may recall he was the minuteman regional vocational school representative for the town i represent belmont from two thousand and seven two thousand and ten i served with him on a community preservation act study committee at the market back in the early two thousand and he was also the election clerk for precinct three and along with marianne his wife who served as well as the warden for decades his commitment to the town was was incredible so people who are willing to give that much of themselves over such a long period of time for the betterment of others is definitely going to be sorely missed so we could just take a moment of silence thank you community announcements a special tuesday evening event to meet local author dr jeffrey dutton tuesday february twelfth at five thirty pm for turkey shoot a radical international conspiracy literary thriller following the journey of a twenty three year old mahmoud el ramadi a displaced war orphan x engineering student travels from mosul to syria then to turkey and ultimately to pray as greece during his journey is adopted by terrorist fighting isis in syria taking an oath of payback on war crimes that left him displaced except his mission as a jihad testing all that he believes spiritually and mentally over the last six years jeffries posed over four hundred articles essays stories a resident of belmont the cost of this is free it will be at the beach street center to sixty six beach street again february twelfth five thirty sounds like an interesting read also now scheduling appointments for free tax preparation with the a a r p tax aide free preparation beginning tonight monday february fourth the preparers will be at the beach street center on mondays and fridays from february fourth through april twelfth the program is for low and moderate income tax payers repairs cannot repair complicated returns such as rental income or cancellation of mortgage debt to meet with to name a few but general systems such as answering questions will be provided anyone regardless of income level assistance is offered free of charge while preparers cannot accept payment you are welcome to show your gratitude by making a donation to the council on aging that's a great idea trax prep tax preparation is by point only please call six one seven nine nine three two nine seven zero that is nine one three two nine seven zero and they can send you a list of documents you need to bring to for a more efficient appointment again that's from today through april twelfth lastly if it is march coming up it must be belmont talk of the town sharing the passions of notable belmont residents hosted by the meet belmont committee hosted by jane clayson johnson as always journalist and author will be tuesday march nineteenth from seven till nine pm at the general middle school and mission free although you must register in advance facebook dot com slash meet belmont the speakers this there or you just push the buttons on there to turn the microphones on thank you and i'm clear colburn i am the chair of the library building committee and i'm conrad with odin's o architecture welcome frank thank you thank you for having us i think the purpose of tonight was just really to give you an update and we have reached a milestone with the building committee and we wanted to share with you in terms of hiring an architect and getting started so it was the right time to come and proactively provide an update to you in the community and when we talk more about what we've accomplished and where we going to turn over to clare so just a quick note on the library building committee we have just a wealth of knowledge institutional knowledge from the for the town and for the we did a long range plan twenty sixteen feasibility committee and i was i was on that committee as well as a number of people who were on the building committee we've had three community meetings community survey children's program young adults programs that focused on the design and we've had over thirty meetings small meetings with a number of the community groups throughout the town  twenty seventeen fund raising was approved for a schematic design that was funded from the town and from the building library foundation  twenty eight the building committee was appointed when we were eighteen as well we in june that we interviewed and selected the owner's project manager to tell you a little bit about who we are we're a boston based firm we've been around for a little more than ten years ten person office we do a little bit of everything but we have a specialty or an expertise in public library work and museums  are sort of are our main areas of focus over the last ten years we've been involved in twelve projects throughout the commonwealth five of five of them are completed construction one is in construction now three of them have been lead certified and a couple of recent projects have won some important design awards most notably our project for the town of east him in twenty eighteen one and national  a american library association award it was one of six libraries nationwide that was honored for library design so we're very much involved in the development of libraries here in the commonwealth  and really excited about the prospects of belmont i think this site is challenging in a lot of ways but it's also got a lot of incredible opportunity we really like the opportunities for engaging things like the wellington greek creek which is sort of in the background sort of loss to the back of the site right now and also underwood the lawn and the pool next door and then of course the opportunities along concord avenue with great transformation the high school project going on the armenian center and even talk of a possible ice ice hockey rink so there's a lot going on and it's a great moment in time to be thinking about how one might develop synergies between these projects that are that are under their library war and because of their what they brought to the table you know encouraging to hear people talk about the site and what could be done with the site and really opening up very impressive and creativity is going to be  continued community engagement building on what we did in the future ability study we are poised for in the beginning of additional community meetings targeting hopefully in march thirteenth again that advertise until now i think the architectural team has been meeting with the library staff going through the different work that has been done we've engaged with sustainable belmont's the conservation committee and had them com our presentation of the building committee a few weeks back where the green engineer came in so again looking to engage the right organizations proactively so that we get the right i there are a number of groups that have that are impacted more than others by by the new building those certainly the historical society the veterans who have components in the current building that we want to make sure that we're  aging with i think to connor and point we also want to be smart so we hear a lot of feedback about single use projects perhaps in the past so i think your point about if there is to be a hockey rink parking