or picked up a town hall or the library nominations should be received by able first two thousand and sixteen they could be mailed to christine a copy here at town hall which is five eighty high street and they need to be invited first you have any questions please feel free to call the selectmen office the second  talents to others both within and outside westward now is the time to recommend these people as nominees for the sixth annual roy london humanitarian award as these people deserve to be recognized by their community roy london was a westwood resident who by their actions embody the spirit of royal london there are no less than probably twenty five percent p m s over the years including many organizations the west would community chasse the west with foundation for education families and individuals who have done some great things in the community all nominations for residents and organizations should be submitted to christine mccarthy who is going to be busy bobby was represented by the board of selectmen at the meeting in the spring if you have any questions good applicants every year for them so i think it shows the best of our community be here and pursuant to the charter as you know we are charged with reviewing the towns in your financial statements and the auditors manual management letter so we had the opportunity the end of last year to meet with powers and sullivan the town's audit firm and also with him to come in and her team to review darted financial statements management letter and we also had the opportunity to meet with the auditor our though the audit firms you know just the three of us to ask questions and you know receive some additional information so we're pleased to report that for the third consecutive year the auditors issued an unqualified opinion on the financial statements they did not find any instances of material weaknesses or any cause for concern are related to internal controls there were no misstatements or instances of noncompliance again commended the town and its financial team for being very honest and open and very cooperative through throughout the process of you know compiling annual financial statements in the kaffir there were in the management layer there were no new comments this year there were three comments from prior years which the town either is in the process of resolving or did resolve  the town began accounting for medicaid reimbursements in the general fund so that has been resolved it's been addressed that was one of the comments from a prior year another comment was related to the town's procurement policies and so the town has made great strides as you know both hiring of human officer and then also you know implementing some policies sounds like there's still a little bit of work to be done in that area but again you know great great progress has been made and then the third comment was related to implementing a fixed asset software system to facilitate accounting of fixed assets and there again that the town implemented that system but the auditor is recommending the town implement a system for recording the disposal of  i can tell you the way we designed the process is similar to a process that i would see is larger public companies are larger private entities where we were the auditors before the i did it we got it after we got it we have the executive session with the auditors so i think it's i believe it's a valuable process and i think again we've designed it in a way that would be some other entities a much bigger than this one and i do have to say that the process of the come to that town goes if you look at the just having a lot of meetings and really working out the budget this year obviously there's a lot of activity going on throughout the town and now with the university station project and i really just want to thank you know our long range financial planning committee has met multiple times  we've actually moved the meetings just night so that we can stay longer and they do their very very long meetings but i just can't stress enough the time they're all put into this and that's as you know  really trying to stress this with everyone we're trying to look at all areas we've got a lot to take care of when we look at the overall town budget and anything that we've been doing with the finances we're trying to address some of those areas and then i just you know this list i won't go through but you know i want people to know that each meeting when you look at a couple of pieces that's not all you've done if someone happened to turn into one meeting you've been at this now since september and every meeting we come in and look at different financial information we put all of these presentations on the website so people could follow what you have been going through all the various numbers for quite a while now one thing that has changed since the last meeting was the initial state budget came out and several of us were there m m a and heard directly from the governor but they have released the cherry sheets social miner and chapter seventy of increase of sixty one thousand dollars or one point three percent and in the municipal unrestricted a twenty eight thousand dollar increase of four point three percent and the governor stressing that municipal a that they were committed to having that go up by whatever the overall state revenue went up and that's four point three percent is what they're using so they committed that so small amounts i would recommend that we incorporate that into the budget process you know this is going to have in here that we would allocate anough funds to the school municipal budgets to accommodate a four percent budget increase that would take about six hundred thousand dollars for the school and two hundred seventy two thousand and four municipal and again that would take those budgets from the two hapless cent that we can afford with our normal revenue up to the four