ok seeing that we have a core i'm going to call the march second two thousand and sixteen meaning of the word community order just passing around the agenda thank you again david for bringing that to the poor of our gender today is going to be your view the various by the way i'm assuming everybody knows what carmen but for carmen is our town treasurer and also in the leaders of the c p a committee so thank you for being here as well ok so the the project the jay is representing is the wind broke tennis courts which is a three hundred twenty five thousand dollar project on the agenda there everybody has gotten responses to the questions thank you jay for providing those responses  want you to go ok that sounds great so we'll so there's three minutes whatever's appropriate from your perspective and then we'll you know see if anybody has any follow up questions you know unless others have an objection i think that there's a reasonable chance that we'll actually vote on these projects there may be an instance where we need to kind of follow up in some way and so will choose not to but just a second expectations i mean is a reasonable chance we'll vote on some or all of the projects and i get  ok great i know there are some questions are submitted and answers were provided to further questions discussion on this topic and actually before we jump in i just apologist again for people's benefit as we review these projects and just you know for those that are watching right so i took a walk by p q the other day and i saw the work listen don and i saw the explanation for why it hasn't been done yet from last year and then i took a walk by grove street and i know those courts were not rebuilt totally but they were substantially worked on and not long ago and there's already significant cracking and deterioration at grove street and i'd just like to the course resurfacing course they didn't do that the cost was about twice as much as the original estimates and that was because of the condition of the course the estimated lifespan was about three to five years  ground there and then what's the lifespan of the rebuilt they're properly maintained twenty twenty five years that tend toward the course of the high school to which are non functional also a functional fortifies the right ok so that you're going to course your agenda rules presumably go away from the market because of the modules being put on that's on that space of programs on our works right now so i have two comments one is i think it behooves us to look at what is the need and are there other things and again i've had a conversation a pickle ball which is the fastest growing sport which uses a tennis court but it has different  aspects to or is there something else with all of the demands for space in the town and for fields and for open space you know is there something else that we might want to use some of those courts for because it is an expense not only to rebuild them completely but also to maintain them over time huge expense for maintenance whether it is a maintenance it's the second one second thing if we are going to renovate these and spend the money the c p m money to renovate them then i think we need to  actively go out and create programs this gets back to the financial taskforce recommendation about utilizing increasing the utilization of the assets that we have and also increasing where nonresident groups use them  increasing the the revenue worth it to cover the costs of maintaining an operating those fees right fees to cover the costs of not necessarily even from residents but at least from the nonresidents or from other private groups that are using this whether it's camps or schools or whatever so i really think that we need to be committed as a town in our rent department or wherever you know high school the schools and the rec department to be committed to utilize those courts in a way that helps recover some of the costs and expenses of not only building but maintaining those because these are funds that could be used for other purposes other you know purposes in town it i'm speaking right now primarily from my own perspective i think it's shared by others but i chose to do so without speaking for the commission as a whole it sounds like you have not voted if you have an opinion that you would like to share about this th consideration that is we're now on the runway for someone high school and they start the construction for the high school it's going to be eight to twelve tennis courts time is taken out of play i've had a conversation with jim davis so at least so if if one were to go offline for a year or so you would still have more courts than actually is needed is really recommended by the national reparation for cessation  may very well make sense for us to at least wait until you guys have voted have a logic behind it for us to factor and i'll go to jenny and i understand that there's a significant process to approve the c p a projects but i assume that there's no necessity for carrying the project through if things change and if we does it's decided later that this project is not in fact something that the tel should pursue if they tell meeting does approve this this year and it's determined over the course of the summer that we need to go to a different direction with regard to tennis courts i assume that money could then be reallocated next year for a different project if that were the choice of the c p i committee so i don't see any harm actually because of what's been said about the schedule and so on if if we decide we do need these courts why should we wait another whole year if there's really no need to get it i don't believe this money's being tied up for any other purpose that it could be used for instead so that would be my suggestion to you and i also just want to say briefly that i very much support the recreation department doing a survey and look at all the playgrounds when when the plan y i want to speak to a couple things most importantly the usage i think it's while i think it's worthwhile to do a