didn't know that there was an emergency management agency first of all the person that's been here for forty five years probably knew us in our previous name which was civil defense so emergency management is what civil defense was back in the fifty's in the sixty's and the belmont emergency management is charged with helping train mitigate in response to town wide emergencies when we're not an actual response agency we don't go rushing into fires or anything like that but we do work in the background to help coordinate all the town resources needed to overcome a situation heads three or four days in advance of the storm and we'll discuss what's going on in the town what extra resources we might need what special planning we might need and then as the storm approaches we'll meet more frequently and we will activate our oh great question we don't have any of this for the residents no one no one in the in the united states stockpiles food for all their residents that's why people are strongly encouraged to keep a separate used to be a seventy two hour and i was saying you know after hurricane katrina you should really keep a week's worth of food available rotter canned foods you know that the three day rule is really gone you know personally i buy three or four case of water whenever they're on sale and i just continuously rotate them so that they never you know get more than three or four months old we have canned you know nothing elaborate we keep canned foods at home so we could survive a week if we had to this display of food here brought by it was allison who's very active in emergency preparedness these are the emery's which is meals ready to eat this was these are military packages that are also available to the civilian population and it's very easy to buy them even with the expiration date on this list but i'm sure it's at least five or ten years out and they're not bad you know you would want to have one every day and you don't have to but the military survives on these and there's nothing wrong with you or i eating them in time of need and liz will be demonstrating later on a lot of other basic ways to prepare food without power a lot of electricity without gas there and there are a lot of ways you can become better prepared to handle yourself in case of emergency these on amazon where did we when did you get these images on was it you know mary's you know any good google is your best friend just type in and google where can i have an m r e in google will probably bring up ten or more places where you can buy an m r e all the stuff you was provided by live in again it's important to know that the town does not stockpile food or water when we had our water emergency in belmont for five years ago and through fema we were able to get water but i don't want anybody to think that this town is has enough food for everybody for three days because that's just not  that a boston based organization and it's pretty new lesson new year old and we're trying to start a bellman chapter and we're organizing moms around the issue of climate change trying to pressure elected officials to act on climate change change change the way parents teach their children at balad how to preserve the planet do you know actually the group does have a smop pamphlet that talks about you know how do you talk to your children about climate change but i mean kind of initiative is to organize mothers and grandmothers soup have you know raise their voices and have them heard asking our elected officials to you know back away from supporting his house parties where we tell people that about the organization recently our leaders met with the governor to talk about not supporting any more fossil fuel infrastructure  so a lot of political activity if somebody wanted to find you what is your e mail address or your website it's mothers out front dot org and so there's some great information there about the organization and how to become julie first of all it's nice to see you here at the event you know thank you for the coverage it's been exciting it's been wonderful you know i've been on the board since april time goes by very  fast i am very fortunate we have we have wonderful staff supporting the board of selectmen and two other very good colleagues that i work with so it's been wonderful and of course it is always a pleasure to give back and try to help the community that you grew up in so it's been it's been wonderful and i thank the residents of baghdad for putting me in that position for the community you know i think that my expertise as an attorney as you saw at the last board of selectmen is meeting and other meetings is an asset to the board right now the board is comprised of an attorney myself an architect and the rojas and mark polo who's an accountant and having three different skill sets and that role i think really helps us make better department is a separate enterprise which we preside over as the three member light board one of the things that the that the municipal like department did do several years ago  they in effect subsidize the installation of solar panels on residential dwelling units ok so if you put solar panels on your roof any excess electricity would be so back to the town at a price that in effect help to subsidize your cost of the panels right now  our municipal light advisory board which is made up of experts in the field that advise us and advise the director of the light department are suggesting a formula whereby the town would still buy back excess electricity but at the same rate that it would pay for that electricity on the wholesale market so we would still be supporting solar panel but not at the same rate that it's being supported now it is a very complex and complicated topic as you can see from my discussion and i hope i got it right to be honest with you but this is something that's not going to change without the proper public hearings deliberations and import from residents in the community so we are planning to hold a forum to discuss that specific issue before any change of policy takes effect except for i'm going to be how do you know yet i am not sure on the date it will be this fall though this fall green community how is it going i think i think it's going very well we had a report on that at a recent board of selectmen meeting and right now there is a company that's going around and doing an energy audit on all of our municipal buildings government side and town side and it will be exciting to see what the recommendations are we run to reduce the carbon footprint and we all want to save money by being more energy efficient and if we can satisfy those two goals i think it's great it's a win win you know we have we have asked the souers one summer where i i held office i was in august ok so each of the two select ben will hold the other two selected one in september one in october so it looks like i'll be up again in november and i suggest residents to come in where they can speak to us off camera and make their suggestions and their concerns known to us so  you've been around all the tables and everything if you picked up any good information we've had about to have the table so far and we've gotten a lot of good information and it's been great this is a great this is a great event so you know there is some like and a lot of the plenty more people are here anything and anything you want to know about down my they're here ok great that's great pantry has been around for more than twenty years serving residents of belmont it's open four times a month the first saturday and third saturday of the month and the second in fourth tuesday it's open to two residents