good morning my name's jim williams i'm a selectman i'm calling the budget meeting of march second to order i'm joined by my colleague because we have to be conceived and we are and we are looking to restructure the department so in europe in your packets you'll see the current organizational chart and then a draft proposal and the focus right now is to hire if sylvie's manager and really once we get that position in place and start looking at the department a little bit more but in terms of budgetary it's really just kind of in a holding so prior to my arrival i think this was played with a little bit fellas in terms of how to how do we look at the department but you still had two people there and what they did is they added a supervisor of contract management and then they had a supervisor capital projects so what i did was we thinking ahead so thinking ahead especially to the building of new high school you're going to have much more advanced systems there so you really want to hire somebody that has some general knowledge of those systems so we decided to have a director facilities manager and then have an assistant director and that person we are probably most likely going to draft the position to have hopefully some systems experience for those types of systems and they would be the system for manager and then  collaboration with the facilities director we have an operations manager that's really the old contract manager position it would be somebody that really looks at procurement looks at the general operations of the department making sure when somebody calls in and asks for something to get done it just doesn't get lost in the paperwork that things are moving along and items are getting addressed john when we spoke to john and phyllis there was a great need for a project manager slash o p m person that person there was the rationale for that i my understanding was you have all these building projects going on and you're hiring o p m stick to it so rather than hire individual p m s you have department has been lagging for my understanding quite sometime yeah given the recent direction of it so sorry as the form of your public services subcommittee the war committee i'm fully aware of what the facilities department has been that's another question which i raised on the war committee for years and nothing ever happened was something along and maybe this is where you're going with this some version of it something like the summer step system of they copied off a baltimore city spent where they've got when you call in you get a ticket number in your complaint like they do with verizon or something and then you can follow it live on the computer and see where the tickets are in that way if they and then we can tell how quickly i know their ticket counts in here so something's obviously happening like that but the seed to track them and see how quickly they're moving forward to see if there things get clogged where they're getting clogged and then fix the clog now that they have a whole city department for that which we clearly aren't going to do but there is a dumbed down version of software the smaller towns you can buy this one used i think on this i think we've been has something similar to that so i talk to the mirror somervell about having the work committee over to show it to us and see how it how that because they've done presentations to towns all over the place who want to emulate them in other towns are starting to do it if you're interested we could or maybe you could talk to  about what what the cost would be first software to allow us to track unless you feel like we're doing this officially when i think of them fine i don't think it's unheard of i think what we should do is focus on getting people in there but we've got to hire people obviously i'm talking long term the week we do have a that excuse me we're going to try to stay on schedule here and we have three minutes left for this you have a hard stop attend there and there's no budget and this is relatively straightforward you know that that kind of discussion can go you know  to the departments but not to prove the budget i think in mind tonight that's right and i'm not comfortable with the budget that we're not approving the budget just talking to the i am uncomfortable with the budget you know this i don't mean that as a criticism i mean that  being uncomfortable so i think the board of selectmen have to start with the five year projections we have to understand what was going on a number of different things it doesn't bother me too much to talk about facilities because i think what you all are doing makes a lot of sense and i see that the change for fiscal nineteen is less than one percent which we can say is good although i'm kind of curious as to how that how that happens and is it because no one's it right so the person coming in is going to be making a little less problem most likely than the person that they're from so it's no wonder if there are bigger opportunity or is it or is it just how do how do we come out like point one six percent i think we put a well i guess wellington has to know terry as wellington has three when brooke has to burbank has to butler has to kennedy has three in the high school has do that i mean the high school is much bigger place and you really have to have contractors in there i think there is some yeah the night the night you know they're not on the  think the plan is good i'm comfortable with the overall budget but i'm comfortable i'm glad to see that this one is basically flat and the numbers that you're still looking for decisions yes i would like to mention that there is no o p m on this table the r p m s are currently contracted out in all the projects so this even the current one we i know we did talk about that going forward because we thought that would be more cost effective than having separate people for every project so that it's not that was one that we wanted to have and we were unable to fund and  get everything you know i think everybody's well intentioned of course your we always get the phone calls you know and people are handling people are managing the department who you know are on staff and they say there's a hundred who put these books together to lead to great books great books when you got started in december or something or in november when you thought yeah they start  accessible to the public in all forms you will see throughout all of my so called successes for my department and i don't claim them only for myself i have a great staff they're amazing maybe it's super up work down there and  we have a lot of people who come in and depend on us so we have seen a bit of flux happen total budgets about two hundred ninety five four hundred ninety thousand excuse me up from one hundred sixteen the biggest amount for that is of course you've of november even oh well for the whole year i mean i have four but four elections budgeted for it f y nine hundred vs two for this year the eighteen are good right so i have five one for september one for november one for april and having two more iraqis yes moral reasons so for elections as i said we're expecting or for our legislative part of our budget we carry the town meeting expenses in our budget guarding our eight sessions so that's about twenty five thousand and for the calculus we are at twenty four versus last year which is about two or six the biggest difference there is quite honestly we have two big  parts one is we have paid for next request which is the town's new public