is at a premium how are we going to do something that now leverage is parking in that space and really looking at meeting space with with different entities in town the senior center to make sure that we're building what's right for the community and also what's right for the library and so we expect to be very public i want to make sure that we're sharing with people all of the architect their experience how people can get engaged starting with march thirteenth with another session to happen before we break for the summer or come by back in the fall and finalize schematic design that's a longer than we had initially thought but we think it's critically important to make sure that we get the right engagement  into this process after that and you'll see you know some activities fund raising the foundation has become much more active and organized and they will fund raising as we've always said  developing yes we do so i know that you know the whole conversation about the timing is one that will have more in discussion on and it's not one that we as trustees or the building committee can decide independently and two on that needs to be decided collectively with the town and i think we will want to have more conversation about narrowing in what that timing might be because we have it's complicated we have a lot of pieces and  one can't move forward without the other so fund raising again the foundation would speak to you about a fixed time frame where it's going to be most productive so how do we start to put some stakes in the ground for all these activities and come up with a timeline that's going to work for all and what's the fund raising goal so they're still doing that research on the foundation i think that would be time that we can certainly have them come back but i think they've always said they're committed to raise think will come to fruition and now want to time frame for when the town might be connected and for them to be able to connect and so again it's that's another conversation about we wanted to share with you where we are  excited about our partnership with with the arc of thanks and excited to partner with other community groups to move this forward if you talked about coordinating construction with the high school project as otherwise you're going to be ripping up the same block of concord avenue where severely at the same time yeah i haven't yet i know you've spoken with bill avello i have will when we have a better sense of the time frame and i just want to also speak to that that fund raising time frame there's going to be a point where it's diminishing returns peter and i can tell you to meet about every six months with the library commission to understand what their timelines are so they're going to the legislature with another grant around potentially there realistically before they issue their next so you're not you're not opposed to getting money you know so there is i think there's a limit in terms of how much money can be spent each year through that grant process i think it's twenty million so they would have to go through the nineteen communities who've already been awarded a grant and before if we applied if we were selected if we were awarded it might be twenty thirty before we would twenty thirty twenty thirty who are not going to be on the money i think i i think it's a stretch honestly i don't point there was a talk about not going forward at all so we wouldn't have the state telling us be and what's the cost of waiting and and and so you might run into if you run the that we might be better off to go out on our own but again then how does the fund raising work relative to the town vote or is all of the fund raising done contingent upon a successful vote is that how that structured or or do you or does the foundation raise the money and then what happens if it's not successful we have to we have to move forward in one way or the other so and i spect that money goes to a new building and i think that's a fair question for the foundation i would want to speak but i think it's entirely you navigate police station d p w all these people still need to be going to completion but but we're doing work down there and this is like the final building that needs to be addressed within our community i think everything that we can do as a board to support that effort helpful thank digester idea and at that point we also discussed about with bruce who had done the investigation for the and i just her idea to follow up on the skating rink idea because we need to find out what's going on in the soil to see whether or rink would even be a feasible option because the rink and the digester are two of the five remaining choices and someone's going to ask what the other three are so i'll just say it's open space by can skate park  storage so tonight we're mostly last night last week we focused mostly on the digester our discussion tonight we're focusing mostly although i'm not limiting the discussion to the rink so i guess bruce you want to give us the update because last time we'd said well it was will more detail than has been done in the past and initially my thought was to do a geotechnical valuation as the sumo significant difference between an ice rink at the landfill and ice rink on a more pristine site is the foundations that would be required for the buildings and all the structures in the rink itself i went back after that discussion i looked at you know what you know what what kind of made what i want to see and how would i go about that and then i really look back at all the data that's been collected over the last fifteen plus years on the landfill and even some old information when the incinerator building was built out there the borings that were done for that so you know there's realize there is a fair amount of information out there and what we do know is that there is a you know fifty to sixty foot high landfill mound out there that would have to be shaved back a little bit for the ice rink and then it's on it's over a pit layer of peat it's a while and then some sand materials that are underneath it there's some things we don't know so i had a discussion with some geotechnical engineer they use and i got a recommendation on an ice rink designer and sort of said well how does this how does this mesh together what should we do and when looking at that it was it was clear to me that doing a boring program and spending that kind of money i think twenty five thousand dollars and it turned out when i got their initial estimates it was in excess of thirty thousand dollars it was not it was not in my opinion an effective way to spend the money to do that given the information we have in the assumptions that they can make about the foundations and the information on that we can provide for the board because even after spending that amount of money the developer of the the ice rink and for be a private development would still have to go out there supplement that information to get the really detailed information they need more productive and might even be instructive to look through the paperwork of some of the through the paperwork and see what the feasibility is and that we would not