hello everyone thank you for tuning in to belmont in thirty i mean host joanna jubal is senior multimedia journalist of the belmont citizen herald and wicked local belmont dot today's guest is a well known belmont resident podiatrist dr david alper dr al gore has lived in belmont since one thousand nine hundred five he's been married to his wife pam for twenty seven years they have a twin son and and adam who are now twenty and a son brian who is eighteen and graduating in the belmont high school class of two thousand and eighteen he has owned family podiatry of belmont a private practice in his home on oak avenue for thirty two years dr alper has a long list of service to the town including being a town meeting member for thirty one years but he's most well known for his service to the town as a member of the belmont board of health for thirty years in this past april election dr would have been running in a race for his three year seat against newcomer steven fury but decided not to run because he an opportunity to serve on the board of trustees of the american that's that's it you just said the magic word because we only have thirty minutes to talk about thirty years that's a long time i mean thirty years not thirty minutes so it didn't seem like a long time to you those thirty years later  still remember the first meeting that i attended with the needy human tom bond where i was very wet behind the years and trying to learn my way through if you look back at everything that we had our fingers in and where we started with just a three man office to what we have today i really don't know where the time wins and of course i'm still only thirty eight years old so that's kind of well you were always living in belmont about about a year or two when you decided what a frank beno was a dentist and i was stepping off the board and they wanted to fill the seat i actually had three competitors one of which dropped out so there was a young lady who was a nurse and there was a pharmacist  a race so there was a race at first and he offered it to me i was a single man at the time so i had the time to do this a little bit and it was a good way to get to be no one in town it was a really good way to get back to the town and that's really what community service is all about from the get go the belmont even in those first few years was very good to a stranger who brought his life and his business to the community and the other thing which i've tried to teach my kids as well is that if you want to live in a good place you have to be part of making it a good place so we had it not election it was an interesting night because at the league of women voters i was the only one of the three that showed up at the time and so i got to have the stage to myself to introduce a little bit which probably didn't hurt and so i won and it just kind of kept on going i've had competition occasionally over the years yeah ten elections ten elections you remember how many races and i would say there were four because i remember that there was a position that ran against me i think in the fourth term the nurse came back and ran against me after that but certainly in the last few races not so much great that you want and you would have likes and you would add a race this time around i would have had a race this time which was good because when i decided to step down the last thing i wanted was to leave an empty seat and the fact that someone has shown interest yes i mean that the you know the seat was going to be filled with someone that was ready to work so it actually worked out well that way well i know it's only been a short time since you stopped at about two months since you stop serving do you miss it terribly it's amazing yes well it's funny and i think any of your listeners that have served on boards for periods of time those that you suddenly become deaf and it gets very silent you used to getting a ton of e mails phone calls all of sudden it just stops and i find that for the past thirty years i've known what's been going on in belmont not just with the board of health but otherwise i have no idea anymore i had a citizen call me there the day has been a question about some new cigarette regulations that were coming in and i had to say i don't know really know i had to give them the phone number and say they call the office but apparently at their last meeting they were discussing a few changes that in fact we had talked about earlier  i'm just not privy anymore than anybody else just living and walking in the street so that makes it really interesting i miss it terribly i miss the people i work with i know that sounds going to try but we had just such an amazing team that i really miss having that time i'm with them too on the other hand it was a good choice for me because my new position with the podiatry association is a real time crunch and it is the room where i have five trips that i'll be doing out of state this year i have three monthly conference calls i have volumes of e mail it just would have been impossible to do a good job to to both of these jobs and this was a board you you always kind of wanted to be part of right and i mean you were invited to be part of it well it's to make a very long story short it's the governing body of my profession throughout the country and so each state sends a representative to a larger group and i've been that representative for over twenty years so an opportunity opened up where i would have a chance to who run to serve for this and i was fortunate i liked it to do that and it is it's kind of a culmination of my years in my profession and once again if i want my profession to be good and healthy i need to be able to contribute to it and this is my opportunity to really happy for you thank you now you were kind enough to share your scrapbooks which i believe you told me your wife put together for you at books of your time over the past thirty years and produce our producer jeremy reserve put together a little slideshow which which with clippings from his scrapbook let our viewers a little taste of what those thirty years were like so it's very well these are questions many your predecessor were articles on there from the citizen and the herald and it just kind of shows where we've been but the interesting thing that i think you probably saw is a lot of the issues we were dealing with back then seemed to resurface again great well why don't we take a lo violations this one i can't get over the mysterious it that hit town housing so what stands out in your mind as the the biggest issues you had to deal with well of course you know as the years go by different issues happen for a while we spent a lot of time with the factory we used to call cambridge plating now called pure coat that was