records portal i'm sure hopefully you'll have gone in and looked it's getting a lot of use but cost of that comes out of my department  office about with that was going to be worth it but we've already had six hundred and forty seven six hundred fifty six requests but then filled through that all departments in town are using the system in our average response rate is two point nine days out of the ten that are allowed certainly the biggest workhorse they are if you break who goes to the police department they're doing an amazing job for their crash course everything is through their put the fire department to me development selectman everybody is on board so it's a really easy portal to want to be using people are kind of raving about it they really like it so that's i think part of the budget and i think that we are obviously focused on is in terms of people coming into our office that has dropped a little bit this year obviously because of the elections but we still had fourteen thousand three hundred people walk through the front door still those are not small numbers and we count them every single day we don't do any permutations to that and it's just straight numbers right into the exam and they come in so we are down from twenty five thousand last year to fourteen thousand this year let's put fourteen to fifteen is our kind of average number of people our emails are down from sixty five thousand to forty five thousand minis just received  this why you know a lot of election related stuff happens when the big presidential election we communicate with it why do i register myself and all that kind of stuff so those are kind of principal things we other thing that we're doing we are we are seeing a drop in some of that because we are pushing more information out through our website through general code with all of our general bylaws and people are able to search for those things no question it's a whole bunch of documents so people can actually do a lot of that information themsel wind up paying legal costs you jeopardize your ability to collect fees and you have to pay their legal costs if the supervisor or the court finds anything about their argument to be positive we always fall below we  very best to jump through somersaults and make sure that we do follow and you complement the police department but they're subject to that as well they are but they also have an extra layer of laws that apply to their documents because of cory for example was one because i remember from your presentations our firm our law firm said that there was going to be a cottage industry developed in massachusetts as a result of this but so the risk is there but but we're kind of reaping the benefits does allow people to just look at them so we do continue to get requests from the press with attorneys and you never know when it's background or what they're looking for but so far we haven't had what some of the towns are definitely experience more nuisance complaints to since requests we have not as you know better than i do there are a number of people in belmont who are advocates i prefer to think of them as advocates instead of activists and i'm aware of one situation where there was a request that was going to require the department about ten days worth of work and because the department head in the ad because we're able to sit down for a couple of hours excuse me the request was withdrawn right so i think it's a good give and take because we don't have unlimited resources at the town yet the public and the advocates of from the public deserve information so it's one of the larger you know bigger benefits i should say in terms of the public records law is and it's also a burden is that it is incumbent on the town to provide a price within ten days for someone to collect this kind of information on really really complicated and complex requests it's pretty tough to get that number so you have to do a tiny portion of it in order to be able to multiply and provide why it is going to cost them a thousand dollars to get this or fourteen hundred dollars and then  provide the price sometimes it does tell people they are more interested in just seeing it they don't really want to get you know i don't want to beat this to death but we are aware that there are also groups who are not from town yes who like information that that one group in boston they're always interested and have even forgotten what they asked we have to comply with them as well everybody we have no right to say just because we're looking at for whatever purpose what it costs ten thousand dollars to comply do they pay or advocacy group again requires information of the town that costs the town realistically ten thousand dollars to collect they pay we don't pay that's great oh i have i have paid quite heavily to day we're monitoring make sure the people are where those deadlines and their requirements of sending doesn't know who decided that you guys were in charge you and david are the state are you satisfied with the time the sign that they put on the door to redirect people away from because remember we were talking to her so these about that is that sign working i'm sorry to be so pedestrian but i think it's important it is working have the other thing i just want to make sure that i mentioned just last year i think was mark actually asked me about my staff and i have mentioned how great they are i have no ground put in a request to have them we leveled so that they are on guard with other folks in town i believe are doing the work in this particular case one of the major reasons i put it in was because they are dealing with secure and confidential information every moment of every day not just kind of oh what's happening it's so have your numbers creating people's identities it's creating birth certificates death certificates every moment of every day we're handling all of that and we know who some of these mom is if we have all of their for me that security means to me that i have to be able to absolutely trust them and then they need their value and i think it's not about money it's about making sure that in terms of parity across the board with other people who are doing similar work just one point two two percent increase so i put i put something in a while ago and just because doing a and evaluation of we are following up on minutes with various committees some we have made great success and great strides in and we're bringing them on and some are struggling a little bit most of the statutory and really kind of critical mission critical committees i would say they are up to date and  continuing to be up to date the ones that are let's say maybe less mission critical they're harder to get sometimes because they've had some turnover and people wander away with their records and one of the biggest leak points quite honestly which we will be sort of looking  attacking again is trying to figure out you some was a chair of a committee and they disappear and we don't have the studies or the books or they should be able to turn them back into the town for property so we can see if we have them in our archive before they say oh i'm just going to toss them in a think so so we you know we are very limited in terms of our ability to archive as you know the light department the formerly department is where a lot of the town's archives are we've actually pulled all of our critical archive things that are absolutely must have in mass be able to through committee appointments we can envision so actually this year we we