and i think there's been a lot of discussion on long range that you know we need to be concerned with that that we not go higher and try to have the operating budgets grow beyond what we can sustain so over two year period allocating funding there we would have allocated about one point six million of university station revenue to the school budget over the last two year period and about seven hundred thousand to the the next line on the chart is allocation for debt service eight hundred thousand and we talked about this just using up portion of the new money would be able to do projects within two and a half particularly the police station proposal  and long range really supported doing that within two and a half we really don't want to raise people's taxes if we don't have to and by this reasonable allocation we are able to bring that in and still have funding for other areas we have change the tax relief for seniors with the you're going forward with the homo petition we know that that will have an impact on f y seventeen so we've changed that allocation we'll come back at that the following year and then with moved about two hundred thousand dollars just say for any university station direct cost in f y seventeen as the municipal and school budget undergo a review of this cost related directly to the university station project we had always set out that those would be paid for separately  not within kind of the normal budget allocations for either of those budgets the one you are here to rule i did and again kind of through discussion we're going to show you coming up we have two other articles for and if you recall the two point six seven available is f y seventeen there will be additional resources in f y eighteen and absolutely will look to fund that senior relief if that goes forward so i would just said you know the feedback that we get is really very favorable as far as trying to address multiple areas and not focus on one area of the budget lot of discussion are meetings about tax relief and what that means and trying to get something out before the residen and then you know again concerned with the operating budget making sure that we don't allow that to grow too quickly and this next slide you've seen before just what we're talking about with that group that the operating budget any growth year to year of compounds when you build the base the next year you're just building in that much higher and so we've really worked hard with our groups to understand you know kind of what are the issues you know with the with the operating budget and again the board selectmen has done a tremendous job in taking some of the new university station money and assisting those operating budgets two and a half percent increase within our normal budget is very tight and you have been able to go much higher with that again almost a ten percent increase over to your period for f y sixteen and f y seventeen this slide looks at the tax relief discussion and we've really tried to make sure people understand what are the tools available for tax relief so there are actually the general tax relief that goes to all our tax payers and those include not using our full tax levy so proper two and a half cents a maximum that we can use if we don't use that all in a way that doesn't lower someone's current tax bill but doesn't increase their bill as high as we could we can pay for debt within prop two and a half as opposed to a debt exemption again same thing to call for a debt exemption that's going to increase above our base two and a half for that budget the commercial tack ship and you've talked about the the  selectmen and the assessors working really hard to work that shift so that we get the most bang for our residents from that at the same time kind of protecting the growth of the commercial and then there's an article that you have on the warrant this year where we can allocate free  general to the overall tax rate and it's a way to reduce the overall tax levy some of the problems with this is it goes to all taxpayers including commercial that's just how the formula works from v o r we're not allowed to kind of partition that so that would affect everyone and right now as our residents pay about seventy five percent of the taxes any amount we would put this out they would get about seventy five percent so much numbers were showing each hundred thousand if we put in this article gives about a thirteen dollars break to the average home so five hundred thousand would give about a sixty five dollars break to the average joe and that is i'm going to show you that is you know what the tax bill would be and now you're actually voting down with this article voting the tax bill down and then finally the targeted one is the senior population what the board is trying to do with that tool that would allow the town to appropriate funds to the aid to the elderly and disabled so you have that one article to march for the budget definitely we're just been trying to let people understand what the different tools are because they can be somewhat confusing so we've been talking through those with the group so that people understand what we can and can't do and give some parameters to if we start putting numbers against an article what would it mean for that average child so this lie again you've looked at before just shows that average home in town right now is about five hundred eighty six thousand dollars in value in f y sixteen the current year they're paying eight thousand six hundred dollars in their annual tax bill that was about a two point nine percent increase from the prior year their value went up about seven percent and the bar in the right we've been through this at your last meeting were showing if we didn't have that split rate we didn't charge the commercials higher what with that bill had ben and it would have been over ninety seven hundred dollars so eleven hundred dollars or thirteen