near the high school we were getting some very offensive voters into that neighborhood and of course it was very near the school and for those that don't know it's a metal plat company that works with a lot of heavy metals a lot of acids and i will say in their defense that they responded and worked with us as far as venting as far as different filters and the likes but we would get calls at two in the morning because the fans were running in the neighbors with smelling some pretty accurate odors and you needed to keep people feeling safe and comfortable with their kids in the school and living in the neighborhood up on underwood and baker roads at the same time this factory predated everybody that lived there so you couldn't take a company that was allowed to work in the town for thirty forty years and suddenly say you got to leave so that was actually one of the more challenging ones as i look through those headlines as you say some things are still here was still dealing with he's still dealing with rats we're still dealing with dog issues i think we've got that and one of the nicest things that i saw in there is that fourteen realists that the retail establishment sold cigarettes to kids that doesn't happen anymore are stings are down to zero or o at best and that's a real success and accomplishment for us that we've really got the the purveyors of cigarettes in line to keep it away from the kids that is good to see it but it is interesting say that a lot of the same issues are still around  but what was that mysterious it that hit town housing mold there was a lot of mold that was growing in one of the buildings up in sherman gardens really and it had gotten into the plaster and so it was kind of a dampness issue and there were a few people that were allergic to molds and yeast and they found themselves suddenly sneezing and we were trying like crazy to first of figure out what are they i mean sneezing like go going to the doctor type sneezing and we determ was the house that they were living in and so we had to mitigate the mold that was growing they were able to do that you know that was the housing authority and again it wasn't so much that people weren't willing to do it it just we had to figure out why is this poor woman sneezing like crazy when she goes into her house actually and god knows i wasn't really such wrongly supporting it but we had a problem for a while with feral cats in town and with a lot of people letting their cats out and so the thinking was for the safety of the cats they would be hit by cars in the legs we were as you so we also had rabies in town for a while with reckless that we thought it was best that they wear their collars to show they had their rabies vaccine and that you should leash them well of course i got quite an education about how difficult it is that we should and cat owners are a militant group that will come out and defend their kids from here to tomorrow that probably cause more noise than anything else oh my gosh and we wound up not passing that on the other hand we did pass the by a lawyer for the length of that your grass can grow which sounds again kind of silly is that still an exist that is still in existence and certainly the health director doesn't run around with a ruler everybody's like i had no idea about that how what is this well the short answer is we do have citizens of the town that go away for the summer  that they don't arrange to have the grass cut it goes to seed which is a great place for rodents and other little pests to live and grow in so you need to keep your grass down to pretty much less than three inches which is longer than you would normally it's simply a tool that the town in the department can use when something goes wild you know again when we're not running around saying you know you got a quarter inch over you know you better get one of the landscapers in but that caused a certain amount of controversy number one because people are like well you tobacco i'm very proud of the fact that belmont in our board was always ahead of the curve we were the first town in the commonwealth to bend the ending machines for cigarettes that goes a long way back oh yeah and we were the second town to raise it to twenty one need of that one and of course in the most recent regulations with marijuana we made it that you had to be twenty five to be able to purchase is this to me is the board being very proactive in protecting the citizens and that's probably one of the things i'm most proud of is that we've continued and of course that was no controversy that was something that people really kind of bridged glad to hear that you know what about rats over the past thirty years like rats we know now recently and you know he's park had to close twice and now from what i understand they're pretty much everywhere they're not just certain parts of town they're just pretty much everywhere is what i last heard rats are opportunistic and they'll come in when there's a food source they'll come in when their burrows is disturbed a place they're not disturbed and finally doing a lot of digging on the roads well there's digging up the roads which actually is more disrupted in the land you know i mean if you dig up your house you don't assume they have rats around your house but if you dig up the roads near the sewer as well you've got a lot of rats in through there yeah so i think people little more aware certainly when you get such a visible place like joey's park that obviously brings it's a front and center as opposed if you had rats in a rock metal i mean we have a lot of their people my them they're probably do you think the new policies in place like carrying your trash out of the parks and eliminating the barrels at all the parks do you think that that's going to help the rat situation it's going to help as long as people embrace you know i mean it sounds kind of silly that you have to educate people to carry your trash but when they took the trash barrels out for a while people were using the old water fountain there didn't stack up their garbage i mean i don't even know how i still can't believe that i mean how do you teach somebody not to do that so at the end of the day this really is a public issue one of the things that was a suggestion that came across when i was talking to the highway department is going to try and get the kids involved which i think is fabulous so they're going to go to the elementary schools and have them make anti trash posters and they're going to hang them up at the parks on their own that is my right and you know if you get kids involved think of what happened with seatbelts you know when you and i were growing up we don't wear them so much now your kids yell at you if you don't wear your seat belts we're hoping the