have had for the past four years we created a database which now has turned the company that we created it with using people g i s our g i s company has now turned this particular database into a commercial enterprise so they're selling it to other or you know engaging towns to use it and it manages all of our people and all of our committees and all of our appointments it's really pretty powerful one of the modules that we have been waiting to introduce which will be introduced actually within the next two or three weeks is for a talent bank for people on in the town to just be able to directly go in via the internet and register their interest for committees and claim their top three skills which make them appropriate and upload their curriculum or their resume so i think that will also help streamline the process we definitely have that in to align with you before you start the approval process really that is the committee's super and it within that same system it allows your administrators once you have nominated or appointed people to just put those that same person it's not quite drag and drop it's pretty close this person is now on this committee and then the whole rest of the system in terms of public worker x parish records yeah operation  ethics tracking all that is all in the same database so it's actually really powerful i think that will help us a lot and we have the ability to keep track of how many meetings for example a person has attended or ask the  chair to do that or post minutes like how many minutes are the committee is sounds good so it's it's in a phase that's not right i don't understand the salary increases as a result of the upgrade it is in dollars why you know we have something that worked really well we didn't break it we're good what did you find in the light company in a green plastic box about three years ago the original i've tossed there it was about five shelves up and i was up on a ladder and i found it now pretty it was a really exciting fight we also found is an exciting really great one was a pit is a group of pamphlets for and against the incorporation of the town of belmont who but we want to make sure that we there's a number of kind of cyber attacks there's the cyber attack where they somebody clicks on you want an amazon thing and the issue two years ago and it came in it was actually the someone from the fire department was looking out for some replacement parts for one of the engines on the website they were on had been brothers and i t and it's they have a ton of money in the system possible but there's always something new they're always trying to work around it's not that we're spending i would say we're spending seventy five percent of our time in the backend securing the servers and so forth the the thing is that we can't do anything about is the person behind the keyboard you know they click something so that it's education so what i was just going to ask you about  training because you know public safety is impossible to but if you reduce the possibilities that's that you know that the best offense coming out of that education exactly what kind of training do you have number correct check number that the invoice was paid it had the invoice number and the amount all that information was there the e mail address that it was from was from it wasn't a d e l y know something that it was actually dell dot com they spoof dell's emails what they did and the only thing that can be used to it was an incorrect was the actual phone number was not the correct phone number for dell's most people would not have picked it up  and that's the exactly right and in the thing is the thing is when it asks you to click on of me to verify information or something like that the das i will do it i don't care if i know it's a legitimate email and if if if a tree sent me an e mail and said hey can you verify this and i would call her on the phone and say did you actually send this to me you know and that's the thing that's what if you tell people to stop and think if you're going to if you have to click on something think for a second and pick up the phone you have been doing that a workplace the extra extra step of this you know you did we talked in the past about coordination of requests for software or things of that nature is that taking looking at some system they call us for us and they say ok well that's a protocol how does it how do you interact with the school department on this we meet once a month and actually there are they are in charge of the network and the  switchgear computers connected and we go through you know what's going on with the network and things for example good example is the five or study we're doing we've got a three base project for the fiber in the town two to work with the issues we're going to have with the building across the street here fifty the high school been built in the library because this is where some of our hubs are for the for the network so this past year we just we hired somebody to give us all the data as far as what conduits were in what holes were on and so forth where all the fibers were putting that all together now into our g i s and once it's in there then the next phase is to have somebody look at that and say ok this is what the ideal network should look like for you or your town that we take an overlay what you've got and then pieces that are missing is that's the construction and for the next in and part of that the ideal network is the plan for these pubs what to do with them so so that's what we're doing and then the third year is to ask about you are actually the water and sewer enterprise fund do in terms of i t i do not you do not that's in the light department there is a yes that's unlikely these things and right now the light department is separate as a separate t do they have a separate server are they they have a totally separate we think it's two point six eight point six eight is because i've got someone who is below the midpoint so they get them from the rest just so i think a lot of that is because of the software licenses and some of the other sort of the increases of software i treat it like it's my i hope but because the way to look at anything else more question on that on that one so all of the accomplishments all of these ads and desktop computers and tablets they just are directly sleep oh yes yes i do regularly i have a replacement why not replace budgets like fifty thousand but they do regularly and every year and what i do hourly twenty percent of the computers every year so we have a five year oh i see my monthly maintenance i said that we just do this well this is the thing microsoft and this is one of the things that we have an issue is that microsoft is now updating their entire operates windows ten every six months version  eleven or twelve they come up with a whole new version so that's like apple than there and we have to go around and make sure and then what they do is they stop supporting the ver two versions behind them you've got to keep so it's a constant process we actually  computer with the new version and strip out all the candy crush and all of the game things and stuff that the that gets loaded with it automatically  only other way we could do that is if we bought the enterprise licensing for windows ten which would cost the town hundred thousand dollars so by them doing that they're great so they do it was computer monthly using we do have one computer monthly  they do what they do to mine that to us every month yes to every other