necessarily need to do the boring is to determine that right now right right so what you're going and the cost of that you had make some a lot of assault some assumptions based on existing information and knowledge of this of linfield material about what we would have found in the boring logs boring program and then make a calculation about what the kind of foundations in the range of costs associated with that would be that would be confirmed when the boring program was done it could just be quickly modified so that was sort of step two of any of the of the boring program in any case out there the second thing we we what we proposed to do is provide some further information about i heard some things last week about schedule and how this ice rink would fit in if you want to and how you know and you can really went back started really think about it is complicated because you've got both a regulatory timeline a permanent timeline with a timeline that the town would have to go through to be done so one of the things we thought in against not a major part of this is the put together a you know a well thought out schedule and work with patrice and glenn to come up with a schedule for what it would take to implement it from the selectmen vote on march eighteenth to go in ago and told in the five options of the selectmen it narrowed it down to at that point we did not get into any detail i would as part of this double back with them and say what else do you need to do out there things ok but not the camera view in terms of think we need to work through our state legislatures and that this is an important question in the i like the concept perhaps if it works but the etc decided considering this as you know serious proposal for us whether that works for the high school building committee or the school committee i don't know but it seems to me if we spend this money will get information that it is buildable he would accept out but the threshold question will continue to be with he can view this if it's done in a public private way we go consider this recreation any any any choice we make for the incinerator so it's going to be contingent upon a number of things it will be contingent upon the cam approval of the use it's also going to be contingent upon getting more into it and finding out that it's actually feasible from a specific thing also whether anyone responds to an hour of people for instance can i clarify that so it i appreciate the approach and it does sound like there's a lot of data we could tap into before we go and dig holes in the ground  said do you feel that that the work that could hack her here would be sufficient to allow private entity to put it in respond to our p or is there a step where somebody would have to spend thirty k before results so before you were sure nor of p you would have to do the first part of it and then just make sure it measured together and go back to the back of the assessment say yes our sumption are right or no or some things are wrong change that and provide that information to potential bidders to use so your your are of p would include that boreal we would get that you pay for all the thirty thousand dollars or pay that so this is some sense of decision tree where will we could if we choose to we do the eight thousand dollars and if it turns out that by twenty five or twenty five yes yes guy but but it would i have definite have some concerns about about the site this particular site in general and one of my concerns is that depending upon the nature  we may not get anyone to respond but it ends up being something it's just not economically feasible and challenging as you know and where the timing doesn't work for whatever entities might come table so i think we should just as a group be thoughtful here for going to spend this money there's i completely agree with you but more importantly is that the campaign question and you know i would like to suggest because i met with them when we were doing with senate brownsburg or on a forget how it was there i can't recall but it was i mean when we went complicated it was difficult to determine we actually went in and had a very sort of productive meeting with you know de camp and i mean i would suggest that if that's impose further on your schedule that if there's any way possible because it's going to hear from the just the other i think that's a good you're meeting with you with patrice and senator brownsburg or i have to go and meet with them and say look before we're spending seven hundred get some threshold questions here before we proceed down this path if it makes i don't know whether we're all in agreement that this might make sense we have your school committee on board what are your thoughts on this yeah you know can you give us any general sense of where this is that we have to go back to the legislature i mean they could get some of the answers back i think you're going to complicate much as it were done i think patrice if you could contact well maybe i think we've got it down to five uses and one of them is just a hard no i think we owe it to ourselves to figure out i mean we spent the money to do the analysis on the owner of the digester because we can't analyze that use without the information and yet i don't think we can analyze the rink use that this information  conversation i mean agreement with this approach one of the things that we did discuss is you know depending on what this skating facility is going to look like ultimately the site as it exists today may have to be augmented with some kind of retaining wall system to allow for more land area on the site to be developed you have to build it up and that would be part of this this process as well would identify if that was required yeah we would definitely go back we've we've done a couple of valuations of different skating rink propose ideas over the over the last decade or so and i think we would go back and take a look at those in the current size of the current double rank or rin half and see how those fit in and take a look at jennifer by the retaining walls if you remember we look to the public works facility moving up there and it was just it was like it was a castle up there with the wall the walls had to be to build to that area there was a problem i guess idea i mean to the conversations that bruce and i have had there's the this site is actually surrounded by brooks and streams there's going to be some slope of material from the strokes and streams rising up to the plateau ultimately that will be on this p l the thought is you know depending on that slope that allegedly dictate how much land you have remaining at the top if that if the size of the land remaining at the top isn't large enough for this skating rink proposal now you've got to do something to build a retaining system and to be able to broaden that plateau and that obviously adds to the cost of developing of that site as well and to your point that the a lot of the viability of anyone responding to an r f p are in addition to the other things we may demand such as i live at the corner of marsh in concord half directly across from the center at a site and i was wondering if there has