percent savings to that average homeowner so we want to show people understand how that is and then just looking at a few scenarios with the tax bill so on the left we're showing f y sixteen the current so the blue bar shows that eighty six hundred dollars bill if we had used the full tax levy the bill would have been eight thousand six hundred seventy dollars the t not we had about five hundred thirty nine thousand and excess levy we didn't go up as high as we could a sixty nine dollars savings brought that bill down to the green bar on the left eight thousand six hundred dollars looking at that on the right what happens to that bil seventeen so we start with the current bill in the green eight six zero one hundred normal per show and a half conditions that's going to increase by the blue bar that bill is going to rise two hundred fifty eight dollars to just over eight hundred with a couple of action by the selectmen that we're talking about if those go forward you'd be able to bring that bill down to the green bar on the right so if you have some excess levy we get in use of about eight hundred dollars eight hundred thousand that would save about one hundred four dollars and if you did the appropriation of the free cash five hundred thousand you'd save sixty five dollars so the bill under those two scenarios would be eight thousand six hundred ninety the bar in the right a one percent increase over the current year and we're pointing out that the other two items again would make that higher if we didn't take debt within two and a half that eighty six hundred would be higher if we didn't do our residential commercial split that bill would be higher just moving on to the capital budget and i don't have additional information for you tonight we're still working on that but the long range and significant work on the capital budget at their last meeting having some departments and to go through some of the larger items so they've asked for some additional work to be done on that particularly for me to look at some financing options for a couple of items one of those includes the high school turf field it's due for replacement and i think the committee felt very certain that we need to go forward with that  there's two large pieces of fire apparatus that are due for replacement so we're looking at you know what's the best way and what are some options that we can propose to fund those large items within our capital allocation one item i will mention with the high school  turf there really is a sense of timing they would d p w would want to move forward on that in the summer late spring early summer so it's a not impact of our city teams and to do that todd would like to go forward with some initial planning work he would like to have an allocation of about ten thousand dollars that he can kind of go and study some of that to make sure he's ready to go if that got approved a he could so i could work with him to find out if you're ok with that going forward it really seems that he went through in great detail with the long range that unless you can kind of do that the timing will be off a little bit to the status of the field it's ten years old and that's about it's ten and that is the normal life cycle particularly for all the product as with anything the newer versions are a little bit better and you might be again a little bit more  just to look at you know this is like a community wide project and our initial funding source would be the capital stabilization fund that we were just able to set up at fall town meeting one item that the long range wanted to look at was could we you know borrow for this and slowly on the capital stabilization fund to make sure that that's there for other needs so that's something we're looking at so we were it's about half a million dollars the initial request we brought into one of your previous meetings was about a one point one million dollars increase or six and a half percent over the current year you had expected mike and i took a back in kind of what would dr parkman heads to bring that down and we items we went through in general you know we just really work hard with our department heads to take that down we're being very cautious with our operating budget there were some items that people requested that are kind of you know in some ways what if scenarios if this happens we're going to need extra money and what we're doing is saying no this budget is going to reflect what we know and if things come up with how to deal with them at that point one of those items and we'll talk with chief over time increases for police and fire department we do not have those in this current proposal as you know there's a lot going on with public safety and university station in china assess the staffing levels and so we don't want to build this into the base budget we want to have those department heads coming to you later in the spring and really look at those budgets and those departments and make sure we're on track with the right staffing with university station one item that we did do as reflected in the current f y sixty item there is that there were a few transfers and we have that sheet also for you but the selectmen funds the selectmen can transfer n f y sixteen nothing really substantial but some transfers from one budget to another that really gives us a better presentation of the bunch of for f y seventy so we want to just make sure that the selectmen are ok with that but right now those are if we have that additional state aid of twenty eight thousand the total amount available for municipal would be seven hundred fifty three thousand and you can see here would currently be using six hundred seventy two thousand and we would recommend to the soc men that you look  at what's the best way to use that right now about eighty thousand and it might be two additional capital there's a one time appropriations it doesn't build the base budget you can