laptop yes and actually every system gets updates every week you know there's this new updates thing they get done overnight with people we should make more often but thank you i think that makes a lot of sense jim to to be no shortage of snow here especially on the cyber threats and the security issues and whatever protocols we have around any kind of a cyber attack thousand seven hundred sixty seven dollars all one point four percent salaries lunch of any medicare increases were three thousand five hundred seventy two dollars less than one percent health insurance increase by five thousand one five nine percent of salary items no increases the parking clerk budget increased by thirty five thousand the cost of a new prime practice for eleven new parking to sustain a further ten to twelve year period of time or do we have a large term decision a fighting million dollars and a lot of the long term decision it will be physically located at the police station see nine percent like it was last year eleven percent this year it puts everything on the table you start looking at all different types of areas that you can improve that number just we're just asking that perhaps if i can   no health insurance you know i think that's part of i think on the join last i mentioned the foundation budget review commission with things they look at is you could continue an increase in special education c and i think it's something we need to dive in you know unique to the belmont i mean this is across the board understand it also has to be centrally managed but it's a great point you know i mean because as john said last night he you know he's not the right guy to ask about you know it's just a number on his on his budget i mean i like the idea of pushing it down because i think it's important to understand the cost of what we're doing but we have other central costs that we're not pushing down so  yeah it's important to know but it's in that detail in the back of this book so floyd what is the relationship of the treasurer's office to the enterprise fund water and sewage standing water and so bills are like bills i probably have twenty let's say twenty residents last businesses that are on some sort of payment plan go up and down the belmont center road but you have you have different categories of payment plans right you have some people that are on thirty day some of us i have some that  have something to run amok ok ok my my attitude is you want to work with the business community i don't want to see an empty storefront so and you've done a good job collections overall it's been fantastic over the years i remember that from we're very high rate of collection you know i mean you're not you you you don't take prisoners in this regard because at a certain point you send somebody down to the  treasurer's office we'll work with them for them from a collection perspective because the town runs a cash flow you know we have a cash you can't do business with just one come on you that's exactly and we just look at it that we will get the money eventually because the that that that's that's smart like like most businesses i mean you've got clients who are going to pay your bill and you know that's going to have him go because we know that sometimes we're by spike up a little but you know for the long run it's got to be  right it was a try now be on i live here so it really works out well because we never come back to hit you for a big sum of money you know try to keep it on an ongoing basis so there's never a blip there it hit seven point four seven percent this year but it's not a big it's a twenty thousand dollar one it's a problem these small number of the work can be the but some of these departments are so small that you get these large percentages with relatively small dollars backley everything else remains the same pretty sign off on the audit of why they push it to five years basically because i was doing a pretty good job you know when we first out of this back in the early eighty's late seventy's they were it was a two year cycle and then they would do a three year cycle and now they they can now spread it out to do the right right and it actually works out better because they can spend a little more time on a five year cycle with each city a town some cities and towns and force the need more help than others maybe the claims we get the work up front they're putting your mike i'm sorry we do the work up front of valuation you're not going to get a lot of challenges that's great and said again when we do wind up getting a challenge we're pretty far choppered that we you know if not prevail we're going to be not lose a lot on that going forward and believe i mean we were one of the few communities that challenged horizon on their assessed value and we prevailed i mean you know we want to give the money back but not you know and basically they told us every one of the state is going to get the same we're not going to change and we joined with the city of cambridge in the city of boston the city in newton said no it's these are not the right numbers and so unfortunate lot of cities  towns wind up giving money back if they don't they're not willing to fight because they may not have the money to fight and they know we've got a reputation that we're going to stand by it we have to go forward we will we're not going to fight a trolley but make sure that again when someone comes in sometimes you'll get a budget crunch and they'll say oh well we won't do that we will cut a little bit and he says make about ask for their budget and they say we can't afford to do it this year and they cut back a little bit and you know again it's one of those things if you don't do the work upfront and you have to win the inspections and all the long time house on the hill you know exactly i think eighteen i would couple of questions the impact of public records request of if i want to know what mark is paying in taxes i can the it's a totally transparent with everything is right there you know do you do you do you all get a lot of records requests or do do people come by how does that happen i get a lot of record requests simply because we've done a good job you know it's always with one of the first comm day you go online and in looking you've got to read got a really good i sent him i do the line real estate deals and you've got a really really good website as far as information online and a lot of towns you get spec that's my cambridge from boston but for me for towns like belmont most of the time i have to get on the phone or send someone down to the city hall to the town hall to pick something up at belmont it's online and we order municipal in certificates for closings all the time tom it's always been pretty prompt in responding to every one of the first ones to do it believe it or not the first community out there on line with everything and promoting it and all the building permits and the cost of everything is all right there online and again it's you know it costs the biggest thing is the storage data cost i mean we we clocked up a lot of service doing this stuff  didn't fit in with the fire walls and everything else this could be on a separate server that you know we can just show it's transparent to the public people don't realize it's an outside server but it works it works so you know from time to time you know we have people come to us with the board of survey questions or proposals we've also recently had people come to us under the demolition de lay looking for exclusions and the