been any discussion since our meeting last monday night on the anaerobic digester where are we on it we've not had any discussions on that because from the meeting last time we asked langdon to come back with information about this test boring for the viability of the skating rink idea we have nothing's been put on or off the table it's still the same five choices that we intend on march eighteenth to make a decision and so the end of robey digester a still under consideration all the five ones are going to probably stay on the table until we get a final unless something falls off because it's totally non feasible technically then we would keep are safety concerns safety concerns that might have gotten lost or not mentioned last week specifically safety concerns with potential explosions gas leaks fire residual permanent environmental damage has there been any due diligence discussions with bruce yes regarding those issues bruce has talked about that a little bit if you want to just give briefly yeah i think we did take a look at that if you had to comply with all the build any building codes anything in the safety codes like that out there for the facility and those facilities the soldiers have been up and running for not any consideration given to any safety concerns it was primarily economically driven and i was just wondering if there was a section about that actually in there i think it was discussed briefly but it sort of assumed that they would comply with whatever or whatever regulations that were were would be required and we're not going to do we're not going to choose anything that's going to be harmful or unsafe i mean i think that would be foolish ok so i had him such as a potential radius mileage wice distance wise that may be affected by a gas leak by an explosion by talks of commissions that's all been looked at and you're comfortable with  it we don't have a design of a facility to review so i think it's premature to get into that we've looked at as far as these things go that they don't you know explode with any regularity or anything that they've got multiple say failsafe that they're done in a safe manner i understand the trepidation about it i should i mean but the potential exists the risk exists i can't quantify that i don't know but i do know that there that these things do exist in the commonwealth and around the world and they seem to be safely operating but as long as you're aware it's a primary very primary concern of the neighborhood we hear you use or we hear y idea of the digester of the original appeal because i think i was part of one of those regional meetings was that it had the potential to generate significant revenue both to cover a shortfall in the capping activity and then ongoing revenue to the town thereafter and i just one of the point out that in the financial model that was contained in the consultant's report there are three elements which i think taken together raise a real serious question about the financial viability of the proposed solution of the proposed facility the first one was discussed by steve klee on ski last week about the buyback rate for energy the eleven cents that's the current solar buyback rate was never contemplated to be a general buyback rate for power they want to get into the details but steve indicated that he thought the eleven census high and as a fellow predicated on a four percent interest rate and the only way i could understand a four percent interest rate in the financing was if the town guaranteed the debt and even four percent in the current market is too low i can't see any scenario where the town would guarantee the debt for a private developer and asking and some of my fellow warren committee members it seems that the current market interest rate for an activity of that sort might be on the in the vicinity of eight to nine percent which radically changes the economics of that project and the third item i seek when clancy is here he can correct me if i'm wrong  i believe that winter street was recently repaved but when the streets are paved paved to a certain specification that specification did not include eighteen wheeler tractor trailers coming down and i'm concerned that with the volume of truck traffic that was discussed last week that winter street on the surrounding streets may actually be all torn up by that kind of truck traffic which would again be a cost would actually be definitely in my mind certainly is a negative to that idea not to say that we're taking it off the table at the moment but i would say that it definitely hurt the viability in my mind of of choosing the digester simply because of the impact as you describe anybody else i did get a letter from somebody who couldn't make it tonight who said that they wanted me to read the letter and unfortunately it's three long paragraphs but i will make do because i did promise i would read it and if you were here he would have read it you would have had to hear it anyways so sincere apologies for part of the way i gave you feedback i will ignore this part of it because i don't think it's all important as a place for my children grew up at my will and my wife and i have chosen to live for the past twenty years intend to remain this beautiful town beyond our retirement all the departments i have had contact with including police fire d p w treasury light and in all caps especially building department have been just wonderful i would very much hope for support the proposed ice skating rink is not turned into the incinerator as it would create great connection among parents and children leading to friendships and support sources for each other residents will meet an environment that is healthy energetic and exciting people would look forward to seeing each other they most likely encourage other friends to join which would increase revenue for the town my wife and i know lots of residents in belmont surrounding communities will make special efforts to publicize the ice skating rink i'm certain my neighbors and other residents would be more than willing to do the same even better of a roller skating rink is also built alongside the other rink it could possibly double the revenue i know many professionals in multiple fields especially who reside in belmont in fact our town is more residents with doctoral degrees  norman curl up who is an architect plus my son there's a structural engineer would be happy to assist too please be assured i'm not mentioning these names for marketing purposes i just know there's be happy to extend their helping hands there are also so many others who would be as efficient and knowledgeable good render their services my last suggestion would be to have a number of our local professionals and developers to meet with you to discuss these rinks and brainstorm about other options that could be quickly pursued and built on as there is an approaching deadline as you mentioned so to enter that what that would be like we now have that information so there's really nothing else to investigate to be honest as far as the five remaining uses other than what we've been talking about bruce tonight about the skating rink analysis i'm not sure there's any more