going to be any change on your end just a change of mind that i actually have to go out with and if i ever don't believe me it's not from lack of conflict that may have cropped up and i will try to appoint one of the other two to appear in  ok i would now like to introduce one brownsburg or i've asked him to speak about the general state of the state budget as relates to the belmont i have a particular question for him about the community path you may be able to address this is something i can report that the state budget this year is doing relatively well versus its benchmarks through this time of the fiscal year we are running about seven hundred million expected to or maybe a little better and it also orders well for the exactions that we made about fiscal nineteen the way the state's budget process works december shearers of the ways and means committee of the house year it looks like those benchmarks and the like those projections are probably going to be good but they're probably not going to get revised downwards so that the governors numbers for local aid which i'm sure you guys have seen of probably time ministers built into your likely that the house of the senate will end up finding a little bit more money for some of the different categories of local labor as you may know there's several different major categories one is the lottery money which so it is what it is we don't you're you're you're looking this year for reimbursement from cost last year i'm out of the reimbursement big go up a little bit we may be able to put this in one of our supplemental budget i think we are doing this will be raising the k as well that's a overview and maybe i could take some questions and because there's different directions we could go here we could look about long term we could talk a little about the point of whatever people feel as useful  these the chapter seventy formula is just that phrase is a little bit of a misnomer because people think there's a chapter seventy where there's a formula and the money comes out through that formula that is really not what happens what really happens is that every year handful of people who understand the numbers produce this huge spreadsheet run of nine million different ways to tweak the formula so that it adds up to the amount of money the governor wants to spend on the ways wants to spend looks like the spread everybody's getting something and that's kind of how it's done in practice there is there is a conceptual framework behind it which goes back to sort of frameworks  of top of each other in the formula the original formula ninety three the original education reform formula is designed to give a lot more aid to the poorest communities in the state and their communities in the state that have s ends up paying almost all of their basic education costs that formula is the but the basic idea of that formula is that you have a construct a comput amount called the foundation budget which says you know how much you have forty five hundred students with which so many are special limited so many are bilingual and some other low income here's what you think you need we think you need  forty seven million dollars to educate your students and then the state based on walton based on a complicated for us as how much should you have to pay the old formula was based on has chosen a direction which actually works well under this formula the reason you've gotten a good bump this year is because instead of choosing to accept a decent amount of commercial value in town and grow your tax base you've chosen not to carry a tax base particularly but you do overrides and so the town of watertown by contrast has taken a lot of and  two things are treated differently in the old formula new growth is considered to sort of counts and so that if you have new growth you're considered to have more money and so that reduces the age you get but if you don't have new growth and you tax yourself more that doesn't count against you in the way the a formula works interestingly enough so watertown has really gotten treated badly goal level for local aid for the most for the more affluent communities is seventeen and a half percent of foundation budget under the way this formula is played out for belmont you're even above that locally or nineteen point six percent on a couple two thousand and six is in so that's really what's happy that these sort of vestiges of that old formula which favors which favors probably tax overrides instead of new growth in the way it works has benefited d my understanding is that the chapter seven is meant to actually essentially paid for the nothing for each student at some basic level effectively so in other words when you have more students you get more chapter seven here and that gets actually affected one way or another but based on the wealth of the community effectively so when we have a thousand new students and gone over the last ten years we're going to get more chapter seven he'd scale back some based on the fact that don't want to say well if your committee rolled holyoke for example but we're going to get more money so it seems to me if unless i'm mistaken well that there are impact of more money from chapter seven in part because we have many more students and for the reason you said which is that we have had an override instead of actually having a commercial tax base group might run about how does that that that is actually correct somebody if you just looked at the enrollment growth they wouldn't give you a fourteen percent increase this year the reason you got a fourteen percent increase is because your foundation budget goes up somewhat and this other quantity doesn't go up that much at the end they diverge and so you have this you have your aid levels the difference between these two computed quantities and they're both bigger you know they're both pretty big quantities so a little bit of difference in the way they move results in a big increase in your aid and sort of capricious it's sort of capricious you know some recognition