our main planning tool for trying to figure out the trends in the overall budget and given the convergence of things such as potential that exclusion generally that's going to be such a big topic now the more we can get a handle on the factors now that are leading to this big shortfall this expected shortfall in the white  the ongoing personal contract negotiations on the town and schools like that are going to be the biggest and biggest and driver and you know we even see it's fairly straightforward to say if the call up numbers com in x that that's the consequence or for the future future budgets going to be y i mean it's and and i think being very clear and specific about that as soon as we can is just going to be useful school committee in our report she read the report comment on explicitly so we know that she read it so it's not like we do we're guessing whether or not the school committee was when we're reviewing our work we know that they were you know the law and also let me just add to that i think that's one of the reasons why school committee bargaining is a very legally limited kind of thing and you really can't set limits on it i mean it's you know you have to bargain in good faith that's the way it is but does the information flow yes absolutely and pat there is precedence for there to be a delivery because you know in the past i know we did some jim did some analysis of different budgets depending on and i think there was a feeling that the warrant committee should not be you know coming up with its own budget separate from the town administrator is office on i'm asking when would the tenements traitor have the forecast available to us to look at or to analyze or are you suggesting that we would be working with the can't hurt us right away because of it now and and do all we can to find the best response yet and i just want to respond to what and instead i mean while i did hear second and criticisms about the work we were doing i mean i i personally didn't i mean i just i just sort of you know took a moment and then and then kept on going because as and as jeff and others have pointed out i mean our our thing i know that modeling originally came out of that and there were a whole lot of other recommendations as well i've my first question is does it still exist and secondly i'd love to get a sense of where we are some of those recommendations as well polo was talking about at some point continuing it just didn't happen that way and i want to be clear to all of there was a financial projection group the financials were basically developed by the administrator the to exactly they were they were and we didn't meet very we didn't meet really on them task force and so some of those things have moved far as you all the recreation strategic plan was one of the sort of results of that arc are significantly subsidized by the general fund and some of those assets that are used for recreation are not getting fees that are generated enough to to maintain those assets so i think that was something that has been moving forward and it is so we can generate a status report and that some of that implementation is very parochial and territorial and so we're trying to work on some of those issues and looking at fee structures and making incremental adjustments so that people don't f when we talk about the potential of the tales from we've had an old right and we're never going to have another one we promise never to have another one because you know we know people like them and so on which is the way overrides were presented for the twenty years before the pressures as you say roy that are going to be pushing us in the future i think that is very valuable for the town so i think it would be a good thing if i mean most of the work of the work committee and usually has to do with analyzing next year budget and that's that's our job that's what we do we foretell meeting but to the extent that we could form an arm that inserts into our analysis the pressures that are pumping over the next three five years administrator the school superintendent and the school committee i think that those core bodies should have a general sense that yes we have a three year view in this is generally what that through your view is that and speaks to what are some of the key trends and things to be concerned about like go like pension or like the cola for example you know there are various issues that kind of come out of that and then speaks to questions about overrides and things that need to have in the future so how we get to a place where we have that kind of three or four cast whether it's the tennis minister's office that takes the lead and then the work in many places supporting role or whatever i think is something that can be discussed but my own personal view is that that should exist and that there should be appropriate input from the group of people that i talked about a second group which i think is very important but for entirely different reasons lasts bring if you're a member we had a meeting where the issue came up for id use supplier and we said at the time that we thought we could be helpful getting the public safety departments to make better use of their existing had well generally the departments had made investments in software or they didn't feel they were really used to generate very effective and short of going out and hiring a consultant to do that i thought we could at least take a first look and either make some progress in solving this issue on our own or identifying  the scope of work for which a very targeted use of a consultant but either way it's something that we have discussed yeah is there still and i t advisory committee because there used to be because that's what this group of that group is supposed to do well as far as the institute yes but you know all the years i've been involved in work many of the information technology advisory group has not really stepped so in the same vein if there are volunteers who would like to get involved with us send me your name by e mail and i'll constitute a group and the idea generating some kind of work they would like to get started think about how to do this or better yet let me just give a little bit of a history on this the fire department and the police department ha requested formally and some of their in the budgets you know adding i t people are data managers both the data manager and we've just taken the position as a public safety said committee  that we're not i think we need to understand they need to understand the scope of what they're asking because there are two there couple different issues one is the management of the data that one isn't the understanding and the use of the equipment that the town has invested in and the software that the town has invested in the other one is creating management reports that are useful to the fire department and in the police department  then there's sort of some other other aspects of technology that where could where could that be useful in terms of you know making making them more efficient and so has the town has invested quite a in equipment for both the fire department and and the complaints we've heard is that they have the stuff that can do all sorts of things but they don't actually are able to use it and so that's that's so i'd want the scope to be looking at sort of how technology can and also how these things can make the department's more efficient well i'm an bein passed chair of public safety so that is a logical candidate of course it's not really my strong suit yes i mean we even though it's sort of come up in the context of looking at the budgets for the fire department and the police it really is it really sort of goes beyond that yes and the and the id resources that are under under the under the town minister are really sort of a critical part of that because you know i mean these are