information we need on any of the other five other any of the uses at that point that we're going to get in any reasonable timeframe to meet our deadlines on the capping so i think that's why march eighteenth we might as well vote on it because i think once we get this information if we end up taking this lying to proposal there's really nothing else to get  wise we just have to make a decision i've i'm sorry that that that the digester stays on the table i don't want to discuss it don't want to give disservice to anybody else or any of the other ideas than a lot of competing constituencies and all five of them have somebody likes them impact on the neighborhood and obviously all of your responses but that said i i don't think it's fair to take anything off the table under certain orange so i respect the process i just got enough is public information if the supporters of the digester are actually would be neighbors  we would have to get you know agreement from the school committee the high school building committee we have to understand whether it can be built it would have to understand whether we could do in a public private way you know what the size of it would be and i don't want to put you on the spot time but just in general if this board were to move down that path or you know because that's where my mind is right now you how do you think they would react to that and down that path meaning the  you know i can speak for my opinion and not as a chore present in the neighborhood because i might get you know some feedback that's negative on the way home i would i think people be very favorable to that concept it's a community center concept i think it it matches well to the use of the surrounding area of rock meadow it's really a community focused area you know we're going to be as you heard from mr and obvious letter that i read about we've heard from a lot of neighbors yeah there who actually are positive about the rink yeah we've heard a lot of neighbors over the high school who are franco at road i wonder if one of the reasons you're hearing support from the neighbors the neighborhood and others around the ice rink is actually because it's sort of the more well known of the five options and you know and i so i just want to say  just remind people that there are things like the solar farm which would be a very quiet passive but also good for the town bike park is part of another proposal which would fit with the outdoor space in the mountain biking that happens in iraq meadow and simply open space merging with  q so it's just as far as like hearing other ideas i wonder that there's so much talk of the ice rink for the last years that like oh i think there that's the solution but i think it's actually possible because of name recognition or just the fact that the other options aren't as well known about what the town is considering i mean so i put that forth as like other options that could actually fit the neighborhood in the space better and then one last thing which is got me out of my chair which is you're looking you mentioned like you could don't know if you can need or will get other information around the options before march eighteenth and i would put forth that there's still some valuable information around the solar farm that you could prop hopefully get and i don't feel that options been run down i know we've been working with chris to get some of those numbers i know but it's still with back in there still o even suggested that perhaps it works on the land we currently own which is the right you could it doesn't mean you can't do two things on the no sun yet that to me it's almost like direction that we somewhat agreed to last time we voted on it we've also one of the reasons before we vote on it the better it is i'll take anything and everything and we will read it you know thank you agree thank you thank you dear oh did you have anything real quick darrell king precinct one i want to second the solar farm use the town has a climate action plan we're nowhere near meeting it we're not we're not on the trend to meeting it the way we're supposed to the solar farm is one of the few options that will get us in that direction also creates the least amount of traffic it's the least amount of disruption to the land besides open space perhaps it could be done in conjunction with with one of the others but i don't think solar said be left out of the equation a large open space which is exactly what we need and it will create energy and it will do so in a very predictable manner and some of that there are some technical problems with the topography of the site for i want to get into it  we have we have looked into this so solar and battery would be perfect gotcha they could be talking about the energy roadmap later this evening i'm going to stick around for that so anybody else so we have to vote on  whether we're going to hire lincoln for seven hundred dollars to do this work to explore the view viability of the rink idea what i meant favor of it yeah i just ate them in favor of learning more i wish we could get to you can give us an indication  legislative let me just one logistical question though so let's say we do this is takes thirty days let's say comes back and says perhaps feasible before we can make a decision to move forward with the rink we would need to do the boring have determined whether you know how much more it's going to cost to put there and what the feasibility of it is i think i would rely on on the ice rink designer i may have talked to him a little bit about the economics of it private develop but i think we can try to maybe even have him talk a little bit more about that new corporate some information on that based on the cost of the promise of the economics of an ice rink is very tight as it is and they have extremely expensive construction with very fixed pilings going down to bedrock that farrior it's going to be tough to get in or f response that's the problem that's i mean my concern i'm just trying to think that so would we be willing to if we did think that ultimately the ice rink with the right decision i'm not sure that it would be but if we were to go down that path we would be committing to th chose a lot of these you know if someone may come and start doing research and on the idea further and then find out it doesn't work and we have to go back to square one so that's a risk we take on any there are some that some choices are riskier than others others obviously an open field is risky at all but anything with a construction on it is asking for some level of risk so i'm supportive of doing that seven ahead all research unless we get something in time i think from my point of view let's forget something other than to fit it in from  i'll be back thank you very much and thank you there as well q thank you everybody for i'm sorry running a little long but this is kind of an important thing next discussion of temporary police department relocation another exciting project building for evening and we're here thank you and it's what we'd like to do is just to give you some broad brush updates as to where we are with the relocation of the police station if i can lay the