that there was a sort of a some unpredictability in the way these two quantities moved and the and so there were there were communities that were doing well and they just didn't make sense compared to what communities were doing which you know you had you had wellesley getting more per student than watertown of you know just just bad bad numbers just don't make sense and so there was an effort to recast the formula based on a direct concepts of wealth and sort of that so that would have a closer relationship to ability to pay but of course and of course you couldn't do that all in one year because you're never going to take money away from anybody every everything stays grandfather just to sort of have to build upwards and we couldn't do that up with the revenue available we could do that sort of complex transition rules that were created with a goal to get to the sort of more rational allocation in about five years and the recession so we never got there in the formulas been kind of tweet tweet to compromise and not really go as far as it was intended and so now you have it has converged a lot so that the aid level videos have occurred that's based on wealth as to what the percentage of foundation budget should be and i think the poorest communities you know should be up around you know he did ninety one hundred percent and everybody should level down to about seventeen and a half percent the scatter of communities towards that curve has got a lot narrower over the past few years and that's something that's how i framed my efforts around this is to bring not curve narrow or well built from the bottom up not to bring thing anybody down but in that's and that's the framing the way that that we've been able to benefit watertown and other communities we're getting badly treated in that formula so we're pretty close to where we need to be but we still have this ungodly complex mess what we should be doing as a next step in in my view and the view of many others is that we should be increasing the foundation budget is the foundation budget is is a quantity that is just too low it doesn't reflect the true cost of educating kids and it's the and that's really true in most communities th we can't raise a kid we don't have the money to do it the only way that's going to happen in the short run is of the voters approve the revenue increase of the on the ballot in november look it's actually grease that applies to people who are over a million dollars on the ballot in november that will generate about two billion dollars worth of revenue which will get split between education and transfer of purchase it is not certain that it will be on the ballot there is location which i've heard is kind of a jump ball as to whether it's framed you'll see the foundation budget go up lift all boats try to get to the more a more reasonable formula if not all kind of a lot of it i'm not sure where it'll go but but you say you save this year with a good increase and you're going to go if you grandfathered in future was in the future but is there anything else the belmont could do specifically to get a higher ranking not that you'd want to do that that you'd want to do i mean i think that you know that you would only way you can get a formula right now oh is there a sense for this tax increase that might be on the ballot how that hits individuals like him but you mentioned the gross amount is is there an estimate so the tax increase is not about only applies to people earning more than one million dollars a year but your tax returns are one million dollars a year so do it's not going to affect your  any other questions about the budget we'll have a specific question for you about the community path so the the way i've heard the community prospects for funding the path of only a portion of the route they've been applied for example this suppose that we have a clear path to get from the cambridge line say that on center but zero first of all you know before a project can be fully priced and funded you're going you're going to need to go further down the design curve right i mean you're you've got some conceptual conceptual reductions one is selected there's still a conversation that could continue about the little bit you have to nail that down and you have to take into the point where it's designed adequately so the pricing because the it is is is well defined and then you have a shot of getting it onto the transportation improvement program which is the shared list of projects that the  regional decision making body for allocation of state and local transportation funds use of a metaphor there is a thing called the metropolitan planning organization which is a federally mandated body which makes decisions about how to allocate funds for highway projects in the boston area and it creates a thing called the temple it's extremely transparent process it's an extremely sort of rigorous process it's very well publicized you if you go to boston and you know i think you know google that boston embryo dot org you'll see everything that is done every single decision they make is extremely transparent it's a very acid kind of test you have to have a project one more statement the town there is we've looked at this a little but there's no meaningful amount of money for the design front this is this is this is a burden of the town into caring for examine this is what we did on pleasant street this is what we did a  town carries the burden of making that is doing the design and getting a state of readiness that the state funding is going to be there there's a lot of desire to fund bike paths i think there's you know there's  be cleared before the other i don't think that's a problem that's come back to answer your question of the scenario that seems most likely to me and this is just personal opinion is that we have a clear path brings to play issues mean think about we we just we just we funded the portion from alewife we funded and built the portion from alewife to broad street there is no reason the philosophical reason