the fire departments and the police please i'm for apartments for the town of belmont they're you know eighty eighty five hundred parcels in town and they all have you know specific longitude latitude and and and that whole geographic information in my keysets is really much more centered in in the in of the i can shop shop there and so in so if you start to have these conversations and looking forward looking for looking for solutions but don't gauge the of the town keep group as a as a partner where technology is i know there have been issues that have come up with respect to community development for example but ways that they could use technology or d p w or whatever ways they could be used technology to again create efficiencies by creating trails that allow people to look at you know where their project stands and that kind of thing other towns are using so and again i'm not the expert on that but i think it does bear some from last june is meeting which i guess i think of the notice that you mentioned one of the things that i had been following last year's report and i interviewed the id department every year and one of the things that i that really became clear to me and when i was speaking with the department is that i was looking at sort of i think campbell we had five hundred points for at any rate i was looking at like four one four of id efforts and there were all of these others that were very independent and you know we were looking at the budget the budget issues with this one but then you know there's all these others that we're not diving into and so my recommendation was that for the record we start looking at you know instead of it if you want to teach apartment we interview all of them together well i mean there's a question of what can we do that would be attractive and i don't know that we're in a to my mind that whole project really got off the ground when we toured the police station d p w that was the impetus for drawing in the capital budget committee and forming the major capital projects group and then developing a proposal which i think is going to make significant progress problem and been hanging around belmont for more than twenty years and i have a similar kind of optimism with id that i don't know what a perfect solution would look like but if we have at least the place to start which are the problems identified by the police and fire themselves i think i would suggest starting working with them and reaching out to other counties far as necessary but with the focus on police and fire initially to see if we can do anything useful   part of the issue that faces the town is that i think the police and fire departments identified those issues but because they were under the category of supplemental requests and because of the forecast and because of the projections of the fiscal condition of the town i think they tried really hard to look at instead of requesting additional staff to try and work on being able to learn more about the software and be able to spend time  delve into those options for reporting in data collection they were beginning to get that that they were trying to be respectful of the financial picture and not request additional staffing and i think that that was where the discussion of volved to saying maybe we should have a consultant to start and look at the scope so i think they can define the scope i think that it was more about whether there was a request for additional staffing or not maybe a half time person fire and a half time person in police i think they were trying very hard or at least we were trying hard to limit the amount of additional staffing that was  requested and so i think that that's always a factor in terms of balancing where we're going and with the benefits of what we've probably have someone come in and determined as we didn't think we weren't sure once you had managed on the reporting aspect when you're the management reports created and some of the training four of the equipment done whether you needed a full time very separate systems from the town and they also you would find someone who would come in who had dealt with those systems and who also knew what other police departments and para governments were doing in terms of their management because they do have a lot of reporting that is required by law or that is you know that so i guess some question now is that as we're talking about it whether it's appropriate first of all it's not really a financial thing that we'd be dealing with as much as  it is this you know this need that they have that's very specific and i'm not sure i can add a lot of value to that process but so that's i put that on the table i think this  an issue for financial analysis if you will and every year for the past six and i guess we've been talking at the capital budget committee about the fact that many of the or whatever there ought to be a separate bucket not the capital budget there ought to be an i t budget because overall the town needs to establish a platform and think about how we're spending this money and what the priorities are because it's very hard to balance the needs the i team needs of the police department versus the i t needs of d p w versus the i q needs of the town and then straighter and figure out which one we ought to be supporting any in any particular year from the capital budget committee point of view and i think that you know the work committee looking at each of the individual departments may be in the same kind of dilemma if you will of these balancing questions and really somebody ought to be looking at it overall and doing the balancing in a way that makes sense and maybe there are some economies that you can achieve by people sharing things i don't know and certainly the reporting you know being able to establish the prime work for appropriate reports that do provide some  in staffing would be terrific but all of these questions i mean to some extent i think what we need is to front to do the the tour if you will i mean you said the capital projects group really grew out of looking at the  in the buildings that we were touring and to some extent i think what the work committee needs to have is some information some snapshot if you will of where we are in terms of the structure of thinking and purchasing in the town and take a look at that and see whether where we couldn't search some helpful and they'll assess and to that i think it's bigger than just the two departments so that i have again i'm sorry for questions but maybe background but  interview the town id department and the question that gets asked every single year is why are they combined and every year there are very good reasons why they aren't there's very specific requirements of the different systems there anyway i'm not going to go in detail there's but they have very justified reasons for security purposes and all of these things they work very closely together they meet on a monthly basis their you know there are a lot of things that they do together that they share they certainly share infrastructure like the fiber and other things like that what i would like to see because i i you know spend an hour with the director of the town id department but you know for example the library we interviewed folks for the for the library but we don't talk to the director in the library and go into depth in what the library is doing or certainly the like department we don't talk to them to see what they're doing and in id and so my my sense is that we should be looking at all of those things from a financial perspective you know what are they doing and how this what this one's doing relate to what this one is doing and are there efficiencies i know they're talking to each other but just like we're talking to one of the departments i feel like we should be talking to all of them and getting our own overview and giving