make a different choice in the future year so that's something that would want the selectmen to look thousand would really go a long way and i think keeps in that discussion of you know not building the operating too high we certainly have capital needs those are more one time and again you can come back at it in the future it's not built into the base and carrying  would recommend that for the eighty now and if you made any further changes are there's any further changes in the municipal budget as we go forward that we would do the same thing and there's one more document you have that does show the municipal budget and one of the items in there what's driving that six hundred seventy two thousand or three point seven which is you know in some ways a pretty moderate increase for the operating budget document there and if you look on the second page where listing what is driving that request and really half the request or three hundred five thousand is for salary increases cola and step adjustments for all employees town like all of them in this part of partners and that increase is in line with what we've had over the last couple years which have been moderate wage increases for the departments so a good portion of that amount comes for that one i'd the other items we have listed there there are a few  positions or increase in hours and you see the list there totals ninety four thousand dollars and really for them deal with the community economic development department they have proposed consolidating the zoning and housing department part time excuse me now there would be one full time position better able to serve the public that's a net three thousand dollar increase one new admin position to serve the whole department request to increase the conservation position from part time to full time about seventy thousand dollars and some additional hours in the building department six thousand and i would point out to the slide by one mike and i went through this these were all recommended in the  department that you looked at last year and they were in the original budget request last year for f y sixteen and you when you pointed north to that position to run that department asked her to hold on those and to kind of get the department together get it up and running and wait to allocate any additional funds and she has done that now in that department is functioning very well as a cohesive department certainly one of our busiest departments in town with the universal station project still continuing  ts lincoln center work other development projects in town so we would recommend that those be approved this year for going forward and i think that's kind of how we have addressed the municipal budget the last couple years been pretty cautious and you know you had those before you last year you said let's wait and see what happens with that department they had some staff and transition let's let that settle out and now we're much more comfortable in kind of bringing our forward saying yes this is the nice time to go forward with that people can clearly see the work being done by that items so really you know on the salary side those couple items for economic development and the one for tarp and then really just the ongoing coal increase on the expense side really a relatively groups or that's on your hand out there a relatively minor list of adjustments one thing that work we are doing is where we are now building in again this is kind of how we proceed cautiously or try to we're building in the expenses for departments for fall town meeting budget and really that's it you know the next step is that we would be chipper clearly this week going out to print with the mean this a poll budget and kind of a summary budget that kind of shows all of the different things that you've been looking at each week our our tax numbers our state a lot of the book that has kind of all of that overall so with your permission we would go forth with kind of what the current layout is everyone understands that that's just the in the budget as of today as of february one of the big lots to life some of that to ensure that your energy manager can stay in place and go forward spend a lot of projects going on in that's a resource for you to fund that so that not minnesota budget we have a separate category for that because sometimes many of the projects he does are for the schools also you could look at that that was the requested increase kind of based on actual activity but no and just the other items on that list were trying to increase what we have for building maintenance you know you now have us part of the d p w organization you have some staff in that area who are a lot of projects to kind of make sure we're maintaining the buildings es y can i have a discussion with god so we're going to some money for the conservation commission and i see you built and will that also help start a program to keep our trails a little bit better together is that sort of what's  operating budget and sure we know it's kind of up and running in a recurring expense they had indicated initially for upon maintenance but we can certainly expand that to be trail just like the c v s and i don't be a good start for them to kind of get going  and then we can go from there whether you build that in we have some beautiful for us but they will maintain themselves and so i'd like to like to see some development we had a change of leadership at the head of west cathy executive director left and bragg agnew as we all know and we thank greg first two years of service in west cat but it afforded us an opportunity to go out and seek somebody to replace gregg and we luckily we have a very active board right now and we leverage the board's reach into the public access community we identified a pool of candidates we narrowed that pool down to two leading candidates we interviewed those candidates several times and out of those interviews