argument sometimes is you know my houses is disadvantaged because it's it's on the street or whatever i mean i i i'm not a real estate every as you say you reassess everybody every year basically and you're within ninety to one hundred ten percent isn't that that's pretty much it so if somebody comes if they call me up or call one of my colleagues up and say i think i'm being treated unfairly that's just not true everybody's within that range the information is public if you have a two family home and you've seen your taxes go up because the valuation has gone up and it's not because you've been singled out it's because you can look at every two family home and see see what's happened everybody exactly right and we do a great effort i mean we do a lot of inspections every year we're out there looking at it's hopefully we've been to every house was supposed to be going to get a five year cycle it probably is an asika the way we do because some homes we go back to several times correct and it's the like but that's why any people say oh you know i haven't done anything but that's not the point we really just take a walk through the house and verify because there's some people to do it without permits you know they're very handy and talent and they go finish their basement that's not fair to the next door neighbor but they've now got a finished basement because they didn't get a permit and like so you know that helps raise transparency try to work with them and you know make sure if someone's value has spiked it's probably because we were out you people go out and they buy a house they look at say well how old is the roof and you know you don't get a discount if it's ten years old as much as you think you know you need a new roof it doesn't solve things like that that are trying to get out there you know since we have you here i'm going to ask this question too because you come before the board of selectmen once a year to set the tax rate in i think there's a lot of confusion about the tax rate so i'm going to repeat my understanding there is a  tax levy cap for the town which is two and a half percent times the assessed valuation in some towns their budgets are right up against the cap that tax levy cap but we are the levy ceiling for us is to lower that because we were using our nine hundred seventy eight tax levy increase by the two and a half a cent plus the new growth that's you know that's a good point terms like a lot of people think that we have this really high tax rate in fact we do not have really high t points for the public i kind of think of it as a tax levy cap the first number we talked about which is the two and a half percent times the seven point three billion but if we were in two thousand and twelve it would be two and a half percent times four billion because the the assessed valuation as i understand it has gone from four point three to seven point three in that five year time frame so for us that tax cap is going up and since we're our annual tax levy can only increase two and a half percent from its original base as you say we're about we're about halfway there and then the other way to think about it is that since if i have a rebate once show that i have two other questions and we have a chance to sit here and we're all here one is that people are confused about why we don't have a separate commercial tax rate and i understand that but i i know you explain it better than i do so will you explain that one more time split tax rate is not had one additional penny to the tax revenues at the time it simply divides the pie on commercial and residential because d has a such a small commercial base of only about five percent their taxes go up dramatically and the average homeowner would almost not even notice the decrease because they're like one percent of the total tax and if you increase their taxes  split rate wouldn't increase like you say any additional tax revenue right well that was going to be my last question and again i'm asking more for the public than myself when when when we discuss the tax rate and i think adam adam is right i believe and correct me if i'm wrong or don't correct me if i'm ballpark belmont is the average of susman an average is always average is ranks about thirteenth in the state that milledge ok we won't go into that it is called the mill rate class and have to teach you know really ok so our mill rate is one dollar fifty one cents or something like and i think this year it actually went down i think that's right because the assessment of the value went up the assessments went up so if you increase that it to want to have percent every year and you think about it in ten year terms that's a thirty five percent and it compounds to thirty five percent increase so i understand that you know there's a linkage between what we tax and what we spend but  the question is have it i'm trying to say this in a correct way do we expect to go up two and a half percent every year for the next ten years is that i would not see a reason we would not have because i think what's happening is that the assessed valuation is are outstripping income for some segments of our population and there are different ways of managing that of course but  yes so we can we can you can look back and i think we were looking back not sure it was last night but we were we were looking back at a forty one percent increase over the last ten years and if you look forward it's going to be about the same if we keep doing two and a half percent a year and i will say what i think we've been doing in my career but i think you know it's only about five years we're actually able to have decision which really for me is a school building decision because it really fixes a lot of problems in the school district but you also have to do financial management because the store they have percent is something that you can reasonably expect ok see if you look percentage wise if the larger percentages for the most part are you know office supply type of thing printing and mailing as in when you look at the actual it dollar increased since significant salary wise i think the biggest increase was to the building inspector position and this was actually born out of conversations that developed during last year's budget season where we recognize that we were having a relatively  regular turnover in that position because of the challenges we have of what we pay and what we ask that position to do versus other communities so ultimately the position was reclassified and on the level it was last year that right it's over so it's reflected in the the difference in the salary items from last year's budget to this year's but that's not you know in this as a health care change and how many had you have ten i think mike my full time equivalent is like ten point one y  the technical services line item for planning is remaining the same the reason that we reduced it here is that here we call last year there was an additional twenty six thousand added to this line item in this was an idea that was pushed by the planning board at the time because there was concern that we didn't have the capacity to enforce the new site signed by a lot of regulations so what i did in order to manage that and forstmann effort was i brought  in and it spector that used to work for us actually he sees someone who's not working in the field at the moment but he has a certification in the qualifications and so what i did is i took one of my regular inspectors off of the day to day routine of being a building