kids will do the same thing you know mom dad you know don't leave that here after the soccer game we need to take that home so i think that's a great approach to have the kids kind of own it a little bit and that will really help you know whether or not the garbage pails that they are not if they're not being used in a responsible way it doesn't really matter and that was the point of the highway department is that if the garbage pail was full well they just lead it next to the garbage pail well that's not going to accomplish anything so it's that kind of an awareness that that really it comes down to it's something the citizens  now let's talk about the underwood pool because that was in a lot of your ascap acad lyin this is we're talking about the old underwood pool can you tell us about that there were there were issues with the water and that's why it couldn't open well this is what happened the underwood pool of course was something donated to the town and originally it was a sand bottom pool that it was kind of amazing that they put a concrete layer over yes the problem is you have a very very high water table there you have the creek that runs across behind the library of course and it's not so much that water fell into the fell into the pool or leaked out of the pool the water actually leaked into the pool because of the pressure from the water table underneath and so would cause the concrete to heave and the ground water would come in and it would pollute the pool water because it's bringing bacteria and all sorts of other things so we had an incredibly difficult time of keeping the bacteria to count down in that water the other thing you had to cause a jet all that concrete being tore up so the bottom of that pool created a lot of cut feet and i actually made a lot of business off that when it was ok but the problem was as we got to the point where we had to have the wreck department test the water two three four times a day and the amount of chemicals you had to put in was bordering really a little dangerous yeah i have to tell you it was the hardest thing for us to do every year to sign the variance off on that pool because we knew we were opening something that was going to be a problematic on the other hand you didn't want to deprive you know the kids of the town and the adults as well one of the really nice things about belmont in the summer so it was a real back and forth to decide what to do unfortunately of course with the new pool they mitigated that water they one of the reasons in fact it was so expensive is actually to raise the bottom of the pool a bit when they built the pools to get to keep it away from the high water table so that it wouldn't be heaving again to create the cracks we used to have is the board of health still involved with the new pool they monitor it we test the water a couple times well i think as i said to begin with i think just the wide swath that we cut you know i mean the health department deals with your veterans issues we have a town nurse that does everything from keeping track to infectious disease you have you know you come down with pertussis you come down with any type of that disease we keep track of it will also be the ones that will quarantine you if need be so that you know as well as contact the schools in the case of it's a child if someone comes in with tb for instance we want to deal with that we are the people that deal with hoarding in town we work very closely with the council on aging the bullies and the fire department so we're the ones that will mitigate that as well to you know when you deal with hoarding is that because someone called and complained about a hoarder like h get away most of our referrals actually come from other departments you know one of the things that people don't realize is we just can't go into your home you know we need to be called and that's a good thing of course you still have the privacy and at the end of the day you do have the legal right to live the way you want to and if you want to live in a in a less than clean environment well i mean that is your choice so what will happen very often is that meals on wheels will make a delivery a notice of problems or the fire department will be called because somebody fell and they'll see all this forty and then they'll start getting involved if it's a senior they'll get nava in the council on aging if it's younger than the scene or age then the the social worker jenna damned or will come out and start working with them but we need the cooperation of the resident in the residence as i don't wa in my house that's the end of it now there are times where you could have a nuisance situation one of my very early and probably most traumatic jobs i had i'd been on the board for less than two years and we had the illustrious cat house up on laws because where the town did have a regulation for the number of dogs you can own before it's a kennel there was no regulation for the number of cats what we were able to do is that the neighbors were complaining about the odor oh my goodness as you can imagine because we went in there in july and because i was the newest board member i was the one that was elected to go actually been done with these folks and i'm allergic to cats but it was the owners that allowed us to investigate and once we got in of course then we started having to work with the folks and we got the a believe in our place all those cats as a gas are actually healthy they were a little psychotic but they were open and then we had to work with the family get the house habitable again because it really wasn't habitable once we got him that maybe something else that your viewers may not know that we can condemn a house they obviously do it very reluctantly thirty years we did it twice and that's usually because of hoarding or issues like that where the house is just past the point to redemption but once again we don't drive by and say you know we better investigate that house you just in fact we can't even look in your backyard we're only allowed to deal with things we can see from the street or from the aber souses if they invite us over so like if your neighbors complaining about you having trash in the backyard i can't look in the backyard i can only deal with what i see from your backyard and then of course we can follow up with a ring at the doorbell and say we've got an issue here so is there a by line now for how many cats someone could have there isn't no why is that  because there's no state precedent in the you know where dogs have different issues because of possibilities of attacks from from the you know having too many and barking of course which is always an issue in the legs a lot of cats in the house don't affect your neighbors again if it comes under