whatsoever that you can't but going to fund the piece from right to develop one center and then not some sort of restriction like you can put in the benches that you can't put the pavement or something like that we want to clarify exactly what the borders of this arbutus other communities have done that so i don't know this well and this i mean i've told the c b c to be expecting night with the exception was so we would like to pursue them in the same order that they were discussing last time the first one part he's ability study recall the five thousand dollars for the sign of growth it's just one overall question i bees design budgets are generally developed is to assume a percentage something like ten percent of construction or design how the rights of way might figure into that i don't know  my own view which i'm sure will be discussed of a later date is slight and then moved to the root that could bring the cost down i'm hoping to between fifteen and twenty million dollars but whatever the ultimate construction budget is the design is likely to be well over a million and whether it's two million or three million it's too early to say but i would say that any dollar we i remain a little bit confused overstates it as to what our role is the opportunity cost question is that really a c p a committee question to say should we as the c p a be reserving the money and is our role to look at the merits of the individual projects or should we be as a group second guessing the c p s a as to whether or not they're fairly thinking about opportunity costs in the future and not quite honestly not sure what our role is in that kind of this issue make problems my view is our role can be whatever we would like it to be and people can either pay attention to what we projects total a million five and we're expecting a million one uber seats this year so that would be a carry over eight hundred thousand if i did the math r of is it is it reasonable to believe that we would want to spend something like two million dollars on the path design next year is that is that a reasonable possibility or is that unlikely because if there's a reasonable possibly that being true that we currently have that's eight hundred thousand left over really get another let's say one one or so next here or there get us to one night that's pretty much everything he wants a point couldn't even spend all that because we have to set aside money for certain for the other buckets so we would not have enough money next year just spend on that project even if you want to spend a hundred percent on that project and that would lead us to live would lead us to think that we may actually choose just for the first time maybe numbers and not recommend approving all the projects this year so we could save more money and fund that project out of your fall and if that wasn't all most amazing i was thinking more to to left this year pass considering that are the applications that come in before we actually have a half truth and then pick it up starting next year or so but if it were true that we would that we were expecting to spend two million dollars next year just because one asking the question then we wouldn't have enough money and we might want to revisit that that logic so do you believe that it is next year but i think in the next two years and certainly in the next three years i will be without i certainly don't want to go beyond that so i like to move this along particularly the structure talking about or behind the high schools but if we're going to be ripping up the high school  so we're not budgeting for it in the budget we're approving now i mean we could do it at a special town meeting if we wanted but at the moment even if we had the money in the c p a we don't have any mechanism to wrong that me c p a funds can be used to pay the debt service so that if we had to borrow the money for the design i don't love that option but on the other hand sometimes it's easier to lock in following events rather than to say no currently so you commit ourselves to funding that design work over several year process i can certainly i don't see any other source for the funds from if if that's our only option i mean if you're looking at that versus trying to take money from somewhere else i mean it's a guaranteed it's a fairly guaranteed stream of income yes ah but i do think over a two or three year horizon that we actually have a the i'm not aware of any pending major project but that doesn't mean that they don't up i'm going to skip my claim going to the reasons for the next project is housing trust that was a request for joy or fifty thousand dollars just to recap  funding from other private public sources and use that money that they could then extrapolate further to acquire portable unit survivor structures for housing restrictions on existing that that could be the range of possible uses but lawyer moved to approve the says the intent is to create this trust agreement between the housing trust and the c p c it doesn't say and i think the saw somewhere in here where it says the trust is willing to make the  money subject to that but i don't see anything in the vote that sense that the money is conditioned upon that trust agreement being created then jointly executed before the money can be spent is your understanding that if we approved two hundred fifty thousand tonight it is subject to expenditure only after the trust usually executed or could the trust agreement never really happen and they come to you and say we'd like two hundred fifty thousand for this house i think doesn't seem like it's conditioned upon although that seems to be the official body of the town i mean we're not dealing with people that we don't somehow know anything about or trust and so it seems to me that their application included the trust agreement between the town and the  interest how about spending this money and that is their intention so i don't think that it's a likely scenario at all this is just going to be two hundred fifty thousand dollars that just goes into