you candidates or adam dash ngai carbone e in this segment of the program we're going to have a conversation with adam dash the audio version of these pod casts will be available on the media center website media dot org and the television version will be available not only on the website but will be rebroadcast broadcast multiple times on the belmont media center t v stations adam welcome to community conversations and thank you for being willing to talk with me today on today's show well thank you for having me roger it's a pleasure before we really get into the meat of our conversation today can you tell me a bit about yourself gimme a minute and a half introduction about who you are that's a tough one well i'm adam dash i've got two children one who's a junior at the belmont high school one's a recent graduate of high school i'm married i have a dog i'm the vice chair of the warrant committee where i chair the public services public works subcommittee i recently ended as vice chair the underwood pool building committee because we built the pool and then disbanded the committee i was chair of the community preservation act study committee and i was a member of the zoning board of appeals and the been a member time beating member for precinct one i'm also an attorney with my own law firm i somerville where i have my own small business employing several attorneys handling a lot of a municipal law zoning permitting licensing in addition to real estate and other matters great thank you we're going to talk about four topic areas today and i'm going to lay those out and then go back and visit each one we're going to talk about the budget which is the operating budget capital expenditures town governance and the environment we have a lot to cover so i would ask you keep your answers brief and to the point as mr read murder the town moderator tells us a town meeting if you have an extended answer give us the headline st and then expand ok he's a wise man ok let's start with the town operating budget counted ministre her david calle presented the town's preliminary budget for next year so for fiscal year eighteen on february th and which time he indicated that the one hundred ten million dollars request represents a three five percent increase over last year's budget now i don't want you to talk generically about the budget but what i want to ask you specifically is this not quite two years ago the voters approved an override that allowed a property tax increase at the time of the override there were folks who said that there was a substantial potential for financial savings can you tell me new things that have been implemented since the override to make sure that belmont is using its tax dollars wisely that's a really good question roger you know we just got the budget at the war committee which if people don't know the word committee analyzes the budget is the financial walk for the town and we've got the budget and we just started analyzing it we had our st public services subcommittee meeting last night as a matter of fact to go through it there are several things that we're doing is we're trying to stretch the override as you know i was in favor of the override  one of the leaders of getting it passed and we're trying to stretch the override as long as we can one of the things that we have done since then is to take some of the excess money from the over it was over i was always intended to be multi year and not to be all spent at once and to take that extra money and to put it into a stabilization fund for future years which we have done to sort of put it in a cookie jar up on a high shelf where we wouldn't be able to get to it as easily in that's trying to stretch it out as long as possible the other thing that we've done one of the things i guess if you want specific what we talked about this is something more committees been suggesting for a while is to bring in say a recycling coordinator because we save a lot of money per tonne for recycling over trash for every ton of trash we divert from trash to recycling we save money and if we a recycling coordinator would that position be able to pay for itself by saving us money while improving the environment and those are some of those numbers we need to be evaluated obviously to see if in fact that's happening and if not how things can be tweaked the override money has gone towards what town meeting and the public were told would go towards more teachers and to the roads and i think so far it's been going pretty well can you tell me two specific things that you think should be done that that aren't being done yet well i mean i think one of the things we need to be doing is having a sort of a system where we get together and talk about taking our shared vision our shared ideas and moving forward with action and  getting things done so the something like taking care of our infrastructure projects like the big four we talked about the high school the library the police station the d p w yard and actually putting them in an order pricing them which is happening some of them price some like the high school the feasibility studies underway and get those together put them in an order and then start tackling them in some logical order rather than wait for the poll to get condemned or wait for a building to burn down which is what sort of the history has  been we've gotten better we need to do a lot more and we need to move forward a lot quicker than perseverating and discussing and talking and talking and talking and talking at some point you can talk to a point where you just need to make a decision and that's what i'd like to do is get in and make the decisions and move things forward now to drill down a little into the budget to one specific thing in its two thousand and fifteen report to town meeting the town's work committee reported that fire suppression constitutes nearly ninety percent of belmont's fire department budget and in contrast out of the four thousand seven hundred incidents which state if the fire department responded to last year only two four percent involved fires another  one rd involved emergency response emergency response by ambulance another thirty percent involved non medical emergency response twenty percent in involved life support transport given that data how do you respond to the notion that perhaps it's time for belmont to move to a consolidated department of public safety rather than having separate police and fire departments that's actually a great question i know this came up when the fire stations were being built several years ago whether or not we should have a public safety building on propellor road for instance involving the fire in the police station all in one and that was not done i think that would have been a good idea to do that  fire the fire department in their defense they do respond to things because they're the st responders and they tend to get there quicker because the police the police officers are out and about doing things whereas the fire station people tend to be at the station so sometimes they're the st