usage study i think there's a chicken and egg problem and it's similar but different to the underwood pool right everybody was looking at the other with pool and saying well how much is it used before we were going to rebuild it well how much the old pool was used was irrelevant to how much the new pool is used because you have a new facility and we were busting out of the scenes at the end of the pool last year so i think there is a similar but different problem with the tennis courts when the  winter courts for example when it was resurfaced and it was no longer i mean the cracks were enormous they were dangerous when it was resurfaced and they were again usable it was a tangible difference of how many people were using it i don't know the numbers but it was visible and even before that i saw a lot of demand when i was p t a president and we had a program where we were having children in the afternoon doing after school tennis programs it was a hugely popular program that had to be ended for staffing reasons but i know there is demand out there and so i think you have a chicken and egg if you have courts that fall apart and people don't use them if you don't have a rec department that's planning programs and stimulating demand then people don't use the courts at this stage people have gone elsewhere and they are playing tennis elsewhere they're doing their programming elsewhere they're taking their classes elsewhere and they're not doing it here i have had these conversations with people who help run some of the ran some of the tennis stuff in the past so we can do a usage study but it's going to show us that there's not a huge numbers of people using it because we don't have the programming for it and so making decisions based on the current usage study while it's informative i'm not sure that it is going to necessarily lead us to the right decisions the only other point i had was the one that was already made about the schools we are losing the channel record s we are very likely to at some point lose the high school ports and there will be you know we are going to need new courts i don't think we're going to want to replace a lot of them in the same here and i think there is some value of having them in the neighborhoods and not necessarily having everything at a central location at the high school having these things where people can walk up to the job and run it's much s point maybe different degree the record maybe is making this study we're about ready to have p q actually get a bit actually seeing what happens why don't we just to feel in a way that little we have more information right one of the question i think really in the chicken and egg problem of trying to figure out what future demand will be and it seems clear from the discussion a couple of years ago about grove street about the geographic distribution of the courts occurs to me that at the same time we very likely have a surplus of courts for the time as a whole so the question i have is  yes and it's and it's a more from a process point of view i i personally as a member of the ward committee don't want to get it started playing the role of you know being here mediator between the c b c and the and and the willing to take the recommendations from i mean from all the different groups and you know and and try to try to consider that but i'm not looking for the board committee to take on a lot of a lot of them do wor a town and we're not talking about five thousand dollars or about three hundred twenty five thousand dollars so i think speaking about process for the moment i think there are two paths for us but at the moment one is we've got on this right now and the second is we take the approach that bob was just talking about giv here so in terms of the timing of it i'd rather do it as soon as possible but it would be depended on on either the information you would have or any further information you may briefly ever bring to bear it sounds a utilization numbers would not actually factor in at all because that w ownership or the control of the land is it all is it all school land both sides of the pond do we know where the division is right now part of this  that it's handicapped accessible to people with wheelchairs or that's an easy thing for them to end bikes and strong words and that kind of thing is that is absolutely that was one of our big issues when i first heard you were dealt with i remember there was a student the double double doors in the middle and a single set of double doors on the right the railings that run from the front right double doors the landing down the stairs deteriorated to finish but can be refurbished the railings that run some renovation and replaced with a few years ago so they got in better shape but will also be refurbishing them a little less extreme but our goal is that we're all done that everything's going looked the same of the same finishes in addition in front of the building on that side there's what i had been calling decorative balls for a while and i learned from the belmont historical society they are civil war era cannons that are buried upside down on the right which is interesting to know that there's a whole story behind that and we will be refurbishing those to those mostly probably just need a bit of grinding  sam yeah might i also add and correct me if i'm wrong but we also did receive a seventy five hundred dollars grant from a private resident to complete the landscaping that is accurate is part of what we're going to look although we're not asking for funding for it because we believe it's led to the tear ational he is the aggressive overgrowth of the area in front of town hall is really impacted the railings so we were initially think about simply trimming bring everything back but we do have we do have a donation going to take a look working with the d p w and maybe a landscape architect can help us out of do we need to change the whole play to plan to make it a little more accessible to that kind of and that really done after the railing or it could be in conjunction