someone's pocket we don't know how this or how it's that it's legitimately spent in the interests of the term it seems to me this is a very careful application with that as part of the structure of the agreement and leave them with the chair entertain a motion that was you recommend you make a recommendation you make the recommendation that oh well i wonder if that's really very necessary because it sounds like the selectmen appoint the housing trust the selectmen could have a conversation with the housing trust saying we don't want you to you know spend this money want to have the region in place i mean it's i think it's like anything else that that there are there are and there are consequences for not acting in good faith i agree with that in the following sense that it would make more sense to me to have an agreement first and then request the money second go i support it too and i just wanted to add that i think we've struggled over the five years i guess that we've had the c p a to figure out how to use a c p a to do affordable housing and we've tried  everything and nothing is quite really jelled and i do think it's an opportunity cost of just leaving yet another year if we don't approve it now so i think it is worth moving forward for all the the house it is a real need in order to be and this is an important subject and then i'm personally willing to take a little bit of that risk is uncomfortable as i feel about the process i think we're being asked to we're being put in a all right that was housing trust the final project is a grocery intergenerational path and  i can honestly say that i've lost sleep over this project since february twenty eighth because this is the kind of project which to me is getting to the heart of the types of tradeoffs that the town has to make now and probably for the next couple of years and i guess my point of young gross tree is there's a good side and there's a bad side and i'll tell you where i'm coming out the good side is it makes the playground more accessible and i think that that is an important goal i still have trouble with just as a recreational asset having an intergenerational walking path when in a small town we have an intergenerational walking path or we're going to have one pla there is a superb path around fresh pond which is about a six minute walk from grove street and actually there's a fine walking path around the base of park reservoir so this will be a force half for close to a million dollars that was scaled back to a six to white half for roughly eight hundred thousand dollars but for sheer accessibility  playground there's a big great change and there's a little parking area there but for accessibility it seems to me that a four foot wide sidewalk appropriately gr not be a project that's proposed at the same time i do think for the reasons we alluded to earlier in this meeting that a project to provide critical there was then a process to create a master plan for the grove street it's not just a playground it's a complex of playground three baseball fields three baseball diamonds one enormous soccer fields for tennis courts and so this whole master plan process with various recommendations including the walking path the community came together with all of that sat down a lot of collaboration a lot of of compromise with people who had very different ideas of what should happen and this is what emerged out of it that it was a major accessibility problem not just of the playground and not just grocery someone who has sat on those baseball fields a million times you can't get in because there's tree roots everywhere and i know there's other issues as well accessibility is a significant problem throughout the park and it's not just a question of getting in it's also of getting to the fields and using it the path is a recreational asset it does create something that people can do and use it in a different way than we currently do but it but it also makes it possible for more people to effectively use the recreational assets that are there it's also  adding the baseball it's the batting cages it's leveling some of the ground here i mean it's it's tweaking various things it's also taking care of  a lot of trees have disappeared over the years i've said on those fields it's very miserable when it's hot and you're watching a game so it's adding trees it's adding edges it's doing a variety of things that we have done in parks in other parts of town and it happens to be the one so when you put a path that is it gets expensive but you know i mean if for no other reason the excess ability of our recreational assets to the full community i think is very important it's not just a question of can you go somewhere else to walk it's can you really truly take advantage of this resource so that's where i look at it it's the culmination of six years worth of work and really what do we say to people after we've they've spent six years with accessibility being one of their top priorities and i know that's  and i appreciate the concerns that you raise in initially i think was very influenced by them they are valid having spent a lot of time at that park it's badly badly in need of some sort of plan to integrate you know it's funny for such a large path that it's very truncated and so this feels to me like accessibility not merely for those who might have disabilit but really accessible even for someone who's able bodied by just navigating that park is so difficult and so you know i do feel the primary driver on this really is accessibility but i don't think it's just accessibility for i mean that's the only community that for the entire community that the park badly needs full integration of the fields and you know  it's almost psychological almost psychological barrier when you go to the park like that you just don't know where to go there's no guidance there's no directionality to it and so i do think that the project ultimately goes way beyond a walking path that really account their capital needs in that town is that i'm asking that