of belmont there's no means test and we serve the population with a variety of food items to supplement their usual budget we're always looking for volunteers at the food pantry and it's something that a lot of young people enjoy doing helping us out filling the shelves going over the food serving our patrons and we hope that we'll get a schools every year have to have a lot to drown i've got mine serves every air is a wonderful contributor it just all the residents of belmont are so generous we really have so many people giving us donations it's wonderful it's really well when we're questioning what's your web site if somebody was to contact you what is your website wow now you know you're causing me trouble so we had it at the end of may may thirty first actually and we had it down at the highway department and i got to tell you honestly it was a great success i was very happy i would have been very happy if we got one of the two guns turned in but we got a total of sixty two firearms turned into us obviously some of them different calibers and things like that but as far as i'm concerned that was a great success it was a great partnership between the police department the middlesex sheriff's department and also also all the religious council within the town and  did we had a great great group of people working together and it was a great event great event and also just a point to there was an additional money raised and that was contribute until the belmont food pantry anything extra was donated to the food pantry which was i mean it was a great success all around know what it is is fair the way the law is written it's specifically written to be anonymous i we ask obviously because of the fact that it's belmont residence and  we don't we didn't ask for identification or anything like that if they had there was an opportunity to turn in weapons i'm wanted weapons voluntarily a lot of times what we find even today is if somebody passes away whenever you know house one spouse the other spouse may call us and say you know my husband had a number of firearms what my supposed to do with them and this is a was in our way a vehicle in order for them to turn him in legally and like i said it was a great event i what we do now is we we work with the state police and we transfer we have to run all excuse me run all those weapons through our system to make sure they're not stolen which we did find one that was stolen out of texas and then what we do is we return that to the rightful owner and then we do our process and then once that everything is completed then those weapons will be destroyed and but as i said it was a great success for i community and all the people that were involved in it so know it's going to i mean in today's world everybody knows that information is the key to wilde's communication so any time we can we get the information put it out there  i mean obviously you know we try and reach as many of our residents and you know expressly the motoring public because everybody knows that you know belmont is sort of like a cut for community and sometimes when we have a bad accident things like tremendous it's all it's all out you know you're trying again get as much information out to the public as you can while we have presently we're in the process of hiring we actually just we're looking to fill four vacancies and we just made a number of promotions  said we got a lot of good things happening and obviously we have the school resource officer now we were able to get that back i budgeted from the board of selectmen and that's and we're extremely excited about that position because i think for our community and especially you know the size of our community it's important to have that on at the high school and you know for everyone for the students to staff the parents and also for us but it's a great and i'm very happy to say that the board also saw about helped us get that restored well always as i say we always ask people to make good decisions and i just we keep in mind you know it's a very travel holiday so you know just to stop and try and be proactive make sure your car is in great name i'm judy fines from the bellman housing trust and i'm helen bakeman from the belmont housing tru developer and exponent proponent of affordable housing and our new thing is the home buyer assistance program for three first time home buyers that is coming into of i'm sorry i have to do this ok so when you talk about affordable housing what exactly does that mean first i'll tell you what it doesn't mean we are not the housing authority the housing  provides housing for the lowest income people we're talking about housing for that middle group that gets priced out of the belmont market for example preschool teachers probably they have an income that is what we're talking about it's about seventy to eighty percent of the median income in the belmont the average housing price in belmont is is about seven hundred thousand dollars for a unit and i don't know what the average rental is so there are things that need to happen in order for these moderate income people so in this case it's just a beginning but for three households we that find  housing in belmont we will provide through the community preservation act we will provide a grant that will help them pay part of their mortgage reduce the cost of the housing to them and these units will stay affordable when the first families move on the next families can find them affordable too so it's a really cool thing we're just getting it rolling and we hope people will come and sign up for more information coming soon we do not have a website it's on the town website under belmont housing trust we don't have a separate and we work with other groups in town we do work with the housing authority and the planning board because there are other ways to get affordable housing ample if you give the developer a break on density or number of parking spaces in return you can ask the developer to make one of the housing units affordable so there are there are a their big houses to separate from the home buyer program give up their bigger houses and velma but there aren't a lot of opportunities to stay in town and downsize so we would like to be able to help people across the whole spectrum we're especially interested in people who live in belmont who rent in belmont but can afford to buy in belmont they are there already members of the community who are contributing to the community who are who have limped with parents here and it's hard for them to buy in belmont so those those are the kind of people we're especially interested in organization that deals with all kinds of environmental issues but the one that we're sort of focusing on right now has to do with the tenor of the way the town deals with residents who want to have solar in their houses on their houses and currently what happens is you get to use the electricity that you generate and then you get to sell back the surplus to the town and they pay you the retail price for energy the same as if you were  at the same price that the town charges you for energy and what the town is considering is changing that system so that it would be much less financially attractive for people to have solar on their house and so we're sort of resisting that and don't necessarily want to keep the same policy is it is now but might like a change in a much less severe way so that people were still encouraged to have so green community i think that the changes that have been proposed will make belmont a less green community then it would be then if we stayed with the current system for absolutely for sure because