because we made me want to clear so i guess the only question i have is why wasn't this part of the original project we did the town hall and other other projects that are in the interest of town hall yes well i can't speak to the past because i wasn't here it could have been a number of reasons some of the scope of work was was dealing with some would repair some window repair we can do a placement done i know that some of the decorative windows were done in the doors were done so i yes i just like to support this very much and say that i think this is a good use of the c p a firms this is the sort of project that you know that the town hall is one of our most important historic assets it's it is an historic building and it's quite an attractive one when you take care of it properly and it's not the sort of thing that is going to be able to rise to a priority in the capital budget because the capital budget is so constrained and we have so many needs for it and i think that the fact that we have to do these sort of historic projects is a very fortunate thing for the town and it's that sort of expense our capacity to to keep up this building the way it should be kept up so i think it's marriages we have everything successfully digitized in the network has just been loaded with all of our software and all of our seventy thousand records in digitize format and we are being trained next week about how to use it so that you can begin so this project is sort of the continuation of that that says we still have all these original vital records that are bound in books many of which are deteriorating or their condition is not exactly what we would like to see take us into the future because they are regional and they are in their only place they're nowhere else in massachusetts so we had the northeast document conservation center was the company that we had to engage with to have a preservation survey done as part of our first project and they gave us for that project i haven't asked if that's the full amount the answer is no some of these books are quite extraordinary and they're all handwritten and they're deteriorating every day and so some of those estimates are twenty twenty five thousand dollars we're go obviously be judicious and try to use our best value judgments and those the eighty thousand is not going to get us the whole project even combined with what we've done the estimate if you add them all up is about seven hundred sixty thousand dollars and i get it authorizing you know recommend spending all that money probably not but just so you know this is the second phase of this project so as i understand what you said there is the first phase was digitizing correct this this is preserving correct this is eighty thousand of the seven hundred sixty thousand dollar that well that's where we look to our experts to be honest the ones that are deteriorating the fastest and ones that are unique which right now is between eight hundred fifty nine and one nine hundred thirty there are only in delta so those are the ones we will concentrate on we have already everything from two thousand eleven on is already digitized we issue all of those down by computer to help so we don't have the skinny on the kind of other ones so you know i we're kind of dealing with a very finite window so we're looking from eight think about that is ten percent of it or eighty percent of it or what you actually if you look through the survey you'll see that it actually is a very big chunk of the engine fifty nine two hundred thirty is a very big chunk because those are the ones that are in the worst condition as twelve course the  fellow depending on where those parents live and where that baby is uniquely born that record is held in two places it's held in boston if your child is born in one of the big hospitals and tell them the residents can and that's simple and debts basically the same way when it comes however to marriages marriages are different because they are not held in a particular community where you reside marriages are held wherever you have filed your marriage license and the law says you can do that anywhere in the palm of the massachusetts so tracking those records is incredibly complex and then each one of those parties has two parents and the last year we had one hundred fifty marriage intentions which is basically a marriage license filed in belmont almost half came from other communities because they wanted to have their marriage license recorded about them and they in it some of it is convenience and some of it is they grew up here or it could be any number of connections so it is a really complex kind of network of criteria for thanks and going to second curious question the people who were born in the area that we are now we use it is called the vital information partnership that has existed since two thousand and eleven we should all of our births from that and we should all of our deaths from two thousand and fourteen on i can tell you that it saves probably five steps and wear and tear on our vaults and all of our original records we have to go into the vault to get the record and then do certain things to it in order to be able to issue it publicly because there are a lot all those documents have private parts to them that are not available to the public so savings yes definitely second project is a combination of two things it's digitizing and obviously making them searchable using our newly developed data system for reports as well as all town meeting transcripts so i'm just an average day the town works officer to a week we get an enormous number of requests for information and they're not all public records request in the really formal sense often they are can you tell me  you know what the vote was when the belmont accepted the gift from the stronger what of the pool can you tell me when the town of wired such and such property or except a particular street as a public way can you tell me what happened to the artillery gun that was  front of the town hall and i decided to vote on that and what