because when i compare i'm supportive of this project and i'm going to vote for it when i compare this project to some other other capital needs that we might be able to use c money for this fades far below many of them so i'm going to vote for this but i'm just wondering is one of the recommendations going to be to take into account every rider perspective her to me but it does now i mean i without running it through the selectmen and recognition and the story and you know the other committees that make up the c p c so and i'm happy to share with all of you take a look at i mean this is one of the this coming here things to is the cost of first depend then when you start talking and i actually was looking to be told budget and they did come back and take off about two hundred thousand or two hundred fifty thousand now the original by shortening the the length of the the path and taking out a couple decorative benches we start items it just adds up in terms of material costs you know i think it's surprising and i think we're all starting to see how much materials cost when we start looking at some of these larger projects also the same time part of this is seventy thousand dollars for a project manager on the recommendation of floyd and because i know talking with j of public works is that they handle a lot of these and they're just overtaxed and so with a large project like this best interest i think it's about seventy thousand for a project managers good money to make sure that this is done correctly and that we get what we want from the contractor biased to the very differential to the c d c and generally approve these funds because there are there tend to be smaller projects that otherwise would sort of get lost in the shuffle and i think when you think about for example what the town of your projects you  could playground for me as arguably nonfunctional to making it being like a really wonderful thing to lots of kids so that's a zero one great improvement this is a nearly eight hundred thousand dollars project for a great  park that we have but it doesn't take the park to make it for me unusable to be usable it's it still is going to use for baseball it's still going to be used for soccer having a periphery of a path around the periphery doesn't fundamentally alter whether it's a nice park upgrade it makes it better is definitely nice to have but in the context as we were talking about before a potentially twenty two million dollars that we don't have on a transformational walking path which would be used for the bike path which would be used for  of thousands of people and would be incredibly beneficial to the town and to neighboring communities it's it's transformational it's got twenty million dollars or thirty million dollars behind it from the state that's a no brainer thing that seems to me that we should be spending c money on and we don't have enough if we use this money on this project and so i actually have to say if this were if this were a quarter million dollar projects i think it's a much easier thing to think about it in the nearly eight hundred thousand are project in the context where we have criteria the c b c committee has has looked at i think it's great that we've talked tonight and in previous sessions about opportunity cost and thinking strategically as opposed to reactively as to how we use that c p c money but i do think that i did think about it quite in the context that ellen did but i do think it's a little bit unfair to dump that  making process new decision making paradigm on to this group tonight at the end of their process if if if we approve this project and then we have half the money next year that we otherwise would have had the cost impact is maybe some projects get delayed but i do think to be at this stage of the process and all of a sudden say to this group sorry we're now thinking about opportunity cost athletic fields are we going to need to let's posit that the high school project gets approved or we're going to need to materially make changes to the field almost certainly ok but second question is would favor of having the part excess of all i think the landscape group answer well taken the baseball field additions are fine it comes down to from my point of were for put it before footpath could take another two hundred thousand dollars over the cost of this i would say six hundred thousand still a ton of money but i would i would vote for it eight hundred thousand for me is just too much and i think it's a dilemma because of the way he's processed the way these projects are designed and i but i can only in the end and i would like to have a unanimous decision but this may be one of those cases where you can't i just i'm not comfortable recommending eight hundred thousand dollars for this for this project given all of the other needs of the bike that i have a bias towards the park because i grew up in that plans and everything they plan some of just said no we're really and i don't think we're saying no i think we're saying go back to the drawing boards and save some money and come back and see us and we get it done other year but i just think you know that was knows too much money to spend on this let me see if there are any other comments from the very first my own i drive by this park almost every every day by my son practices tennis on the courts the park at the park is about us it's a major major town a resource that needs a lot of help and we've had here long lengthy planning process that has come up with a plan to address many of the problems in this park and acceptability accessibility is such such a big issue within the park it's in my view it hundred thousand dollars is it peanuts when it comes to trying to fix what is a major town resource that benefits the entire town it's not just the neighbors who will live by that park but the and i don't live near that park at all but i would just say i'm going to vote in favor of this i do think all the arguments of the specially about forward looking planning are critical and i think we