ones there or if a car crash happens or someone has a heart attack it just so happens that the fire staff get there st so it logs in as a fire call getting there st is a good thing whoever can get there as quickly as possible especially since we've adopted over the last several years the advanced life support we've had brought in use that as a way not only to protect public safety but also to generate revenue because the the advanced life support ambulance has brought in quite a lot of money to the budget which has helped us out at the town so you can kill two birds with one stone and it involves the fire department responding i'd be great consolidations or something the work committee has been very strong on since two thousand and ten we put out a report about ideas of how  restructuring in town government could happen and there were a lot of them involving consolidations and some of them have happened consolidating similar weights and measures consolidating our water and i'm sorry electrical in our plumbing inspectors with i believe watertown and some of these things we have been doing consolidating the facilities departments between the school that was huge and the libraries on the way the library is partly and partly not in if you look at last year's work committee report since i chair public works i wrote that section of the report and you'll see that it's mostly all in not entirely all in the library needs to be all in so we can have everything under jerry boyle's department where we can what happens is when they go to bid for materials instead of the school bidding for so much wire in the town bidding for so much wire and the library bids for so much wire if you can put them all together in one bid you get a better price so it's actually showing plus you get some sort of an ability to try across all of the town buildings were one town it's not a very large town we're pretty small town where one town all these silos of control exist but they need to be bridged ok let's let's move away from the operating budget and talk about the the capital badgett and when i say capital budget what i merely talking about are the upcoming buildings will set aside the basic capital badgett just last week the library feasibility committee unanimously recommended a new building option to replace the existing old structure on concord ave the new building is projected to cost twenty three million four hundred thousand dollars if construction begins in two thousand and nineteen do you agree with the recommendation that the library feasibility committee made and if not which of the alternative recommendations would you have adopted and why right i've been to those meetings actually in the meeting where they presented it i saw i think there's really no other answer for the library the three options of keeping the existing building or adding on to the existing building the problem is it was never as the locker tech kindly put it was not built for the ages when it was built it basically be putting frankly lipstick on a pig because the building is just not in good condition it was structurally not built to carry the weight of all the books i don't know how anyone build a library that structurally taking into account the way the books but nevertheless that's our building the roof is shot the boiler is shot it's not up to seismic code it's not eighty eight compliant for handicapped accessibility the libc they were sourcing junkyard parts to fix the elevator i mean the library building is a bit of a mess plus it's encircled by road if you think about it conquered having the front end you drive in you drive all the way around the billions to get out the new building actually of the three options of rip renovate the existing building add on to the existing building or build a new one the build the new one actually is the cheaper option and that gives you the gives you all of the services that we need out of that building plus it gives you the ability to move the building over towards the library more and get rid of the road all the way around so you can incorporate some outdoor space say off the children's room and even off the adult room maybe a fence and some outer space kids can take the books and sit outside on a nice day  nice brook running back there but it's it's cut off from the library because of the road so if we could move it over then you could create more of a coherent parking lot sort of where the parking lot is now we're not going to they don't want to disturb the existing garden club area yes so this would allow us to build a building that would be compliant have community access rooms that could be locked off from the rest of the library have a secure one way in one way out so for security purposes have eighty eight compliant bathrooms and elevator and all of that sort of stuff and be flexible where i saw the plan with their thinking that you could have the stacks on rollers were that they could be moved around and if someday technology changes let's say we have less books and more of something else the face space could be flexible for that  also was heartened to hear that they're interested in getting significant funding from private sources and fund raising which i think is going to be crucial towards pulling that project together i'm also concerned when they say that every year of delay of building that building adds almost a one million dollars to the price tag from escalation kicking the can down the road and deferring maintenance as a price time is money as you know and the longer things get put off the more they will cost and let's talk about that the buildings more generically i want will be renovated not replaced that's unquestionably going to cost a lot of money on the other hand we have town residents oftentimes aging residents who have lived here their entire lives who simply cannot afford to pay the increased tax bill associated with replacing those buildings as a member of the board of selectmen you would be in the middle of trying to balance those two seemingly irreconcilable observations the need for buildings doesn't improve the ability to pay a fixed income households but the ability to pay of those households doesn't make the need for the buildings any less what do you do yeah i mean that's that's the conundrum isn't it i mean we've had decades of neglect and and delay and not taking care of our infrastructure i was talking to one of the former selectman who said that decades ago the town engineer came in and said you know we need to resurface the roads and if we wait then was going to happen is you're going to have to take the roads all the way down to the foundation and rebuild them from the foundation up instead of just resurfaced them it'll cost scores more of course nothing happened decades later and here we are having to rebuild the roads from the bottom from the foundation up at a much more inflated price these deferred maintenance is caught up to us and it's costing a lot of money that said i've been walking around the town during this campaign talking to people in every precinct young old