we don't have a case to make tonight because we have not selected a site to recommend to the town meeting yet and you know we almost you all know that we try to make a case for twenty flanges road at town meeting started there were those was fourteen different sites you can see them there we looked at one is far away as incinerators site which is way but the top of those like way over to route to the old m d c skating rink around the flinders road site and we began to look at them and have them down with several factors in mind obviously the buildable area we need round twenty thousand three million dollars a mile going back so that six six million dollars and that is on the assumption that you're just putting these lines in there on the ground in the virgin farm country and you know on the between cutting and the covering and keeping the traffic going and the flag and all of the police detail and i'm sure cambridge insistence that we put the road back in pristine condition that could run as much as seven million dollars  r so that we've talked about it could be as much as thirteen million dollars a mile to come down from their wife to world to this site is you can see that most of the sites if you go back to th and keep the electricity on during the construction phase you have to have a temporary sites one of the biggest disadvantage of you has been so far from your wife it's probably another mile away so that's at least six million and maybe another thirty million dollars high school either relocate the skating rink or otherwise expand the campus and athletic fields over that way you could then put the whole library across three on the high school campus which has all kinds of with the high school and their program which would free up the existing library for many playstation to move down there that's a study value and a lot of collateral benefits there's one problem and just skipping them over go over the problem is the site we had in appraising we've had some discussions with the owners and it's in the area six and a half million dollars now although this project which is thirty eight million dollars will be passed on to the r purposes will not pass muster so the what it means is the town if you want to acquire these circles land on a story straight square foot basis would probably have to come up with something more than four million dollars i the cambridge playing site moving on you want substation and i'm not suggesting there's any electronic magnetic field or anything but nevertheless it is a substation which if something goes wrong will be a truck down the middle of the night we'll have to service and so forth and it just didn't seem to us that it should sit in that neighborhood and as we had a one of the public meetings back in may and the neighbor after neighbor essentially was saying to us my reseller blight is so bad anything can be better so we'll take a substation but in any event it's still on the shortlist and like to hear what people have to have to say about you know moving on proposition and until we have a site you can spend the money in doing the engineering for four different sites one of the hopes is that at least part of the way coming down from your wife you go back to the picture th or even go back to the picture that shows where wife is you've got your little beeper there you know who's got them though great technology she showed people where the airwaves is can see that if one could come down a rare on track a least possible there should be a saving both in distance and there should be a savings in not tearing up and having to replace a lot of rooms i heard from many of the consultants that are on tim's team that the m b a is very difficult to deal with and there's no guarantee that we're going to be able to come down the room track but even if we don't come down the tracks we're working through a lot of secondary streets which hopefully would not be as expensive to rebuild when we bring it down that way so that if you go back to the picture of size for a lot of reasons all we were concerned before we recommended to the town meeting of the environmental factors that slide indicates that with respect to the rivers act which says you must be two hundred feet back from the river as far as bomb was concerned the building is more than two hundred feet back in cambridge the river by definition is a so called urbanized river so you have to be back twenty five feet we have the under the hundred the main secondly was clearly we were displacing the so called doggie daycare or the crate escape people i can say that i have been back in touch with the owners and there's a possibility that we could double in both of those  at shows got the substation we located where the little red dot is the and now one of the objections of the school people to giving up land on the side was there is a maintenance and storage facility in the high school that they want to recapture for school purposes for a classroom for a while until school is going to be raised and the storage space up there they're going to be losing and they have long said they bond issue and what ties them to the race and since they giving us the way it seems to me and we're not paying for it it's considered a benefit to the town it's a fair quid pro quo to build in their acquisition costs and we have to replace a field anyway i would hope and plan would be to replace it with turf field which is a much greater utilization so than that particular scheme shows the softball field and the soccer field both of which are not quite regulation size now but they are both the same size they are now live replaced by the same size which is a little bit some  regulations you lose a couple tennis courts people tell me marion will disagree but tennis is tennis is on the way anyone can expect she wouldn't disagree up they can do without too tennis courts without being tremendous this is another thing this was the first one we thought about which is to place a substation at the rearrange a little anticipation of tonight's meeting and we're going to talk about this jim was going to personally circulate invitations to there is residence in or around this area and i don't know on many here tonight but clearly that is closer to of this building can be almost anything you want i mean this is a thirty eight million dollar project and whether or not it ends up looking like a bungalow or a house or almost anything can mean a society in the incremental difference one