need to do that going forward with a list and a timeline of that sort of the estimated cost i know it's hard to do and when they will fall in so we really can see five years ahead if we can i think it's a little bit difficult because the eight hundred thousand jobs that is such a big number but if we're really going to take this approach we should look at where there are two hundred fifty thousand i think the whole thing should be revisited not just this one particular project so i say going forward  process but i will support this plan and i think we need to think about when we hire consultants to look at which was the town did to look at a gross street master plan which i think was well over two million dollars when they finished that original through the name of the land has and we need to think about it you know not just allowing people to go out and plan things that have everything everyone wants then because then do you get that back down to a reasonable cost you know in other words we hired the town hired to solve a problem which was a problem between neighbors and athletic organisations about how that so this was to be used and went out and hired someone to come up with a plan plan was you know came up with lots of things that in addition to what is being proposed here and so what's the point of doing that if you're not going to move forward on or if you're going to say we didn't really want to spend that much money we want to spend a half of them really well i think that's larger it i think the larger issue though is that when the designs get funded in these things that we end up going down the road that we can't ever pull that's my point you know i get it but how do we guard against that right how do we say ok we're not going to spend but i don't know what his attempt alison dollars for the bandstand study or whatever it is and then we don't spend that because we're not prepared to pay whatever the fifty thousand for the bandstand next year i just don't know how we stop doing that but maybe you said grammars where you say we want to we want to plan that for that's the the chicken and egg situation that's what i'm saying to we need to think more carefully because we say oh that's only twenty five thousand and fifty thousand for a plan and then when it comes back and it's a big number you know i think people feel obligated to or thank you so i want to point out that you know we've done playgrounds and we are very happy this year to fund the town field playground and it's only in the two hundred thousand range and everybody's very happy that it is in that range that it's in that range because it's a constrained site it doesn't have during the troubles the year before after having funded the design phase for the p q park we got a proposal for over seven hundred thousand to build out the playground for that and nobody was very happy about the order of magnitude of that the fact is though that they had very serious drainage issues and so a large portion of what they wound up having to do was essentially infrastructure in order to build a playground they didn't spend seven hundred thousand dollars worth of playground equipment i think that there are different kinds of projects and so if you look you know what these guys have done is they've looked at grow street park it's not just a small committee of people it was this big process with the master plan development it was a public process it had all kinds of people involved managing all of these competing expectations and they identified what are what they felt are the main problems and the main opportunities and that's what they've proposed i also want to point out that when we talk about accessibility it's not a nice to have i mean legally we are required to make our assets accessible now is it going to come soon i don't know but this is you know it's not just it would be nice if it's accessible it's actually very important i also wanted to comment on the question of the money and whether or not we have it we don't have enough in order to do the community we're not going to be spending that money year i mean i think that there is too much it's going to have to be done we did the pool in this in this way you know we were able to save for it within two years and i think it's going to take us a couple of years to go there because that's a temporary committee but we certainly you know we've made some members who are on the i believe news both on the c b c and other major capital projects working group we think you know there's a lot of interest department all discussion through and i'm a town meeting members well and i will go on record and say it's a lot of money i'm in town meeting member and i sit there and i look at these projects the same way that you do want to bring up a couple of quick points this is the first project and i may be wrong but i'm pretty sure this is the first project where the town came to us and said by the way don't forget to include ten percent for project management so we said oh can we do that we did the research we went to the state a committees and they said sure that's a great that's great idea so we tacked seventy thousand dollars on to this project the other thing that we did was we we worked at the recommendation of the recognition and you know trying to make this a cohesive project baseball had some ideas for them and for some improvements we had some additional ideas for some improvements and instead of all of these little standalone projects we lumped it together so what would be one project were all there at the same time so that was an additional collaboration that we did and hopefully you know will make this a cohesive project but does make it far more expensive project and then the last thing i want to bring up is i absolutely hear that you know we've got all these other walking paths excess ability is the law it's the law it's not just a great good idea we have we have dips in in the curbing when you get to the up to a corner because it's the law and not because you know and isn't it nice that