your stiction they had to where it is now so a lot of those things are in these bound documents some of them are in the annual reports they rise to that level and some of them don't and so the combination of these two would allow us to digitize and make available to people ultimately the transcripts of town meetings we do have an index that we have been working on ourselves which is a database for the past couple of years we go back from oh now we go back to the one nine hundred fifty three which is actually huge probably eight thousand votes of town meeting or accessible that way otherwise there is no index of all of the votes a town meeting you have to call bob mclachlan or you have to call you try to put some context around it a question that says well i think i was in high school when and then it's kind of a dangerous way to be pursuing these kids of legal questions so that that's where the transcripts are important  assessed marriages election results tell me votes but it also tells us for example when dick betts died we had to go through all of the paper documents all of the reports going back to his extensive fifty year career to find out what  places he volunteered and so if this is digitized than it would be optical character recognition we should be able to just put in betts and they all pop up and that's an objective saves us a huge amount of time and turns around to town council to david to anybody else who's looking for that kind of information prickly and we hope that it will be available to the general public eventually so we're moving towards digitizing to provide access are there other records that you would hope to digitize and thinking about things like the slick means minute minutes or other kinds of yes information that you would intice a peak morning to do right so for that i think that is a very useful thing one of the thin complaints is that people do things and then it disappears and this is a recurring theme and that's absolutely dead on right we still have got a wonderful league of women voters for example did a fabulous gathering of all of the studies that have been done in belmont for you know forty years and those are in fifteen or twenty binders in my office we have worked over this past summer actually this week one of our big kind of pushes to digitize our own archive so now when someone asks us do you have we know where ticks and not just what it is both where it is and where to find it and that's been tremendous so the parts that we are looking forward to would be the minutes and we have gone through part of that other paper part of the project was to get all of our people archived we could put our hands on from the electric light building which is where we store all that stuff and get them back into our office which is probably sixty boxes and went through every single one and put all of the warr committees minutes in one place and all the playing board in one place instead of chronologically which is how they were and then that's not really useful for a research project so we think we've done a lot of the groundwork for exactly that it's not something that we're taking on yet but i can see that we're at a position we should be able to do a lot of that once working with i t they develop whatever platform they're interested in which might very well be different than the one we're working with so yes you know too much not very good and hasn't been historically and this will really help a lot of things and i would urge the school department to consider understanding that this is an investment of funds that over time maybe they could join this project because there are a lot of school records too that really need to be historically preserved because it's very hard to find stuff and we're talking all about permanent records the ones that i deal with mostly are permanent records so those are not going away many of the school department records are permanent records y them and we have a young group which is incredibly active and they are experts in so many different things and so you put out of the question within fifteen minutes you have thirty or forty responses so i'm certainly not inventing on our own i have to say that the index that we we work with for all of the town meeting votes is our own making and it was developed and managed using the g i s the town's g i s system that we used to track all of our kind of you know we use it for pets we use it for a whole bunch of imagine that it'll be completely usable for us the goal is certainly to get it out there is here's a part of the problem when county transcripts are performed and lisa can probably tell you this these are words that were transcripts these are our very best we will definitely get the index out and you know it actually is almost prepared it could go out now but the issue is it only goes back so far to fifty three and so i only spoke a few minutes ago you know about preserving the vital records we we we recommended believe thousand dollars towards a seventy thousand dollars project right this is the digitizing town meeting records and it's eighty five thousand dollars is that the five thousand dollars of what you think is actually needed he got two pieces of feedback from the c p a one was let's just keep it to the playground why don't you talk to the soccer people and the tennis people and make sure that we're taking a look at one portion of people park and not the entire park so we're not looking at a master plan of the entire park we're looking at a portion of the park the portions the playground portion and if you know he there's the program portion and then as you go out a little bit where the bar playground and let's divide this up in the two faces so phase one would were coming into the c p a for this year it is twenty five thousand dollars to pay for a site survey and also for the landscape architecture design  which is similar to what you saw the result of when they showed the clip so we're looking to have designs and documents like that ready at the end of this and then for what we would