still if you compared it from two years ago there's still additional capacity in there above and beyond two years ago it's not quite what it was a year ago but about the new storm whatever a relation is that have now been delayed rightly so it doesn't last for as if you called  regulations that are now been deferred until when is effective date if the new effective date is this july first isn't there a need for additional resources for that so it was ok so the resources the need however i ultimately manage to fund that effort would not come out of this particular budget as this was really a year mark from special services i fund that effort through the capital capital budget item and the help us implement that permit when that becomes effective on july first recall that it was supposed to be implemented last july first there were some challenges made when they deferred for a year i'm not hearing anything that suggests that it will be deferred again  but we still have i guess three months or so leading up to that date so i guess anything could happen but we're prepared if it implements on july first we're prepared to move forward on time of the e p a consent agreement talking no matter what i was going to say that you know by virtue of not only the consent on the water i consent that we're going to right now from e p a but also labor and you of all the work that we've been doing previous there is a vast percentage of the town that we've already done work and that would be required under this new permit so we're ahead of the game and a lot of it is jim this gets to something you and i have talked about before which is that that portion of belmont if you look at a map of beaumont and you draw a vertical line essentially through the mclean hospital campus everything to the left of the outline is in a different  watershed than everything to the right of the left goes to the charles right yet is right goes to mr river mr gray so our focus for the last ten plus years has been to the right of that line come july first and the requirements under the new permit we will now board in the childhood washing dishes right up the other thing is the charles river watershed his up and down which in terms of elevation so can we expect less  always a sewage problem and when brook when the water no longer we've got that straightened out yeah so but what i'm saying is i don't think that problem didn't exist on the charles river side that's correct  the lines were hooked up to the storm so as they were yours yes yes yes so what was how in order to get relief people were opening up the clean out of this sewer you know some interesting stuff on there but the six million dollar separation project that we did for the winter of neighborhood i guess it's five or six years ago now we implemented a system where essentially when the elevations in the sewer main which is monitored down to flinders road where the element of the town on that reaches a certain elevation it triggers things that happen along the system and essentially any of the flow from the town that's coming that would have functioned with that would have would merely come through when broke gets diverted around when brook ok the wind from neighborhood itself becomes its own standalone system which goes into a sewer pumping station but i knock wood but since that system has been implemented we've we virtually have solved the problem even when brooke so that that was it that was a function of surcharging so we don't have that on the trial now so that so what what we are looking for and what the testing is the reason for the test you're in now which in the charles river watershed is we're looking for a co mingling of systems we're looking for sanitary sewer that is leeching out that system in finding its way into the brooks and streams so it's different than what was happening in the winter of the winthrop was true sewer back up into people's property so that became a public health issue obviously a quality of life issue the e p a stuff the water quality testing that we do is really aimed at trying to find out how and why once again it is part of the permit requirement that we test for this for the level i don't know what those tests are going to look like and what the levels are obviously if we find if we if we find levels that are over the threshold then we're going to have to craft a plan to reduce those levels you know  some of it maybe just public outreach and explain people in their day to day care of their properties what they should do what they shouldn't do and hopefully get compliance that way but until we have a handle on what the actual extent of the problem is it's tough to talk about what the solution is and then it's out of scope but i'm curious about the traffic coordination with the building committee and camille's input yes what what's happening there i their respective newspapers so i'm really trying to publicize this because we really want to hear people's experiences to go out all the committee members in town because different committees have different involvement of the office they might want to you know it's pretty clear that you know  this a bigger problem you know this isn't good you can't just put all the traffic back into the other schools which is what it would amount to yeah so i mean i think that the thing that the high school project has done and particularly the media my traffic is it really kind of exposed the concern that residents have about traffic tie and wide you know so this is an opportunity to not only you know recognize that this building project is coming and that there will be some traffic impacts from the high school project but also town why we don't we have we know that there's a significant is you know deal with that volume on our own terms exactly which i think is a great way to control it and so what we'll see we'll see with the with the testimony goes on with the study what do you think about camille's concern about the is directing cars through neighborhoods well i think that's very much a reality that i think you know the challenge we have jim is if you if you put restrictions up to keep that traffic from getting intuitively you would think it shouldn't be in the neighborhoods it should be on these main roads but in belmont those main roads are also residential roadways you know and so there's a dilemma there and we're going to have to sort through what all of that mean i saw this on that march eighth this continuation that departments and ask the questions before we have the big picture conversation because this is last night was a broad picture this is getting into the weeds and then we can step back to the broad picture with all the information i think that this is a school year nineteen that's right but that it pretty much in the jim what you threw up on the board yesterday for trees was supplemental request we haven't heard any of that today and so and i guess you know we don't know too much into the apartment his but i think it's important for us to understand what are the additional i get it i think he said all of the revenue additional revenue that the town got which was a much percentage of them is all directly directed towards under you know under a circle at the bargaining agreements and so therefore there's no room for additional requests but that being said if if we find and i appreciate your philosophy about not adding additional resources or requests unless it's recurring revenue item but if we find that the anything you know if we find that perhaps health