happy new year everyone thanks for tuning in to belmont buzz belmont's newest talk show host joanna jubal is senior multimedia journalist for wicked local belmont and the belmont citizen herald i'm going to be interviewing a very special person today very important person for the town of belmont she is belmont st female town administrator patrice garvin patrice came to us from surely about one year ago her one year anniversary is coming up january th and she was the town administrator in chile for four years and i want to welcome you patrice thank you so much for going on the show it's great yeah really really excited to have you and reflect on the past year i actually have the newspaper from that very special day when you were sworn into office january th and i witnessed your interview all never forget i witnessed your formal public interview with the selectmen  what he has to say about your performance over the past year and he here's what he said ok patrice has been a fantastic as our town and minister we have accomplished so much with her ability to obtain grants and state funding for initiatives in town and for her ability to work with people her creativity and management style has allowed belmont to move forward in two thousand and eighteen at a staggering pace and that is so true it's really true i say w because we're just so doing so much but the support of the selectmen has been fabulous and you really hit the ground running from the very beginning and in the st week you even got a grant in the st week community  towns and cities to sign up as possible and it's really a best practice program it's a tool that towns can utilize to see what best practices are out there we see grants to look at it's pacific just recently finished the five year forecast yet it's a forecasting budgeting model module that we can use to run a lot of what if scenarios and see how that impacts five years ago we did that we also do financial policies we're trying to the town has financial policies it has some what we wanted to do was look at the best practices out there for those financial policies as well as build a comprehensive set of policies that can follow that the w selectmen and capital budget committee and all the vested people agree to moving forward so when you build a budget and you're looking at your financial forecast five years out you're going to use a financial policies as a as a guide as a tool i know that's important because i know that our budgets not lookin so good in the coming years right there's a deficit that will be facing this to have and we're working in we're running those models now to try and minimize impact so after twenty is going to be a lot of work trying to mitigate for the years out i think one of the things i said when i when i interviewed here was even though i'm working on f y twenty i'm thinking about the impact of all the other  years so the concept was just a way to kind of show the town what i meant by that is an override inevitable for belmont in the near future i don't want to put out certainties i think i can tell you that we're working as hard as we can to if there is one to minimize that impact the selectmen just formed a financial taskforce based on what they're going to take the call in center document and kind of work off of that that's that's a new financial task yet very newly formed actually are still being formed so i'm more about that in the new year sure so we'll be working on on and on getting you know that up and running in place you really really great and let's talk about the complete streets policy that you also helped get into place and in your st year another major accomplishment so when you're in municipal government you know what other towns are doing you see  you work in them yourselves and complete streets was something i ran into and surely it was a funding mechanism to address some of the needs in town like sidewalks roads by home and things like that so when i got here i had noticed that the policy hadn't had been drafted but it had been i should through through the selectmen and that was one of the st thing i had that i wanted to do and working with glen clancy that community director we put through a policy it passed it got school it approved by the state the next step was to develop on the plan a part of his asian plan that's what we're working on now so we right we've worked with we're working with a consultant to do that there was a temporary link on your website that people could go to and you want to tell everyone what people sure quite sure what they thought needed fixing right right one of the one of the things that go in i noticed was there over was a lot of opinions of where the issues were in town and instead of having a public forum and asking people to come in and voice where they think we should focus the consultant ph d thought that creating a portal and a web site so people could just kind of click on a map and kind of write a comment on what they thought would be more useful and then when we start making a list of projects and then looking at all the other studies of the time and then we can kind of overlap them and then the priority would kind of filter out we would be able to see at that point where the parties people's we haven't really run through the day we just received the portal on friday to start looking at it you have to now you the next step is to prioritize projects to look at the projects started prioritized when have a public hearing in the st of february that public hearing is going to be the public helping us prioritize it's not just the pfaff doing it it's it's the public using the public information that we received and then belmont would be eligible for up to six million four hundred thousand dollars a that you were able to accomplish so much in such a short time adam talked about your creativity and your management style is talk about that your bit and describe your management style i think you know i'm not afraid to express my  opinion i think that's probably anyone who he would be able to tell you that i speak my mind but obviously in a respectful way whenever i'm in a meeting i like to walk away from that meeting with an idea and then i kind of think on it i i work about the people to try to develop it and if it has any merit then i kind of put it forward and i just keep doing it i it's just something i do because i feel that anything that stagnant and stays dormant it's just that's all it's going to do i have to push i'm determined to push it forward i am always trying something new and if it doesn't work i try something else i like this thing gauge with the department heads i like to know what they're doing what they're working on if i haven't heard from them in a while i make