groundwork a little bit and then i'm going to turn it over to these gentlemen to give you a little bit more of the nitty gritty as you will recall when we decided to do this project we originally were going to leave the police operation in the existing building while we did the additions  as we got into the design and planning it became apparent that that was not a good idea for two reasons one safety but more importantly our timeline for construction would be shorter if we could get the police operation out of the building and by removing them from the building it gave us an opportunity to go into existing space and do some upgrades so that when we reopen the whole facility the whole thing looks good that leads us then to a real location where do we push the police function and what we're in the process of doing now is analyzing what we need and what some of the issues are around  place that we would relocate to so we've been looking at and i give jamie all the credit for doing the operational and the organizational kind of analysis and quantification of what the department needs in addition to that we've been looking at safety parking maintaining historic district concerns accessibility for the public as well as the employees minimizing the disruption looking at not taking up too much meeting space so there's a lot kind of swirling around that in the last couple of weeks we've been in the process of trying to quantify as you know because we look at town facilities and town opportunities over and over and over every time we talk about schools and relocating other facilities there just is no space in town there's no big open field somewhere where we can put a lot of trailers and park one hundred cars and everybody would be there for a year and live happily ever after that's not happening so any place that we decide to go is going to have pros and cons there's going to be positives to it but there's also going to be drawbacks and so i think as a town we have to understand once we make the decision and everybody's on board there's going to be a little bit of pain but the idea is to share the pain right now our timeline looks at a ten month construction period realistically if of you have done a kitchen a bathroom or an addition to your house you know that that ten months might slip into twelve or fifteen months so any place that we go has to be available and usable for that timeframe we are going out to bid in march we are hoping to begin construction on both projects in june so this is a fast track exercise that we've been engaged in and we are working along with our o p m tom get soonest and steve darcis the director facilities and looking at what's available so i'm going to turn over these gentlemen who are going to talk a little bit about the operational and the organizational needs of the police department just to begin you know that and again i want to give kudos to jamie he's done a lot of the analysis piece right now up to this point just some of the stuff that we talked about as emery touched on now that we're delving into it in actually finding out how it's going to work does we've been told no that's not going to happen once we vacate the site goes to the contractor and they're going use the space we can't be on the site so that was an issue so we have twenty three mock vehicles so where those go on we i know we already know we have limited space around the complex itself so now you have us coming into the picture not only with our needs as far as internally with the building itself but also extraordinarily we obviously have security issues that we need to address and make sure we maintain we have issues not only for safety of the public but also safety of  the other employees that work within the will to work within the building there's a lot of issues that we have we also have to iron out the issues as far as alternatives trailers for processing  some of our visitors and also i mean we also take in a lot of property bicycles and things like that we got to have a place to store so there's a lot of things coming together that we're really  looking at and trying to as we said look at it from a global perspective but also make sure we're making good decisions as i said earlier i don't want this to be a negative thing for the for the time of the  don't i mean we have built a pretty good report i think you mentioned it earlier in a letter from one of our residents that you know where we're good partner the police we try to continue that but this is going to be  truly a very interesting project that we've got to manage and figure out the best way we can operationally jamie talked about some of the issues that have come to our attention and just so that we can get an here we have met a number of times a number of times with different groups but probably by a meeting last week two weeks ago what we did is as a result of that meeting we went back to our employees and we asked them this is what we're thinking if you have any ideas pro or con please let us know just so that we are not operating in a vacuum that we're getting all these issues out on the on the surface and when we did that we got some questions miles as far as how this is going to work so that's where we're at we got a lot of questions that need to be answered and resolved and that's why we just want a common update you know you as far as we're we're where we're going to thi fifty five people working and did need to be moved operations need to be moved so on a regular daily basis spoto twenty seven to thirty people working out of which you have a location we move into you know a long wait that comes all the phones all our facilitate the move with us which is is a big help but dissin challenge as you know in the other thing we want to keep him as we want to we want to continue to run a fish an operations police police operations and deliver a high level of service to renovation a couple of years ago but that's we've already planned for that that's going to stay we're gone but a trailer in front of the building and the communication is people will beasts inside the trailer and that will be operational parking police cars i would to visit us we'd like to segregate business from other town business if we could at least that initial point of contact with somebody comes to see the police will be no confusion with them work and walking into the town clerk's office say or somewhere else that they know of between forty eight and fifty parking spaces it night obviously that drops down to thirty five to forty two now are obviously we don't have that many parking spaces across the street right now but that the facility as it is senator so i guess the question i was getting at chief and look i don't fully understand the operational aspects of the police department but there are cars that just come to work there and aren't in need of immediate access or they all you know in need of immediate access and just in the five sector cars right but their employees that go there in the traffic division and the nine one one employee other individual of do they need to have complete media access to their vehicles or can they park while they run over and yes while they're