they were very different both very strong and out of those interviews we had done a five melinda as the person who had the vision and the strength and the leadership to lead west cat into the future and so we think that she's going to do a really great job for us and we look forward to working with the board in the town to signing the new service agreements with the town to getting the obod baker house lease signed and moving forward so that we can begin with our design process working with the west with historical society and building a real community communications center for the town of westwood and with that i would like to introduce melinda garfield our new executive director organization zero communication skills that have prepared me for this new endeavor some of my achievements have included creating the first ever television production programme at the romney marsh middle school bringing to feature films to sundance film festival creating an afterschool program in every f in every elementary and middle school in newton and winning enter and winning a regional any award for outstanding historical cultural program in two thousand and fourteen and currently the vice president mass access a nonprofit organization representing all community media centers across the commonwealth and held this position for two years i'm excited to move the mission of west kept forward and to help grow the organization into a thriving community media center i look forward to building  obit bigger house into a state of the art television station complete with studio in training facilities i plan to build the station to attract residents to come and learn all aspects of digital media including video production graphic design audio recording podcasting and computer training i've already started to engage the current high school video production team and we hope to we're not only going to showcase their current projects but we hope to entice them into coming and fol the only way to achieve these goals is to build a place that the community will want to come and learn the latest technologies i hope that by year's end we'll have the obod bigger house running with active members producing content for channels residents taking classes and volunteers pristine that i don't know if you have a packet in front of you so what i was hoping to do is was kind of run through it in about ten minutes and then you can stop it any time and then we can talk about it so basically it's going to be very similar to the historical commission tried to introduce with the planning board we did introduce at the planning board last year's town meeting we did lose by five votes we feel that we've we've listened to what people have had to say and we've gone back and made some changes and i kind wanted to go through these changes kind of go through the packet and then we can go from there so the most obvious would be the name of the by a loft we no longer call it the demolition delay and we feel that people in the work to lay in you know who's to vote for a delay so we decided to take that out so now we're going to be calling it the historic structure demolition by a law and you know historic structure is exactly what we're talking about endeavor by a lot didn't have that word in it we are talking about historic structures and i'm talking about structures and nonresidential which could be between ten and fifteen more which would be on that list that you have before you and you will make this list available to ever wants to review it before town meeting you can bring copies for people to to look we are we are definitely doing that were to try to get a public meeting together to ask them to all show up in the real santa learn about it the try to get the word out to get some interest in that yeah yeah i mean we're definitely going to do that  i guess the the biggest difference from last year is the number of days and we are still talking six months but but the issue with last year was that in one of the one of the sheets that i that they sent you which which talks about the process of the byelaw and how long it actually takes so last year when when you sit there and you add up all these numbers i think it came out to one hundred and ninety three days so after a one hundred ninety three days of reviewing and talking about it then the commission would either impose the buy a law or not and that would be plus six months so what we're doing this year is we're saying that the by a law that the clock starts ticking the moment the application gets submitted so it would be whenever the application gets submitted if we decide at the end of that process and a number of days are gone down to only forty seven days after the initial applications and the applicant goes then applies up to maybe forty seven days later or considerably less depending on how quickly you go through the process if it's decided that the building should be preserved than it would be even subtract those days from the six months so we would add six months from the date the decision was made so that's quite a big difference from from last year we went down from one ninety three to forty seven days so that's probably the biggest biggest change and then we have also added in your packet is a map of massachusetts which shows the towns that have a demolition law and you can see the pretty much surrounded by the towns that do have it and we we do not and along with that map of also added the names of the towns and the the duration of the by a lot of the waiting period if it is imposed  i mean there's there's a couple of things i mean we're trying to raise awareness of the town's historic structures that's that's the main idea of this to get people talking we're trying to promote and propose saving historic structures as opposed to just demming them or working with the homeowner to to come up with a way to preserve the structure for all possible and maybe promote