it a point to reach out and and find out what's going on so it's very much a just a back and forth team approach you know i like it to be a little light i don't like to be serious all the time i don't want to work in a place where it's just you know it's all people do is talk about work and just focused i like to have a little bit of fun anybody in my staff will tell you that come to my office on any given day you'll hear laughter you'll hear people talking it's a bow communicating and talking to people and you've actually implemented some fun of events that the staff participate in any and so the town can participate in like the halloween halloween  yeah so that that that was something we didn't surely and the staff in the community loved it i mean it was just amazing everybody participated and i felt i'd try it and vomit and see and see what happened in the exact same thing happened  come into town hall that had never been in the building i mean though that was a lot of the comments we heard oh i've been in this form before and i've seen this place before so it also introduces it to a younger group of people and i think you know so it does a lot it benefits the st benefits the community and when you can do that then that's a win win for everybody so you are a very pro choice i've never had an issue approaching you and you're also very receptive in response and so what influenced you to to be the kind of manager you are i think it's working for good managers one of my mentors and groton where i started really being trained in  field and wanting to move forward he managed a lot like i did he like to keep it like he'd like to know about people that he worked with i don't feel that if i'm working with you i want to know a little bit about you how your life is you know are you happy or are you are you where you want to be i think if people want to come to work and enjoy coming to work they're going to work for you in the going to work hard for you and i i like to know the people i work with and i think that's you know ask questions i'm interested in people i have a background in sociology and i think that comes through sometimes because i i just i find people and people what motivates people fascinating that that really interests me and  i think people see that when i'm engaging gaging with them was was it hard for you in the beginning when you were your total stranger to belmont you didn't know anybody and then you had to get to know all the staff and all the people in the community active people in the community challenging about that i wouldn't say that part was hard i mean i like talking to new people i think the challenging part is the other way is they're getting to know me they need to trust me they i'm in  leadership role i'm working with the slack man you know i think the nervousness on their part it was more on their end tenshi than mine i mean i think and i don't mean this weird but i just think when people get to know me they  understand a little bit more about me and it's just the build walls start coming down so one year later what can you say about about the relationships you've developed with staff and general the community i think that you know i have a great staff i mean they work hard they come in you know there are challenges there's always going to be challenges you're working with people on a daily basis you're going to have you know have a little bit of friction but you know as long as the i think they understand that the goal is the same the goal for me is always to come in to work as hard as i can for the people about a month as long as i keep that in my head and i think i project that out i think i think it works the community's been great the residents i've met have been just very supportive and fabulous and you know i get a call in my office and it's from a resident and they have an issue i want to try and help their issue i want to you know steer them in the right direction put them into the person that they need to speak to and and i think you know that's my main goal anybody that calls the office i know you said there's never a typical day but a lot of your days are also very long yes you have like like today you had a high school building committee meeting seven thirty in the morning you had to commute from your whole new town which is chelmsford and i don't know how long your commute is and how the traffic is too bad when it's about and out tonight you have a seven hundred and thirty or a committee or you're working i don't know how many hours in a day that's more than twelve hours yeah i average busy weeks like this i average fifteen hour days how do you do it i just love it i think that's what it is and i just i love what i do and i want to be here early and i don't mind staying late to me it's like every day is perfect for me every day you know if some days that my staff knows it's the day but i just i just love the work alone i do are you able to balance the work and family life as i know you have to do yeah as i was saying earlier this week i'm not doing such a great job with that given that it's you know christmas week for christmas it's a challenge i a it's a it takes a lot of work to be able to do well in one area and then do well in another my kids are older thankfully when they were younger i used to have a rule where i i didn't take a job that was more than a half an hour drive from from them i wanted to know i could get to them within the half hour i think that's the mother in me and you know you just it's tough it's very tough but you know they understand they they know that i'm happier because i'm what i'm doing and you know it is important to love what you do and let's talk a little bit more about some of it while we still have a little time about some of your other major accomplishments in the draft year you recently restructured i think it was back in the spring i didn't want to fill it right away i just felt i was too new i really needed to give my staff and me an opportunity to see where the need was at the same time there's a lot of needs throughout town you know there you can pick a department and you could probably you know figure out ways where you could add to that department when i we when i got here i heard a lot about recreation the recreational plan that was put forward i heard i had meetings about hiring a recreational director here in the budget i knew that that would be a challenge it's so my mind starts thinking about how do i fix this problem here and then address this problem at the same time so you just kind of get creative i tried a couple of different things with that recreation position i i said ok we can do it for a year since i'm not going to hire a system right away let's just do a recreation director