a kid could get their bike there this is what we are attempting to do at group st with the understanding that it is strewn with roots and it is impossible as somebody mentioned for an able bodied person to get in there and then once you're in the park there are seventy five people clustered under the one remaining tree in the park the accessibility book very likely going to be the longest well i do have something to i actually it's a good thing the committee split and the reason i think it's good that it's split is i feel like i am going to vote for this but i'm really uncomfortable about it and so i'm actually appreciative of their votes against the project because we need to think about this and we need to send a message the process needs to be better if i had the option of out of for this versus you need help i think you've got i got the fields but that's not being given to me and i don't feel like i can vote against this in a vacuum a single parcel a historic district i don't think it has ascertainable financial impact which is the first question of concern for many so for that reason alone i'd be inclined for us to  not take a position the same for number four ultimately there may be some impact on housing values but it's not ascertainable i would suggest we skip item fo and similarly for item five and lest we could say definitely that there's an effect even in the one direction i think we should skip it because it's not our role to really make recommendations on again that next year for us to eliminate the sunset clause and just make the changes permanent in five years to go back and tweak some things which didn't work which is why we had a three year sunset clause to see how the changes were and then fix problems that occurred so for just eliminates the sunset if i fix the problem fixes all the problems are not in here this is old language i'm told so that will be changing you could weigh in on it or not when i did three years ago the calculus was to weigh in on the tear down and rebuild houses part of the changes were still very large but she said usually the assessment doubles because it counts as new growth so it does actually have an impact that we can decide whether or not we want to add a plan on this and frankly i don't like in the same form but there is actually a very distinct revenue impact for this because it does limit your growth and that may be decision that we want to live with but just i do think there's a there's these given that what ninety percent of our revenues come from residential taxes eight i don't think we take if you want because again it is a zoning question of what they think it is the right now we have the moratorium line marijuana facilities and belmont and with this would be extending it till december thirty first to allow the state regulations to sort of sort themselves out a little bit because the state while they've done a lot of guidance and created regs there's still some items that they haven't come back with yet that the maximum extension that i guess the attorney general's told towns they can do is december thirty first and after that you can't do it anymore but a lot of towns have been dipping standing their moratorium could just till the state works their business out so it would just bump it's a known good out of place until you know after december thirty first thin it's fairly straightforward i don't know if you want to get involved in that but nine is the sales tax which is if we do have there are a lot of facilities there's a three percent tax the comes with it and then the towns can adopt another three percent tax on top of that and this is that but you have to adopt it so this is the additional three percent tax to the maximum six percent tax i think you might want to wait they also negotiate a host agreement that's on top of that top of that they have to initiate a host agreement which would could enable other fun anything but if we don't have it then we can't charge or i create on the theory that there's an inelastic demand for marijuana i would suggest tax every we take advantage of every taxation so citizens got a petition to call a special town meeting for the purpose of doing an opt out of we're going to have a special time meeting within this time being soon to pay for another town meeting to address that but that's not what you have right now well we don't have  ded i mean romney could decide not to opt out completely but only to opt out on certain aspects you know i mean that's the we talked about that whether people might want to file an amendment to the complete up out of everything to just opt out of growth facilities but not recreational or opt out of testing facilities but not ready to allow recreational opt out of all the other kind of soldiers that are allowed by the whether you think they're going about it when you're losing money if we don't actually you know a lot of this sausage illustrates the other principle about voting time so we're not even there yet i don't claim to be that knowledgeable about our history on town meeting articles but it strikes me that we don't generally vote on hypothetical questions why would we be voting on the sales tax before we even vote on whether or not to allow the establishment so it seems to me that the cart before the horse kind of issue again why would we vote on the sales tax only after we decide whether or point i appreciate that i'm just curious the question of whether we lay in you know i'm assuming we need to make that decision at some point not at the last minute so i'm wondering is this discussion of the decisions  them on the reports should be you should have a draft but sixty we've met with counseling aging and health and would have met on the library except it's decreed from all our you can have a committee meeting on election day  and we had met with the school committee finance subcommittee that most of the questions answered and we're meeting weekly so we are making steady progress ok thank you for  in terms of updates from b o s administrators and leaders on