insurance can be less than it is when the scene should be or that we have additional receipts that we think about from a town perspective those additional requests are well i think you're exactly right mark i think i would like to go through the actual budget turn back a few dollars every year when we can i don't think we've ever asked for anything more than we've needed depends on of and stop this you get a lot of questions about preparedness and you know so for example in the last big snowstorm you and i talked to us and we had a letter to the editor of the belmont herald that said you know how do we handle these kinds of things and you  you know some of our constituents are concerned from time to time in terms of emergency management and maybe could just say a few words about how it works so that they you know they understand more about what the two of  with is and in a just a patient of a big storm people want to know what shelters we're going to open and when they're going to open and i response is always the same that we will not open a shelter in advance of the storm and the reason for it is all focused on safety  situation we don't want to come out and say the middle schools going to be i shelters people become frightened in the height of the storm you know try to venture off and get to the middle school when in fact it may not be safe during a hurricane what we do is we open our eme operations center we have a large map of the town printed out we use the color coded markers and when there's a tree down a wire down we just start drawing circles so in the event that we do need to open a shelter we can just quickly look and see the  different buildings that we could use and then we'll determine which school because those are our primary shelter buildings we would open we don't want people going out in eighty mile an hour winds the police aren't going to respond when the winds of that high the fire department's not going to respond we don't want people to stay or to be threatened at home they want to walk to the middle school you know it's not safe this is a letter to shelter in place and yeah exactly i mean sheltering places is by far the most to you know the most significant thing that people can do in  situation like that i think the last thing that happened in town was along these lines with the blackout but we had two thousand houses that were not electric without electricity how did it work in that circumstance so we responded to the white department we had a meeting there as a team because to the town works really well unfortunately it's all behind the scenes people don't get to see it you know that's why we're talking about it as get together you know there aren't any turf wars where we're one team where one town and we all do whatever it takes to make sure that our residents are cared for and one of the first things that we did was we received a list from all the electric customers that registered that are on respirators that needed power for other than comfort and there were two addresses the police took the list to one right out and and they validated those people were ok and in this case they had actually moved so they were really ok because this is an effort area but when they talked about doing a rolling blackout to give those people some relief we discussed it and as a team we came up with the decision not to do that because we knew that we had a couple thousand residents without power none of them were medical medically dependent on electricity so why shift that to other people and potentially cause a life threatening you know event so we know you have these meetings over at the like department is that where the crisis and we just we have no we want to  fire headquarters so i say ok but we will have a meeting wherever it makes sense to have the meeting and i say that and the one of the comment i made before about us being flexible we're not going to say it's an emergency operations or emergency management you need to come to our office whatever it takes you know we're portable we'll just go in made the most sense for us to be at the lake department so we could see what they were doing we could meet with all their staff we didn't want to pull their staff away from the light department bring to the emergency operation center or bring them before you were here when they really needed to be in their building so we do whatever it takes to you know one of our expenses i know we haven't talked about money we pay almost seven hundred dollars a year for conferencing software one of the i think it's one of the best things that we've done in venture out when in the past we used to have to do that now you say your contact in the in the fire department works for belmont is a full time firing company yes but you you are a part time resource but you're you're a full time professional geographically in middlesex is that the yes i live in belmont and my office is in boston and i can be here in fifteen minute no i understand that but i mean what you do the rest of your time you're involved in other of service leo how many of you doing this work you know i'm going to be a guest at the citizen's academy and they asked me for a bio and i started to go back and look and see i've been the director for twelve or thirteen years and i've been involved for at least twenty f out but it leads up to it in the communications invited to attend a meeting or to go ahead and to station of a storm or something was occurring together three four years ago so it's kind of cool for me to be able to turn that and see all of our terrific department heads addressing you know the potential emergency s community is a wonderful thing to revitalize the community that being said it also puts its enormous strain on our budget with the enrollment you laid out the need for potential override for the twenty one budget in the spring of twenty how we sort of look at you know a broader sort of the sky should not to reconvene the task force that was really difficult to sort of me and some kind of component around that were things in various stakeholders in town to talk about something that you do have some ideas new early on in this year well sure i mean if you look at a five year plan we're looking at six point seven million shortfall fiscal year twenty two four point seven and twenty one six seven and then eight two but there are things that the three of us can deal with regard to that that that short for the  thing is that floyd has talked to the retirement board about putting back the other standing up the fund it's got you know he's it should be on the warrant as a petition from them to revisit the catch twenty two on the ten people well you know and then instead of asking for a fourteen thousand call ask for a thirteen thousand c so that there's parity for our employees and our retirees between the two groups and then the retirement board is is reconsidering the funding schedule in august and if the board can convince them to extend it to twenty thirty two you can eliminate two million dollars in cash flow payments right here you know so instead of four million to be two instead of six it will be four instead of  the other thing that can happen is that the enterprise funds can pay their opeth allocation out of that reduce deficit well what it does is we're using free cash to do that right now which is comes from real estate tax you know no way to where you don't you know you don't have to decide now but we need to talk about it because if we need if we need i think what we needed one