nuisance you know it's a very fine line between your rights as an individual homeowner or a person that lives in the town versus what your neighbors are so you need to make sure that what you're doing is not offensive to others but if you decide to live an interesting lifestyle inside your home you're allowed to do it and so it kluges having lots of cats we've had a lot of strange animals we've had alpacas and llamas up on the hill do you think we well it used to be a farming community and nobody ever banned these these bylaws one of the first things i did is that we had somebody come in complaining about a neighbor who bought a sheep in the pace and parking area as a pet for the family and they were terrified that this sheep was going to bring disease and bite children all these types of thing and so i did have thorough investigation to find out that sheep actually pose no threat whatsoever to human beings the worst thing about them is they smell bad when they're wet yeah and there was no by loren town saying a person could not have sheep the only thing that restricted it was the amount of square footage you have because animals need to have a certain amount of square footage in order to be healthy we have that with our chicken coops that we allow now know this person was allowed to keep their sheep i don't know how long they did but we had pot bellied pigs you may remember those were popular for a while some people still do own pigs yup there is a by loren town saying you need to alert the health department of exotic animals and exotic really because i don't know anything other than mainstream stuff dogs cats birds we had somebody for a while that had a albino boa constrictor in waverly square that used to like to walk around waverly square with a snake wrapped around the neck breaking any law i think i remember that yeah and actually my family owns a bearded dragon which is about this long that lives nicely in a square in there so it yeah it again that's one of the things that made the health work so interesting is really just don't know what's going on in the town and so coy fish are those bad to have you know people you're going to have as much fish as you'd like again you know if somebody of a neighbor sees we actually got a call once because quite cattle live in a frozen pond in the winter but if you didn't know that  neighbor was concerned that the owner was torturing these fish by not taking them in in the winter and we had the you know john magaw rabbits are wonderful animal control officer one of the best things i ever did was to help hire him i do explain that it's really ok the fish can stay all your well what do you what would you say you found most fulfilling about being on the board in those thirty years what what drove you want to keep doing it and must have been something about it that well what drove me to keep doing is it never got dull i mean thirty years ago we weren't talking about marijuana you know thirty years ago we were dealing with the with opioids for that matter i mean it just wasn't an issue back then drinking was the big issue that we had with kids and to some extent it's still an is so as far as what kept me going is it never got dulled it never got boring there are always new challenges as far as fulfilment goes it's going to sound trite but the broadest thing is that we're able to walk around the town and look at the citizens say it's safe to live here and it's a lot of it was because immodestly of what i and my colleagues were able to do both my fellow board members in the department we created the department from something very small it was basically a health director assistant health director and a part time secretary to now we cut a wide swath and so we've been able to broaden our reach we've been able to broaden the effectiveness we're a little more thing we spend a lot more time now with public health education than we used to a lot more back then was more in force meant in education of the people so for instance we talked about closing restaurants and supermarkets it was always our intent to educate rather than closing and so that's something that we still do to some extent but now it's moved a lot more to public health so our social worker janet and there does a lot of programs you know we just finished up the golden shoes for instance a way of promoting walking that we have purpose behind it which was a great moment and now this wonderful youth commission that's going to be coming back to once again promote that i was sent to ask you about that so you can tell me a little bit more about that i can't tell you much more because at the moment it's in the hands of the selectmen but the the datelines going to be that it's like me going to important board to use commission and then  director is going to sit down and help draft a job been using what we used in the past yeah they're going to hire and then we're going to start hopefully getting some programs going so programs for youth so that you know they're not getting into any kind of trouble in their spare time i'd rather say that we're going to give youth and options for things to do the old use commission was tremendously successful we had people may remember we had the drop in center for the the fifth sixth and seventh graders at the butler school on friday nights we get forty fifty kids every week that's forty fifty kids that are not doing nothing or that are doing things of the maybe they shouldn't be doing so that was the options i had and that just was one program we would take over the movie theater on early release days for free movies and so parents would drop the kids kids would go themselves and we actually got to the point where we had it elementary school and a middle school movie so and this was funded by the town the movie theater owner was wonderfully giving us a very discount rate not a lot of labor you needed a couple parents to chaperon and what a fabulous opportunity for the kids especially in the winter months so not just have half a day with of a school without anything to do i think those are the types of things but we also had a youth groups we had a girls group in a boys group of pre teens and te that were able to just kind of support a little bit you know for kids that were having issues for teens and preteens i hope that'll come back again as well so you had something to do with this and i think that's something else you can be proud of that he learns that i ended my time on the board i i i  in if you have ideas for future belmont in thirty shows please email me at belmont at what good local dot com be sure to check our website we updated daily belmont dot would give local dot com or pick up the latest edition of the belmont citizen herald which comes out on thursdays thank you so much