at work it's hard i would say yes ok because those those the police department vehicles so they may be coming to their own we're in the process of doing this and we don't want to excuse me necessarily articulate our list right now because we're not there yes right so what we're trying to do for you tonight is lay out what the issues are and just the are and the challenges guys have got to get everything out really quickly if we are going to get instruction it's exciting that this is moving along i mean these are good problems to have is how do you go about building a new police stations like it is a problem we've been dreaming of having for a very long time something however we do have to solve it so you guys have a lot of good brains on that committee against you put your hands together and figure it out of luck and we'll help in any way we can make it work i mean there is room somewhat here but it's not great there's not a lot of parking that's for sure so and there's a lot of history that goes way back to eight hundred eighty nine town meeting vote that the select will be authorized to place a clock in the new unitarian church to be erected this year in the sum of five hundred dollars to be appointed for the same so the question then of course that t has over the years for a while paid the cost of somebody to wind the clock the clock currently does not work the clock is a c p a application was put in to repair the clock so that it did work and the question comes up two things came up one of which would be whose clock is it the towns of the churches and the second would be if it's the churches can the c p a fund it because it would be public money for a place of worship so that the amendment technical  entanglement so we've got a we have a memorandum from town council taken back in january and then we circle back with them town council again about a week or so ago and got some additional information from them i mean there's a lot of paperwork here i'm not going to go through it all mean the the upshot was that the clock not being a religious symbol that has a can and has a connection to the non really just history of the town i believe town meeting was in the church at one point that i thought this was a good analogy that the town paid for the initial install of the clock and it paid the church a small stipend to maintain it suggesting the town may have in fact had some ownership in it however the fact that the town is paid a stipend for the winding of the clock is an indicator of owner is not an indication of ownership any more than a carpoolers contribution of gas money into creates ownership of the car thought was an interesting analogy which i thought was actually kind of apt it's hard to know from the vote of eight hundred eighty nine exactly what the intent was here when they say the slight would be authorized to place a clock in the church doesn't mean that they were to only clock us at least the clock and then walk away were they to place the clock and maintain the ownership of the clock or were they and they also there's a lot of analysis here about how a lot of the original town folk at the time were actually members of the church and there was a lot of blurring in those days of the lines between what was church and what was state which has not is no longer the case so  also the feeling was i guess from the most recent thing we got from town council was that they felt it was it did not that if the clock were the the churches which the feeling was that that's but there's no indication it's anything about that but whether the town if the town did turn out the clock turned out to be the churches that in fact did not preclude c p a funding going for the non religious block piece so that they felt that it was they were comfortable telling us that we could still do a a funding for it whether we owned it or not so i don't know we're going to get an answer to whether it's the town clock or the town's apostrophe as a clock but maybe it doesn't matter now there's always someone can always go to court and i guess challenge the c p a funding on these grounds at all there is a case that the kaplan case which was cited by the council however it is a little different because that was about a stained glass window which was religious in nature that was being funded for restoration the court said no and this is not for religious peace it's for clock so some people check the time religiously that doesn't make a religious symbol so so so that's sort of the lay of the land where it is now i e committee has held off and voting on this because of the concern that has been articulated in the recommendation at the time was that it get pushed off perhaps to next year when this issue could be resolved so that  guidance from us as to whether this is something that should be funded or not isn't there and independent of us when we don't well actually it's about the ownership do we just do the board of selectmen own the clock so if we own the clock then then what the point would be even though it's  us so i think based on what you just outlined i mean it's not been abundantly clear and even from town councils point of view that we in fact own it so it doesn't seem as though if there's clarity on that issue the question is do we want to own it and if we did on it how would that work because you would have life for us i think came to us because it will be exercising authority that we're taking ownership of the clock for the town or not and then i guess ultimately from getting this from town council the reason for that question is kind of fading away a little bit from town councils opinion which was that it ownership was not clear so my reaction was well let's ask the selectmen if they would formalize the ownership and then the ownership would be clear and then actually would probably have to ask you or ask the facilities department update to it sorta veers it in the other way and i thought i thought i was thinking kind of along the lines i mean an expert in this area of law but i mean the way this came out at the end sort of was along the line i was thinking it probably would go because i didn't understand why this would fall within the anti aid if it's a clock and not a religious symbol just because it's in the building while some other i mean when the point he i think implied here that perhaps there might be residence in the community that would suggest would somehow you know object to the funding  because of the practice right now but if you guys well the i think ironically the irony of the entanglement between church and state actually becomes worse if we say we own the clock because them are only part of the church building and i think town council brings that up saying if the border to sign a resolution confirming ownership of the town clock will be bringing that legally problematic relationship into the present day that i think it actually makes the problem worse if we on a clock in a church as opposed to it would be insurmountable repair maintenance and winding and we'd have to get some kind of rights to get in and out of the church whenever own sort of but from my point of view i'm supportive of the application you know i