solar will become much more well that's obviously a very complicated question and something that people struggle about you know trying to define that specifically but one specific thing that we would like to see happen in belmont is to have belmont like adopt an energy resource policy to define an energy resource policy that has goals and targets for a new will energy and then to explore and an objective way what are the best ways of reaching those goals and targets find your targets figure out how to get there is one thing that we're recommending happen another thing that i mean i think generally to be sustainable means that we want to be using less fossil fuel and there are a lot of different ways that you can do that you can insulate your house you can use less energy wasting  light but one of the issue satyrs in the town right now is a community have and the community past would allow people to commute from go month easily to l y station and they don't have that opportunity now they have to drive through traffic for part of the way so that the community path is something that's sustainable bellman supports and we think all people in belmont should  support i think that each person should sort of look at how they conduct their own life and i think there are a lot of different ways that you can save energy and use materials better and waste less and we should be doing that and we should be modeling for our kids how to do it a lot of what happens now is that the kids learn how to do these things and they model for us so we just like more of that i understand that there will be a public meeting on this solar net metering policy issue and i have been told tentatively that that the date is september eighteenth i don't know that for sure i don't think it's on the calendar yet but whenever it is scheduled i absolutely encourage people to come out in the tendon and make their voices heard and play any board and some other officials tell you have to do is just ask around you can you can find out who they are and ask questions  name and i've been living here for two years now  know we're a group that's made up of representatives of different church groups space based communities here in belmont and the belmont religious councils existed since the mid one nine hundred fifty s and retry to promote understanding and cooperation between the different pace groups and we do various projects that help bring those people together and we hope to do some good things here in belmont well we don't do that so much that it is up to the individual face groups if they did approaches me be happy to direct you know help to give them advice where they can find information about the different phrase groups in town  thing that we do every year is belmont serves day which we do on the morning of columbus day and so far we've had great weather for the five years we've done it and we have a six year coming up and hopefully the weather will hold out for us  i think it's october fourteenth this year i just know it's columbus day which is a monday holiday and we get a lot of people from the different religions out and different townspeople to work on projects with tree line up  we have the projects with the conservation groups as well as in the the land that we called the it was dated over to the town by mclean hospital the town has some conservation land and trails that we help out with fair we do some work with some various schools last year we provided a lot of volunteers for the joeys park project which helped them finish it off on columbus day so we do that for the columbus day morning and then you know we hope that we you know do some good things in town imax jones i'm here with the bell and football team i'm a senior captain we came with their coach we're working with them on two stairs and we're really really trying to do is spread the word about this golf tournament that's coming up it's late september it's there's dinner you can get dinner along with it it's a really fun event we're trying to get people to go raise money for us for the other sports teams and for the school because we really need it and i just really want get the word out of people where is it going to be at that's a great question oakley country club on september twenty ninth and it's one seventy five per gulf air and sea sixty for a non golfer if you want just dinner and if anybody wants more information how wildlife issues dog cat is shoes anything related to wildlife environment domestic cats dogs whatever and i try to help out tolerance for wildlife and so a lot of times i have to brief them on the loss a lot of people think they can take i have a higher trap captured in almost a take them up to rock metal or something and then release them it's against the law and it's you just open that territory for others to move in so you just you just get in a cycle of killing in a most and it's just doesn't really work so there are other alternatives that i can help you with in order to keep animals out or deal with ones that already there here about sixty five years or so and in a lot of people really freaked out about them but it's usually just a lack of knowledge regarding them so i do a lot of public education a master the massachusetts representative for project  about wildlife dealing with wildlife on a daily basis what's the most important thing that people need to know whether it is to stay away from them what do you do i basics that's kind of how they answer because there's so many different species of wildlife i mean you would react totally different if a canada goose is walking your way as opposed to an eastern coyote so it just depends on the wild animal you're talking about so it's it's it's kind of hard to say really you have to be a little more specific basically i guess what i'm looking for as on you know stay away from him if you see a wild animal just turn and walk away don't touch on things like that ok in general the wildlife never never run from wildlife what runs gets chased so you never want to run away from them you should challenge them you should make yourself look big you can walk toward some coyotes easily scared by just walking towards them a lot of people are saying  food is probably the number one cause that wildlife issues arise around so never feed wildlife should never be a try to feed them touch them approach them of they  babies you know just respect their space enjoy them they're beautiful animals we have someone has an unbelievable amount of wildlife here we've got me fishers turkeys we've had a river  beavers we had an immature bald eagle to high school two weeks ago so there's there's there's a plethora of wild animals around so that they're they're here even though we're close to boston they're around see we have a little guy that might be joining sometime soon so it's given us a lot of good information for this guy the music school we found out the music school and they take infants and it's been really informative so far we it's we're not quite sure just yet but this weekend we'll be moving a bunch of our stuff here from utah that we've had in storage so it's becoming more permanent as we speak you need to know about the mine so it has been extremely helpful just to have all the information just in one place you're going to walk around and gather everything that you need specially from schools that were very interest dancers and a musician or two and in england of course they would dance in the streets collect money and then go to a pub and spend it all so especially the kids team we dance in the streets collect money and go to an ice cream shop and spend it all but anyway if it sounds like fun