hundred eighty nine grand last night for those supplemental request so you can you can get that by having the enterprise fund pay for their output which they can do for five bucks and then the rate payers are paying for and we have we have this discussion oh i know but it's not a it's an important discussion because we're mixing sources and uses that shouldn't be in the you know if you have a sewage compan should pay for its full expenses if you have if you have a school department they should pay for their full expenses so you know so that you can understand what you're doing if you don't run it that way you can understand what you're doing so what i'm saying is there's there's a couple of fixes that can be done in connection with this budget cycle that requires you know connecting the dots so it requires town meeting to consider those request of the retirement board and then it requires the requirement that the retirement board to consider a request of the town now to manage this number but we'd also like to see the collin centers the results of their work in their financial forecasting the more we can down the road and i knew this is big for you get closer to that statutory deadline of twenty forty i mean you run out of sort of cushion if you will so to me it's i think it's i think it's absolutely something we need to discuss in the disagree with you but i think the broader point is we have an operating infrastructure that is just not sustainable and and you know and where we have a significant pressure is being put on it by the increasing in rome and again i'm not complaining about that it's just that just part of you know the cycle of you know turnover the houses in town so i don't know how there's no magic you know solutions here but i think we do need to say what what is sustainable and within the realm of our operating infrastructure in our capital needs mean at some point the residents are going to continue to agree that we were going to have a significant increase in their taxes on the debt exclusion in the fall we've been talking about the other major building projects and then we have an operator right in the spring of twenty that absolutely need it and we can't expect the state of obvious said this we can't expect the state appreciate john's comments last night about the foundation budget review commission they don't have the money to through a lot to provide additional in  in a lobby for this all the time where they say should be about one hundred dollars additional per student which would dramatically increase such up to seventy funny don't have the money say there's no money either so i don't know what the answers are adam i appreciate you coming i think that we do need to get together on this and say this is sustainable it's a broader discussion around how do we approach collective bargain you mentioned that last night how do we approach our funding on our long term liabilities jim is always suggesting and how we look at our capital structure and what's the plan for the community over the next the results of the policies then we can use that to inform us going forward i mean we've got those it is we have a little bit of time before we get to twenty twenty twenty twenty one however so we were you know i think we're using that time productively as we speak and then we'll get the results of that and then we can discuss how we want to proceed from there i think communication to the community on going through some kind of board directed we're think group task whatever you want to call it over the next year plus outlined in it is around level services patrice because i don't know trying to suggest but at some point in time we may have to decide for sure we get knows at the ballot box that we can't continue to provide the services at the level that we provided appreciate you coming about regional we can was asian i've been talking about that for eight years it's really difficult to do but we're not in we're not in the boat alone there are other community other than cambridge that have more money than you know one hundred million dollars under the to know which way the wind's blowing and there are several things yes there are several things that you adequately without any additional information we have professional actual real reports that we  because in my opinion these things are very obvious but we need to talk about before we can do it but i don't think we you know if i guess i grieve the importance of it i don't agree that we do it and then have the collin center work on and i think the consular is job is that what they have got the grant for was to help us conceptualize how to move forward on that you have a consultant come in and get grant money to have them help you with financial forecasts into the jump out ahead of it and then ask them if that was ok me that's not the point it's not the proper order well you've been on the board for one year and we've been working on this for three hundred on the work every day for like ten dealing with the budget you know and then when you know the work committee does what it does so you know some people you know why do we have the i'm the employee benefit liabilities that we have and why are we paying eight million dollars to the pension fund when you know where's the warrant committing that on that in the last ten years and i think it's a good question i thought committees raise questions about things like this and you raise questions about  difference between raising questions and doing something we have an opportunity to do two or three things that will drive those deficits down by two or three million dollars we already have the data and we don't need to talk to anybody else about it we need to decide on  road i do i do want to decide on our own but i want to get informed by the experts who are paying to do the analysis that we're paying thirty thousand dollars i mean we know more than they know about our situation i don't know that that's necessarily true i think they have and they have a broader perspective that you're willing to consider the information i mean i'm always willing to consider information however i'm just saying i don't want to have to jump ahead on a long term plan and we have people working on us working with us to come up with a long term plan well we're not jumping ahead we're we're we're updating where we should be and then letting them go from there you know my opinion so you have your vote i have my vote and i think so and i knew we needed a meeting on the sixteenth for department heads were meeting on the twenty sixth regular slightly of involved a meeting on the but that's before we meet with the department well there's not going to be any change to nineteen with regard to the department because most of the expenses as you know from your experience on the water committee or face there's not much you can do about salaries and what cranked  we have an item on the twelfth that introduces a conversation around the building committees having contractual powers for the town what do we do i have you know employee benefits by going through the numbers for how the enterprise funds can be made responsible for their own expenses and what that will do is reduce the pressure on the budget and it reduces you know two hours of that one but we have that it's not a long discussion there's no reason to avoid it it's a simple behind a discussion that's why i won't be a long discussion we've discussed before that we have no we have we have it well you know our got a big fight about i remember the