development that's consistent with the town character so if you raise awareness of a historic structure that's going to be demolished this isn't this doesn't prevent demolition it just delays it for several months if at all so with this awareness what we're trying to do is we're trying to promote new development that is consistent with the character of the town so if you raise awareness of out of historic structure that gets to it's not going to happen overnight i mean you have to file for permits you've got to go before the planning board and it's a process so if you're a builder and you come in and you expect to be building in six months i doubt it lengthy right so i don't mean personally i don't think it worked if i was a builder i wouldn't be scared by that i would just mean that i have to get my ducks in a row a lot quicker and  pretty much that's what we're trying to stress and if it all if it fails in the end and the house gets demolished of the structure to somalia well now people are are looking at that struction are saying gee ok that was that's what used to be there you know now this is going to get put there and  structures that are considered on that list and some of them are already been demolished and i noted which ones i guess the majority of the homes were built in that time period time period that are considered historic and we felt that we'd keep the date and the date wouldn't move like other towns which is revolving because it wouldn't sneak up on people that don't have a historic moment all of a now i think this one this one is i think definitely leaner and will probably have a better chance of passing if we can get the word out which we're trying to do we're going to get something in the in a quarterly newsletter for the town that will be something there will be articles and of course we're going to meet with the historic owners whoever would like to show up we're going to invite them of course and maybe try to get somebody at some of them to come to the finance committee and maybe when we're going to for them they can maybe talk in our behalf guy what can we do to help we're in the planning stage right now reach out when we need help that's for sure is to i mean it's great i think what you did to bring the community together of all ages thank you chris gallagher on this issue it's one of these things that pops up every now and then basically based on what the property usage is down there at the time and as things come up it becomes an issue we look at it and we talk about it and then we never moved on it's come up again so i'd be asking the board for a stop sign just to give you a little bit of a breakdown on it what happens is glacier drive comes down from route one and then makes a ninety degree turn and becomes wilson way in front of frugal fanny's and then gas and another business further back there's also a small private road which is basically a continuation of glacier drive that continue straight in and goes down to the dialysis center towards railroad tracks and as traffic comes down glacier drive the majority of it makes a right hand turn again depending on what the business suit usage is going on at the time and makes a right hand turn on wilson so when cars coming from wilson away they come out and usually make a left hand turn on the glacier drive expecting the other traffic to make the right however now they're using the back parking lot of the day also center for storage of cars for the most eighty's dealership and one of the other dealerships and there's a lot more traffic going straight down that little access road so we have only had two accidents but the majority you know there have been a lot of close call where people are making their left h expecting that car coming down to make a right and they don't they go straight which obviously is a conflict so we looked at it and in talking with jeff being of the town engineer the really logical spot for a stop sign would be on wilson way because that's the that's the more minor road the problem is even with the stop sign there it doesn't address the issue of the expectation that the cars are going to make a right hand turn so people could make their stop and then as they pull out still run into the conflict of the cars going straight through plus there is a stop sign on the private property way coming out so you come up glacier drive or i call it glacier drive extension if you come up the private way when you reach wil way stop sign there is very strict requirements that deal with the volume of traffic and the equivalent volume of traffic as a way of knowing if as you as you may have no known over the years we have done  do it as a temporary one to try and see how it goes my feeling is it's been going it's been an issue for so many years it's just i don't think it's going to go away personally or if it does go away we get we can get always about having to move your meeting are the only thing i would tell you is when you establish a new stop sign and my thoughts immediately go to the one strap sign a pond and a club or tree takes a long time what you've got to put preliminary signing stop sign coming because you know we are we're blowing that thing off small speed sign that we hold right on a pole and i have a graphic made up on that that says new stop sign ahead to alert people as a point up you also have your message board and it would encourage you right yet no small ones nice because they can you know we can go there and stay a little have the play station construction updates exactly like i told her i told her first and then really working at the end of october now there are and how we know they're trying to get back to october first i think so the questions for the public across the board select will be go into executive session seating to discuss one issue related to the position of real property which would have a detrimental effect on the position of the governing body of discussion