all sorts of types of people and it's not monolithic with some of the seniors who even though they don't use the schools they recognize that they did use the schools their children benefited greatly from the schools and are willing to make payments to the schools there is a program in place that the town has for a seniors to defer property taxes until the property gets sold or they passed away in the property was sold i think that the interest rate on that program is too high to be honest with you and i think that also it's not been publicized enough so that people can stay in their homes and the taxes can be put off until later when they're gone or when the the property gets sold and they downsize and then the property taxes can be paid in a lump sum at that time is a solution but honestly we can't sit here and allow the buildings to just fall apart for instance the pool got condemned basically which is why we had to do it the the skating rinks and horrible condition the high school is way too small have a daughter there at the high school there's no room in the library when they have a free period there's no room in the cafeteria when it's lunch time what  the solution was a couple years ago it was benches in the hallways for people to sit and now those are full and people are sitting on the floor there is simply no room in that building forget the fact that it's been beaten on by teenagers for decades and that's got its own series of challenges and that i not the labs are not up to code in this best us needs to be remediated knol of that but it's just simply too small i don't you have to address these they just simply have to be addressed i'll be very disappointed if the d p w yard in the police station buildings hit their centennial because we're getting there they're simply when you take a tour of these is the work committee did recently there deplorable and when when the police station is evidence sitting in the corner of a room that people can access with just yellow tape around it that is not w evidence needs to be kept if you're going to be bringing it to court and as a lawyer i can say that that is not a proper chain of custody there are issues and these need to be addressed if if a prisoner gets out of control they're just in a room they're not secured when they come in there's no what they call the sally ports which is secure areas where they bring prisoners and some of these people on the under the influence of substance can be out of control and they need to be in a confined area but basically they're just in the lobby of the police station right now it's not it's not it can't go on like this to be honest so in my mind we've got four for a building that we have the high school and again i went to acknowledge that the high school won't be replaced it's been renovated not that i believe the feasibility studies ongoing so well ok so we have the high school we have the library we have the police station and we have the right do you have a notion of how you would order this yeah what i would do to over what time period i sure we could clearly cannot do them all at once it's just too big a bite when we need to do is have a community conversation about this there i know that there are there is a committee looking at ordering them but it needs to be in my mind expanded to bring in the broader public and bring in town meeting as a matter of fact to have a conversation because we have the shared vision we have shared vision of family community education and and getting along with each other and inclusive a t and there's no reason why we can't come together from all different sides along those grounds decide where we want to go order these and then move on them the problem is that some of them are sort of in a domino fashion where you put the high school on the site sort of drives where you put the skating rink which drives where the community path goes and then if you move if you do something with the incinerator site then maybe you put the police station there and then what do you do the police station the old municipal building the center but if you don't have the police station or what you do with the police station site  if we're sort of almost paralyzed with these things something has to break and then all these other projects can be ordered to move forward but i i think that the community needs to come together with that shared values and it's vision and i'm happy to lead that project i'm very good at that sort of thing i do it in my law practice bringing people together having cases settle sometimes they don't but most of the time they do when people have allied goals i don't think anyone's going to stand there and say they don't want that they don't want to go high school if they don't want to get educational system i think that would be an outlier in belmont but these things need to be brought together and i think town meeting for instance could be brought in and maybe some key members of town meeting could be appointed to meet with the selectmen between town meeting sessions to have a conversation about sort things like this and we need to order them and then we order them we need to move and how does the ordering of these buildings affect streets and roads as you were talking about because in my mind the most important thing to most people is to repair the streets and roads does it does addressing our building needs have any on my car on one of the streets and the repairman said he had never seen one of those brake before that's how bad the street was so i get that we do have a robust program of doing the roads and there is only so much we can do in a given year because this is new england you can't do the roads in the winter we can't close all the roads in an area at one time when you do a road you have to allow for vehicles to travel on other roads so you can only do so many and one neighborhood at once we only have so many people to do the work and you also have to do the infrastructure under the roads like the the pipes and the wires and the sewers under the roads before you rip the road up so there are only a finite number of roads that can be done in any given year and we are my understanding is with  town as we are doing those and the override money has helped move that along sidewalks are an issue because i think we need to do more on the sidewalk front but as far as your question with regard to the projects i don't want to rip up roads we just did  however some of the buildings on roads we just did like the library unconquered out there will have to be some digging up of some things in order to do that but those roads can be redone in that section i don't want to have the road to hang up doing a new building that's desperately needed such as the police station for instance ok so let's move beyond the capitol bad sit and talk about the environment for just a minute in may of two thousand sixteen the state's supreme judicial court the s j c ruled in the case came the massachusetts department of environmental protection that the state has not done enough to meet the mandate of the