town meeting and overview and that may be true of other functions as well but i think certainly i t has a financial impact in a way that maybe h r doesn't but you know this would be a expertise these managerial kinds of things you know maybe in some other universe it would already have been taken care of but somehow not happened in a way understand i think i prefer that you're you point out that they do work together where they can come in and just for an example the multiple departments have been working with the li department in terms of the creation of a new water and sewer billing system for them that enterprise fund on that side which was jointly done with the life department because the same vendor does the water and sewer billing or the like services electric services and so there were places there even where the light department wanted thought they could just get data from the g i s system which identifies all of our cities and towns and so there has been an integration even more so because of some projects of late but i appreciate alan's description of the various unique characteristics of those departments but they still work together we all talk together where things overlap for the network for the phone system for those kinds of technologies that we can updating the infrastructure being able to identify it that project started years ago almost twelve now and because it's because the town has to make choices about what capital requests that come before the capital budget committee and they're very thorough about saying how do these things relate and interrelate so even when the police department and fire departments got new software systems to be more tolerant and efficient the town department checked once and make sure that the securities and protocols were right so they are entirely standalone and they do in a room what did you already asked for on tuesday so if you perhaps you could ask volunteers if you get them then you know that people want to do it if you don't get launchers then people don't want to that would make sense thank you with the understanding th  what is it is it the firing police or is it because what i had in mind was broadening the scope of what the i t analysis is for the work committee report to include all of the id departments that wouldn't necessarily be a study group that would be later so i'm just wondering if you could define it well my thinking on this was really driven by the what i recall was a meeting reason in the school cafeteria where i guess was motivated by the potential requester or wish by the police and fire departments they would have enough money to hire pursue bit of it would you could easily grow into something much bigger than that but it would be up to the group i think that determine what what's really  just put in my two cents again about the tour as it were i mean i think it would be a very valuable thing for the work committee to have a small group just pull together a snapshot of what we think the situation i think you would want somebody more expert in those specific areas rather than us to do that but how to tell spends it's my team money and where those things where the resources go and how they're balanced and whether they rebalance i think is something that would be valuable so the needs are to what the needs are so i think just establishing where we are first getting a tour if you will on that and then presenting it to the rest of the committee and then moving ahead with that we think and i would say if we get that critical mass then we can deem it constituted and they can start figuring out what it is they're going to do you can of sub committee members and chairs and invited people to comment or whatever i'm just curious whether or not that list is following all or whether or not we will be getting a kind of an update oh well with this within our committee i made one change over the summer in response to some feedback i got but i would say if you're not happy with your assignment by all means it wasn't a question of happiness for me just a question of discussion i thought you had roy i think you raise some really good points but i want to add a couple of other pieces about why i think the select means decision is financially and politically dangerous and w warrant committee might want to play a role in this so i think i just want to point out you know is there anyone here who would buy a home without looking at comparables without going and seeing you know what are other homes going for this price essentially i think that's kind of what the town is doing right now by only bidding one bid they're not even bidding status quo so the number that jay threw out that would save one hundred fifty thousand dollars in labor costs is conjecture each town has a little bit different configurations and so  you know we can guess about what some savings are but i don't i'm not sure that we actually know until we put those into the bid so i think the other thing i want to remind you is two years ago the town asked the selectmen not to go out to bid but to extend the contract three to five years they decided just to extend it two years and that's why we're at this point now so we miss already a process of doing an open bid to lower the cost by the way the costs yet escalated over those two years eleven percent so now we have an opportunity i think work committee has an opportunity to offer advice to the board of selectmen and maybe they might reconsider i don't know to say maybe maybe there's a better financial path to looking at other options that might actually save us more money the other so now let's talk about the politics and so we are expected to get new barrels next july so i understand that we're we're kind of careening towards a four million dollars deficit this discussion that needs to happen with the community is about you know where do we cut our budget and how much can  something that is an environmental goal and with the sixty four gallon barrel so the state which has a huge database of all these  communities have what savings they have found when they've automated none of them have reported labor savings they reported savings from trash reduction so  your role here is to advise the i think it's appropriate to say could you reconsider the decision and do what our committee i was on the solid waste and recycling committee we came up with four options and then the four options are status quo sixty fourth out delane automated thirty five gallon out and pay as you throw and state offers generous grant money for the like for the last two so there's a financial incentive for us to do those so those are just getting swept off the tape and so so in summary i guess that's i would thought in the meeting somebody said two years but i suppose that's not a time definite but so it was that was not it was not a decision to  really just one question to the point you just made it out you can look at page through a couple years after you too automated if what jim said is correct then we have to spend half a million dollars to buy trash barrels that investing half a million dollars their own committee that they appointed that study and the selectmen have stated it would be extremely arrogant for us with lulu's high know about it to step in and tell them go back and rethink it and i think we lose credibility so give it your best shot you back a duck down but don't do it on that and i would say that i did not know until the public meeting at the energy committee been invited to be a part of those deliberations we were certainly not out but that said i think it would be appropriate for us to try to evaluate the results of the bidding recognizing that it's at this point going to take place in  out how will belmont's experience on the minister compare with other towns and you know in the end if there's evidence that would make a compelling case for moving to