tell me just say briefly what the major capital projects committee is up to after meeting the count was and i'm countable number of time radically lower than what's been discussed so far short term you're talking well we have a short term solution for d p w and we have what looks to be a permanent solution for the police station and so when i say a radical reduction in cost it's for a short term p p w which will be a very well built addition to may well last longer than ten years and a permanent solution for the police station and the only cost of those two options will be radically below any numbers that well i think the long term solution for the station is not the short term no but it the complete streets program from the state which would enable us to live with me based just really simply that if we go out and do it on the street then we would also do work to accommodate bikes and  allows us to leverage money from the state up to four hundred thousand a year and one of the projects i know that we've been thinking about is as part of the grove street project we want to redo the sidewalks and have sidewalks actually around groceries on the street don't have sidewalks on them and that this is exactly what the complete streets money could go for so we have to pay for that ourselves so that's one to like board general manager public interviews our paper on night the five o'clock before the slackens meeting on monday night we have two candidates two very good candidates and they will be publicly interviewed on monday and hopefully we will hire one either that night or at the lake board meeting on april twenty third though monday night this lightning set the water and sewer rates with  combined increase of zero point five percent so i think they call it relatively flat common center from boston from us boston is doing their financial best practices work and forecasting and that is ongoing and  we now have a school committee vacancy do just like them in time computer resigning from the school committee so that will be a point appointment by to you of course like school committee you know people who would be interested there will be hosting planning phase hope to have that finished by the end of june at which time we will have cost estimates from the architect of the project manager we have elected to proceed under the  the construction manager at risk of much better control and we'll get an estimate from him too so there was some question about d m him this be a for reimbursement you want to address that in yes two minutes away because i was asked about the reverse well it's easy question and it's a difficult answer supposedly it's forty percent you heard the senator today talk about the well factor and so forth nine percent of the and here's the elephant in the room the eligible costs and now you get into what's eligible costs and there are the biggest problem we have is they will move down if it's the facilities department has their own little maintenance room in there that's not educational or they don't fund that i mean there's all kinds of these things the pull nothing field i was limited as to what they think will probably be jim gymnasiums and should be nothing on relocation and so forth so that it comes down down down from the thirty nine percent the good news is we should get a couple percent bonus because we did a good job taking care of our own buildings maintenance in the past we are designing i think energy efficient buildings and you get a couple of bonus points for that you get some bonus points because you say some part of the existing building the best educated guess is when you apply all these caps and you take a look at our actual percentage is going to be in the twenty six percent area that we have seventy four stations you may have heard have an additional beyond that we dealt with last year and the million dollars that another one point two million dollars that needs to be spent to secure those buildings from  roughly seven just over seven hundred thousand dollars of requests from the fire department which includes a six hundred twenty five thousand dollars fire engine and we have an eighty thousand dollar request to upgrade the town telephone system which really has to be done if you add those three things together they come to more than the actual budget that we have the discretionary budget for capital items this year which is one point one million that comes to almost two million dollars just those three things alone and we have a whole nother set of things which is another two million dollars and so i'm not sure exactly what's going to happen the one point two million may be funded in a different way at least part of it i know this is talking about that i'm not sure how we're going to move forward but the capital budget committee that last time that we've been asking for years for an upgrade to three million dollars annually for the capital budget discretionary capital budget that's never been able to happen because we've never had the funds to do that but we really feel strongly that as we move forward things have gotten more expensive we have more technology requests now that we didn't have before that are coming in and we need to deal with those perhaps in a separate way because you know trying to balance every s e and things that have to replace roughly every five years against fire engines just doesn't it doesn't really work that way particularly if you don't have enough to cover anyway so the capital budget committee felt that they would like to come as a you know mass and talk to the maybe just about the future of the capital budget i know that the selectmen have been talking about establishing a new financial taskforce this may be a conversation with us well there but we clearly are in big trouble this year we don't know how we're going to move forward and i just want to put that on the table for work and i thank you jenny because when i refer to trade offs earlier this evening i have in the back of my mind very issues because i've been hearing much about