for a year and we kind of flesh that  we wind up by the wreck commission in the they were just like yeah but then you know what happens after a year you know so it's just trial and error so then you know after talking to you know bouncing some ideas off to some other people i had decided there might be somebody out there that's looking for advancement in their career because pallies a fill with talented educated people that a looking to improve their situation and i thought if i could find maybe somebody with recreation experience but one and also to be working as assistant ten minutes or so they are ten mysteries and they could further their career write my it might be a good fit and then i can kind of solve two problems one which is you know making it so i don't have to  myself and half anymore and then the other one is addressing some of the wreck concerns and then the rd added benefit would have been it is jamie who is the d p w director who is running racket frees up hi from rack so he can know who focus on d p w yeah so it really solved a lot of problems and then once i kind of started thinking about it that way it made sense and once it makes sense it's like ok let's move forward so we put out the job with the heavily experience and recreation we've received some applicants and we see john marshall's application from arlington and you know he was the right fit he has records perience but he's also he's going for his masses  yeah so we found john and it just was great it really how he's excited he was he was to be acted on december th well before duncan and i just as i sit here listening to you and i'm wondering if other people listening would agree why didn't anyone else think of this before you i mean the wreck department has been without a director since two thousand and eleven you and nobody else thought of this solution i think it's a great solution yeah i think it's going to work i think it's going to work really well in the of the benefit of it is the goal is to make it an enterprise fund so hopefully at some point the salaried position of a director will be funded and sustained through the enterprise fund which then frees up my position again and i can maybe look to another area to solve something in a similar way and once again patrice you also thought of a solution for the belmont food pantry they are going to be moving into town hall in february and again you were given this you were given this task me pose these things to me i feel a very tremendous amount of being overwhelmed because i say to myself well i have no idea and it's just really just working the problem through and it's not just with me it's and those nuggets somehow just end up being a solution and one of we looked at a couple of places for the food pantry and they just none of them made sense i always kept going back to the town hall my gut was telling me town hall my i usually  can trust my gut and when i know it keeps going back to something i know that's where i need to go and then it's just ok now that it's town hall i know it's town hall how do we make it work and there are a lot of pieces there was the gallery because we're moving the i to the back half of the gallery there was getting them to understand this was a need and that we would work with them to figure out their their concerns theirs working with a t what their concerns are those working with facilities to figure out how to get in  with the director in the food pantry and talking to her and getting her own boy would then yeah it was just it was a lot of work and you just i think you just going to keep working at it that's what i keep doing i just work at it work i work the incinerator site right incinerator site is one we just deciding what's going to go there tapping it finding out finding a way to cap it that's that's one of the rink is another one that's on the radar yes  the public private partnership with the bellagio so we'll be working on that and then continually working with the compact there's a lot of grants out there that i would like to pursue zero that's work that's continuing about money all these solutions cost money it's that there's a lot of work ahead so look in any town you always find projects and work and it's getting the high school up and going and oh yes i forgot that bills and the invoices is going to be going to my office so that's going to be a big task that's another reason why we classified glen castro from budget analyst a budget director yes that was another big change that was needed not only just because the high school but glenn glenn's position and what i need him to do he needs to be on par with the department heads he can't be a subordinate to the department and he has to be on the same level because when i when i give him something to go and work on i need him to have that authority with the other department heads and that was an important piece to the restructure if i was going to be able to take my assistant and give him a big chunk of time to react i needed a little bit more authority in my office and that's where that was another then another change what are you what are your hopes for two thousand and eighteen you know i just i want to as the selectmen give me projects i want to be able to deliver on the i r s tell us lachman that you know i want to bring them solutions not problems and that's really my my focus my drive my goal is to is to meet the goals of the board's life and it's really about simple i work for them and they are the chief elected body they decide the direction and i just want to get them there would be an election coming up maybe they'll be a new selectman or maybe it'll still be the same board i guess will mark's been great i hate to lose great but you know and you persons new opportunities to us how would you want to be remembered patrice the time ever came where patrice moving on from belmont i know you have no new year have  checked is good for one how many more years to to and then we hope you will be renewable energy but how would you want to be remembered how would you want to be when people think of patrice what you want them to think of i would say just how hard i worked  and how great i was to work with i agree you're very great to work with them whenever a town administrator response to a question from the press i try to get when my vote so i really i really am so glad that you came on the show and great thank you and i'd love to have you on again periodically to talk about the latest buzz in belmont because that's what this is all about latest buzz and thank you everyone for i hope that everyone has a healthy happy new year and that there's a lot of great things to look forward to in in belmont in two thousand nine hundred thanks to the excellent town