way or for the people town meeting which means we have to decide that by really in march not to have the articles on the mark one school of thought is throw up two or three alternatives and see if the town meeting wants to pick one don't you deserve to be furious because you thought of something yeah i walk to the area behind so my impression from your maps is that in both of the configurations using school land you stop at the back of the tennis courts in other words the fence that marks the back of the tennis courts is the back of your construction so if you have another photograph yeah so wh you can actually this one is not it doesn't go quite far enough to the right right so like i measured the distance from the fence at the back of the tennis courts to the nearest rail that's forty five feet i measured the same distance at the end of the cambridge plaiting building that's just off the map to the right because there's a section of it that but further and it's closer to the than than the part that we see here and the distance there is like twenty feet or twenty and a half feet something like that so in other words there's a twenty five foot difference between how close to cambridge part of cambridge plaiting the part that's not shown here is to the tracks and how close to the back fence of the tennis courts are so it's this gives rise to you know several possibilities one possibility  with both of your configurations is it you could push back say another twenty or twenty five feet towards the tracks which w wrong but i believe the right of way for the railroad is fifty feet from the center line so it's the center line between the two tracks from that fifty feet off is the edge of the right of way there's not a specific distance in current zoning regulations that says how far we need to be off that right away we have conservatively taken ten feet correct so we have fifty feet from the center line gone another ten feet just for conservative planning to say here's what we think zoning would say this is adequate no concerns i guess what i'd like to say is please know that we've evaluated that we're not trying to minimize the  opportunity but if it's decided that the school property is favored and and it's kind of decided to be the most favorable approach that the design team will look at that will communicate with both planning and zoning and say let's maximize  opportunity and it will be pushed as far back toward the tracks as is acceptable within town bus i don't know if you've been to the town engineers office and looked at the maps but what you can see is that the parcels of land along the tracks there have been sold multiple times so there are all kinds of little thin strips with different ownership for example belmont citizens forum on the other side of the tracks owns you know  without a lot of maybe without going to the courthouse figure out the ownership of and that's maybe what you're saying but looking at looking at the maps and looking at cambridge plating i think there's a good chance that either one of those developments could be pushed further back towards the trucks we agree and if it's the decided alternative we will maximize that so we increase the area available for the athletic field so that's the overall goal is to what's available for the field but for our preliminary design without going through the whole planning process we've put together those those two concepts that are conservative and a provable like there should no be be no reason for denial carol channing road you had said that the n b t's hard to work with and that you have a problem cutting up and building underneath by the train tracks where they now and i didn't come to advocate the tennis courts but since you know i do play tennis and i love the game and i've grown up with it but that's not the point over the years the town  taken away many tennis courts i've added the mala we had about twenty nine we're down to down minus eleven now and they want to take three more little by little and some of them are in deplorable condition as it is there are very few public tennis courts in the town i think basically i'm against taking any recreation we fight for every little piece we have whether it's soccer our baseball or what that particular field over there has always been like glass and not a good one to play and my kids used to play on it and it's as bob said it's unregulated anyway so if you're going to spend money you're going to put back a field it's really not regulation size so my question is how does  and then is it an act of the state legislature to touch any playfields not just the school committee what's that process  as i point out recreations important chemi middle school he had four new courts to build a new middle school the choctaw when his only two left at town feel there were three tennis courts they took that away and put a wall up in a basketball court they had covered courts with the hockey rink is they were out there were covered courts so people could play april to october and then it was a skating rink so that's eleven courts have already buried and now they want to take three more so now we're talking fourteen i just think we should preserve anything that's recreation in the town in belmont we have enough trouble and i myself think the greatest idea the bob had tonight and i agree with you on that one is the cambridge plaiting because it's been a big pain in the neck for everybody over there it's been unhealthy it's an eyesore and i think the people around would be very appreciative as bob said it has a lot of potential for future use for the town in belmont the fire station the library and more playfields and so it's four million dollars extra that to me is a better deal than taking anything that's a  ok i'll talk louder i was part of the pure coat committee and it was a pleasure doing that for a couple of years i do have one question that i'd like to see here clarified is you mentioned eminent domain offer or buyout of the flanders road site but you didn't mention that cambridge plaiting would be an eminent domain and it's not or is it not is that a not not an option a wish full drawing i we could probably offered to try to see if someone would do it if we could probably put it out there to the town a proposal of what cambridge plaiting if you're saying the taxpayers won't pay the four million dollars extra to acquire the cambridge plaiting well could we possibly see a wishlist of what if you did acquire cambridge