come back next year for money to do implementation and construction and honestly people are really excited about what's happening at p q they they hear that we may get some money and this playground might get redone and i hear from all kinds of people and i'm amazed and we maybe have maybe one hundred names of people who are part of our group at this point but there is a wide variety i look down the things so there's a whole swath of users of p q and so it's really need to kind of see this community come together and get excited about the project what you have to remember with all these years or is that not everybody is at the park at the same time so it works sorry the wellington broke runs alongside p q park and so there are some flooding issues on the playground that come up every you know late winter early spring and so right now that's like exactly under where the swings are which isn't great to go through a puddle to get to the swing and so parted with the sights are a means to do it it's just show us where that culvert is and say hey why don't you scoot the swings over a little bit so  five thousand dollars as the ten percent then we're looking at a project that's probably around two hundred thousand just to give you guys the idea of what are you going to come back for next year ok so  people who have given to other parks and things and we don't have the advantage of being out of school so there's not a natural conduit for you know they can the p t a gets money for that or the other  d so based on that our refineries ensure thinks five to ten percent of the projects are between twenty between ten and twenty thousand dollars is what we would but we would seek work to come up with the thing we need to keep in mind in the something i talked to ellen about when i was first looking at this is that this landscape architecture design may come back to us with some aspects of the project that are not and so if there are pieces of it for instance you know they may want to really beautiful and make that bartlett street entrance look great and that may require some things that aren't always covered under signage maybe some of the landscaping that might not be covered and so those things would have to raise a private money for it anyway so really more than meet say though we will play and get ten percent of  today which is about maintenance and so jay can correct me or repeat our conversation from this morning but in terms of maintenance there is no isolated budget for any of the parks in town have c p a funds to pay for this great project and then they'll be a community that wants to take care of it and the other piece of that is where we're not going to go out and say hey please join friends of people park drive where members of the pew community can get a little bit of money and then as things need to be upgraded that don't fall under the d p w's budget then we can say ok should we spend this had a note that said additional services may be requested to be filled at the prior standard airily raise thank you for who ever found that on page four of the r p and the decision there was we want to know what we're paid and what we're getting for it so let's take that mine out so that it's just being taken out and then in terms of the recreation department study and how that will interact with the like maybe there is a tether ball point there there's a piece of asphalt with a big hole sticking out of the ground i don't know but that was originally and so there's really just some unused space back there and we're kind of asking  you know what kind of other programming to go there and so people have suggested sand volleyball tetherball exercise or agility course it's not necessarily going to be what i want or what any specific person wants or  were that came from and what they think you're confident in that number yeah so i think what that comes from me is we're going to aim for a budget and then we're going to stick within that budget so we're not going to hire a landscape architecture firm and say hey go you know come up with that the best you know biggest and we're going to go out and say hey we want to redo the park and they will give us so that hasn't been it hasn't needed a friends over to do that and it's one of the things we identify when we're looking at the pool where there's not a sports team that uses it so there's not a natural friends organization to you only kind of citizen group putting forth a c p a proposal this year and the other ones come from people who've done this before thinking you know the town clerk the d p death the various things so and so it's been a learning process for do number one i commend you for all your work ok you know i grew up in that area and i know the park needs a lot of work and it's a very widely used park to number two i just want to be clear this a money it's town funds so the funds are not going to be flowing to the citizens group ok there will be a r f p issued by the town and this will all be under the town's you know guidance an umbrella certainly i don't expect you to be involved in that effort and make comments on design them and evaluate the feasibility study but i just want people to understand and be comfortable that you know this is going to be under the direction of of the town is that when the jury is actually overseeing it i mean i'm not clear about that well it's not so c p a public funds are public funds so basically similar to treasurer's concerns of the process of coronation between the friends if you park and the town is not used to that so it's right there are there any further questions or comments i've come to this is not something that is necessarily germane to the decision making of the work committee but i just wanted to mention that when i was on the planning board some years ago there was we were talking about the triple road corridor and there was somebody i can't remember who was an architect or an architecture students but student but somebody did a plan for a gateway sort of path and nice structure to connect p q park to triple road