state's two thousand and eight  an an ambiguous and said it requires the state to establish limits and multiple greenhouse gas emission sources that must decline on an annual basis in light of that s j c decision there have been proposals to apply clean energy mandates to municipal utilities which of previously been exempt from such standards since the board of selectmen sit says the board of the li department would you support adopting a clean energy standard for light well i think we need the environment is very important to me and i think that we do need to move forward on that i think that we need to explore all the options regarding that i mean i'm very proud the belmont is designated as a green community which has allowed us to leverage a lot of grants for things like electric vehicles l e d streetlights solar panels not that we're moving quickly enough on those i think we need to move quicker on all of those items and dummett light needs to be part of the solution we are fortunate in that we actually as a town have our own electrical utility so we have an ability to make a difference we're not knocking on ever sources door and begging them to do something  know the voters in belmont two thousand and eight overwhelmingly passed a ballot question saying that we wanted to reduce our greenhouse emissions and then town meeting adopted that as well that has been not just a mandate from the courts and the legislature of the state it's been a mandate from the voters and town meeting i take that very seriously as i do with all things the town meeting in the voters say and that we need to move forward on that and extending that to belmont light would be perfectly reasonable and rational extension of that the actual mechanism for it that i'm not an expert in electrical engineering however we do have experts on staff and i would want to as part as selectman and being a member the light board dig into that because i think there are opportunities and let's set aside the environment  about town governance in the november you talked about the voters which gets me here in november of last year in november of two thousand and sixteen a majority of them voters voted to approve legalizing the recreational use of marijuana and massachusetts the authority to decide how marijuana dispensary will be regulated now falls on individual towns should they choose to exercise that authority really have a two part question st in exercising this authority to what extent if at all would you take into account the fact that a majority of delmon tony and voted yes to legalize marijuana use and nd what types of local regulation would you propose bellman adopt right i mean i certainly respect the world of voters on that and i have in my office in somerville i've been involved in some of the medical marijuana that's been going on for a while now for siting locations for that but it's a very different community from belmont i'm not looking to have marijuana shops in belmont for recreational purposes i don't know that that's an appropriate use in belmont however the state as you know is in the process of sort of changing what the ballot question outcome was by putting it back into the legislature and they have a committee and they're going to go back in there and rework some of the rules it's kind of hard to know for belmont what to it what the rules will be i know what the ballot question but it sounds like the state legislature is going to change that so it's very difficult for the town to come up with regulations when the ground keeps shifting on what the regulations because regulations have to operate within whatever the legislation the overall it is lucian is those parameters and it sounds like those parameters are going to change so things are fluid right now i don't think we really can or should do anything with regard to the recreational until the state sorts this out and tells us what the rules are going to be and then we have to have a discussion about where we want to go with that you know that we did as town meeting put a an overlay district for medical marijuana a number of years ago in the zoning so we did do that that exists in this would be another discussion like that of course medical marijuana which is basically like a c v s but with one drug that it's selling with a doctor's prescription is very different from recreational so that's a bigger conversation ok and i have one final question which i hope you can answer with a smile in your face and or at all govern in prose have you heard that i haven't did do you what does that quote mean to you now do you agree with that yeah i do i mean i think i found that on the campaign trail as i've been walking around that when you talk to people on their doorstep they don't want to hear paragraphs they want to hear a haiku or they want to hear a very short poem they want to hear the the look bigger picture things you want to do they don't necessarily want to although some people do want to dig into details most people in a campaign mode when you only have a couple of minutes with them you can't like you and i are having a long conversation i can't stand somebody store stuff for this long but when you get into the office and i've certainly been in these committees in town as i've listed before in the war committee we have people come before us and i watch this like meetings that you end up getting into the weeds and you have to deal in paragraphs and that's fine i mean as a lawyer i do that all the time when i'm in court doing an opening and closing statement it's more the poetry it's the rhetoric it's the big picture stuff and then when you're actually examining a witness you're going line by line through depositions and you're going very granularly through the data i i do both of my every day job and i think that that's an apt description of government actually that's great thank you thank you adam and that the clock has run soon it goes quickly doesn't it it doesn't did it sure has been fun to have you on community conversations this morning and i want to thank you for taking time out of your day job and out of your campaign to come talk to us this was great i would thank you for taking time out of your day to have these community conversations i have been speaking today with adam daz one of two candidates for belmont's board of selectmen in a special edition of community conversations i should note that adams opponent guy carbone e is also appearing on an identical podcast you can access the conversations with both candidates through the belmont media centers website belmont media dot org a video of our podcast session will also be rebroadcast any number of times on the media centers television stations you can find the broadcast time by looking up community conversations in the t v listings on the b m c website today's conversation with b o s candidates adam dash and guy carr boni is a special edition of community conversations i will be back with you for our regular community conversations podcast next week i'm your community conversations host roger coulton thank you for listening