plating what it would look like and what the town would gain from that and had a question too but if you know bob saying here here's one of the reasons why the site selection committee looked at cambridge putting it thought it was expensive but if you're here to say you're in favor of it get up ask questions and suggest that that's what the sites actually want to hear ready other energy coby i just want to clarify this discussion for those of us who don't know the site very well would use explain more precisely where the boundary of the school department's property is beyond the green there and precisely what is bunch of the property are you going to buy that whole area that's all lined in red is that what we want to buy is that what we're talking about and that's for what six million dollars now if you go back after the if you go back to the other side that we want to take everybody wants to take it shows that you need ten thousand square feet of which has to and i was originally to believe that you needed ten thousand square feet they want to stay away from me m b t a prick and you keep on bringing it back as a possibility which i'm making people here think that we can save money by running down the railroad tracks and yes we could if we could get permission to do it which seems to be an act of god to get it plain and simple and i'd like to see some of the schematics with an overview of exactly not just the buildings size the whole size of the area that you need do i think one thing that the design team is has put a lot of effort into it and i pod as you're right you did ask for the building footprints and we have those i posit i haven't but right now but the team has them and you could get them if you came by tim's office or we could provide them to that shows  building footprint on the properties it but the most important thing that we can get out of tonight is opinions about the endpoint the actual sites we can't really design a route we can't select an alternative place to put the cable until there's a properly chosen and it because it's a significant design process and so whatever feedback people have about sites once that can be kind of defined and gives the site selection committee guidance on what to recommend then we can go the route we shouldn't be picking the endpoint because of the route we should be picking the end point for all sorts of different political or real estate reasons that you have as citizens what seems to me that if i was going to hire somebody to do my laundry or landscaping i would get three estimates and i would talk to each person not guess that they might not want to do what i want them to do so i'm not sure we've been hearing about that somebody is telling you something how can we have all the information if somebody doesn't approach them i mean like if you're asking for an estimate for something you make all the requirements and you send it out to people and you go down them you meet with them zesty five years ago my lecture bill was about running about fifty dollars a month and now it's running at one hundred seventy dollars average and so a thirty eight million dollars bonding is there been any engineering analysis of how much our rates are going up and was there an alternative study to sell the belmont light and over to in style which is cambridge and just used their power coming in would that be more cheaper little first of all thank you for having this this is very good and you do a nice job and i appreciate the work of the committee it's very difficult to go through all this then face the the unknown music from people like me sometimes that's true oh a couple of things i'm intrigued i and a couple of things the first picture you put up there the schematic that would create the the new field where you pushed it toward the presidency would say it seems to move it away from the hidden just treat residents took it up against the tracks show you could soundproof it or do something with respect to that and create an open space they are which is appealing to me the other one where you put it down to it by the entrance  yeah they had to people that seems to be more problematic course depending on the size of the building and everything else but it seems to to break some break up the open space to the to the point i don't know whether or not there's a drain there either there's also there's see the pipe coming in and it goes out the other way so i don't know if you run into environmental issues if you placed it there i'll leave that is but then i look at the cambridge plating site which for all the reasons that you've spouted and you and i have talked about and and what i've heard is a sensible thing but for the price tag and then you mentioned about well if the lector like company bought it it's too much and then the time would have to sell it my question to you is one that i don't know the answer to maybe you do would it be something that the town could be the purchase of that piece of property and then sell a big chunk of it to the light department could you reverse the process could the town take it for a public purpose of expanding its campus and then sell home ever much probably as much as we could probably get away with to the light department and then reimburse the town leaving the town with a piece of property and get a friendly bye to come back that would be good to the public purpose to take that entire site but at the same time we would have already in place or simultaneously there to an agreement with the like department which is also the town but a separate entity to take or to buy purchase as much as the light the light company was able to purchase and stay within whatever regulatory authority or burb you've got argue the position similar to the fire stations which was acquire some land but we're going to recoup a portion of that acquisition cost through the sale of the old stations which is sort of the same thing except it's the town out of one side and electric light department on the other side otherwise otherwise if that if that becomes too difficult i tending to like the one that the first schematic pending you know addressing whatever channing road neighbors because you know it's on the other side the tracks which apparently is a lot closer given the complaints in the past of cambridge plating being across the track but that seems to be something that could be a win win but th it seems that you are doing all this to be ahead of the game and be able to have