and it was really well done it nobody had authority over it or anything but i think geoffrey miller might actually still have that somewhere and since you're looking at this that might be something that you'd like to look at yeah so at the so that might be something that for example you mentioned going to the banks and done with collections expenses and what i what i'm going to say what i find balances about what we have left over from currently we have three hundred ninety five thousand dollars that haven't interest you have to save to i thought it was ten percent each year help you know this this is an and designated bucket because the way it works is we have to appropriate ten percent a three and there's the end is needed right now this year there is two of the three star preservation and overseas are creation there is no affordable housing in the six projects that are before us so that money will stay to spend that ten percent a year the way the committee operates right now we've got to leave the turf battles we've gotten away from this well the ten percent is minus ten percent of this group we basically said we will appropriate that way at town meeting but when it comes to the projects we have a we have an opportunity that we can have some overlap like the end the would pull on like the belmont housing or a few of the various projects a pretty rigorous process going through so i can assure everyone that none of these projects on the road there is there is a safety net five thousand for three recipients so they're out there doing the best they can but at this point we haven't heard of any successes so probably one of thirty months comes up they'll come back we'll have a discussion with the committee as a whole in the sponsors and then make a decision from there something let me let me just give you to the fact that last fall we talked about the nature of this this a year and there was consensus consensus around the table to keep the format the same together so those two new roles i was trying to figure out how to manage my my time sometime this spring and i started doing some preparation in terms of how to how to speed up the preparation of the final three standard standard of calculations that we do whether whether something is more than five or five thousand dollars or five percent higher than also what that front front up front on the table is and and that the goal is really the subcommittee focus on subcommittees to do all the number work that they want but it's but it's just a second second source source or so i just want to show you as an example actually this is this is for the fire department if you take a look at the second page can see that this looks like our standard a standard format that box at the top that has the budget numbers and change from prior prior years that's all pulled from from david's spreadsheet those tucked into a spreadsheet that also get some britain for them to do some document and then and then on the on the third page these are the standard things to look at you know all of this just comes in terms of as a as a first draft and so when you as a subcommittee want to write the final report that you can edit and cross out of whatever you want but this is but this is just trying to give you a starting point that to get you on the road to what you want  to prepare are going under the assumption that we want this year this year to report to be in the same kind of format as format as of last year and similar to similar with these other other section  that you're willing to take a look at this sort of make sure you can you verify that the numbers match up with what you're saying and when you're writing when you when you're when you're writing writing the report just sort of know that i won't care about the format of your content but you can put it in a plain text file you can put it in the spreadsheet and i'll be able be able to assemble so i think i think this is going to simplify at least my a very long enough with the word that i have my own personal work around what my only concern in moving to something they were better is that it's maintainable because it's a rotating position and not that many people are familiar with like that so suggestion is that we kind of go in this direction and must be headed in the well i think you have to try it and i mean i'm just saying i mean i mean all all i mean all that are proposed going now is standing around what i have you know sort of this skillful thing with the numbers from you know from this this year in just sort of you see how that is in there and and then each committee can talk with me about how to get the content in that they want and i and i'm willing to just repeat what i said last time this next tuesday this coming tuesday march eighth and thursday march tenth beginning at eight thirty am board of selectmen will have its meetings its meetings its budget meetings with apartment proposed voting for the for the dead last night the six towns that were leaving with concerns of the legal interpretation that may mean the death process began  the old agreement in which they may well be bound and after a long discussion and they agreed to postpone the vote on the debt until march fifteenth is premature to even guess what's going on on that will meet again on march twenty third we'll finish the c p a discussion hopefully on the when broke will have initial time reading an article discussion to the extent that it exists and will have a brief update on the subcommittees in terms of progress march thirtieth which the following week there is also the intention is not to have a meeting and leave that open and again the right people six so we will have two weeks of no meetings we can we can be in three weeks and then two again weeks wednesdays with no meetings for be to do their thing that could possibly change based on sort of events on the ground but that's the current plan of attack just to remind people of the agenda and then we'll discuss how many articles you get on april thirteenth is the current plan with the weren't being