think it's a clock that's become fat it's part of the fabric or cannot withstand the fact that it's in a religious building mean that they could be nice if we work in its beautiful building itself other side you know something that's that's you're not calling people to church with the clock is it hasn't worked in yourself very clearly that's not you can have the church without the clock but you can't have the clock without the church my question of it do you think town council would  i think that's and there's no chance that i can get to pass a resolution well it's not up to us we haven't we appoint one person to the c p c we don't appoint the other people so we don't have we can't tell the c p c what to do there their job is to take the applications before the ones th want to forward to town meeting town meeting appropriate to the funds we're out of the equation entirely other than the fact that we recommend favorable unfavorable a town meeting but we have no authority in the matter of the interest of theirs or in front of me and we had both in favor of it i mean it's clearly  we own the clock or not and that would be the selectmen i just don't think that it sounds like we have to do that now of course someone can always sue and bring a claim and you know that's the way it would go but so people can sue for anything it's so there you could still do this positively and i think we could say to the c p c we have the watch and we have no no objection to this moving forward and they can do what they will with it they can grant you forwarded to town meeting or not but they should not let this think it's wise to bring it to us before we get and we gets into trouble and makes a decision that can't be taken back to make sure we vet it and you know hey like i said someone can contest it someone could file a lawsuit if they wanted to that there's perfectly their right to do so but we feel we're in the decades it runs for seven and a half days so once a week somebody has to go in there and climb up a ladder and pull to weights and then it takes about three minutes and then everyone you know my understanding is with the c p a application it would all become electronic and that wouldn't be the other thing is that i don't know if anybody in town noticed but on halloween at midnight the clock struck thirteen i didn't know his marty climbed up there and after the twelve strikes he hit one more i did hear that meeting but because the end of the conversation requires understanding the beginning of the conversation i'm going to ask you to bear with me to to listen to some of it again  for a few minutes we've done some pretty remarkable things some of which we just heard about last week but for three years we ran better homes belmokhtar you maybe remember better homes belmont that was the initiative of the energy committee where we took thermal ages of every home in belmont and people could say about this time of year every home every home in belmont and people could go on line and see where heat was leaking out of their home and based on that people could sign up to have their homes audited and eventually weatherized through that multi year process to the town about set to records for communities in the state of massachusetts number one is that there are more homes in belmont then in any other community in massachusetts that have had their housing audited and number two there is a higher percentage of residents who had their homes audited who followed through and had their homes actually weather so we had more people out of did and more people fell for follow through and installed the weather is ation that was recommended by the audit you then of course heard about bell might go solar  sold almost three hundred rooftop solar units and through bell might go solar or bell might go solar sold more rooftop solar units in belmont than any other community cells drives electric is one of our current project as ever the end of december i haven't checked in the last three weeks but as of the end of september now my drives electric which promotes people purchasing electric vehicles when they replace their gas vehicles there are more electric vehicles in belmont now than in any given any other given single zip code in the state of massachusetts and then i mentioned last week you may or may not have seen that the mass climate action network ranked light and as being number one a particular side our purchase power policy that we worked hard on you guys in the in the lead back in the transparency of putting our power mics on the website keeping it updated which hadn't happened happening some stuff that's really really  done when james and travis redid the missions and been tory for the town of balad mott and presented it to the energy committee what the new emissions inventory found was we can split it down between municipal nonresidential residential what we found was by far the biggest contributor to and this is your work so if i misstated but the biggest contributor to  emissions is transportation is residential transportation the second biggest contributor to emissions in the town of belmont is home heating the third is electricity  so that the big thing to take away from that is that even though belmont light is now the cleanest municipal light department in the state of massachusetts electricity is only the third biggest contributor to to our emissions so we can make the electricity as it exists today as clean as we want it and we're still only reaching a relatively small part always knew th natural gas you say contributes to c o two me to that that's the largest piece after after vehicles right and it is increasing i natural gas is three miles as i also feel so  somebody to a super efficient natural gas furnace we would have considered that a victory but the way to reach our climate change objectives is to move people off of fossil fuel whether it's natural gas heating fuel oil heating or natural gas driven automobiles and to electrify all of those uses and that was the road map because after the emissions inventory got done we said we can't just jump from project to project we need a road map that we can set of objectives and we can measure to see if we're reaching you know you can track and and if i could just so that is and the purchasing power policy weaves you know even before chris but that we knew we need to clean it up because again it's all coming together we did that before chris kate exactly and so that was all under it and we were writing the roadmap with from the water from the ground to and using that for heem cooling of that the high school i'm sorry the new school seventh through twelve school new build the new building to electric  number two moods new cars new car purchases two electric vehicle purchases fifty percent of all new car purchases will be electric vehicles by twenty thirty number three fifty percent of gas heating replacements will be he electric heat pumps by the year twenty thirty two number three fifty or i've lost track of my number for fifty percent of all heating replacements will be electric heat pumps by the year two thousand and twenty five so we're moving people but in essence what we're doing is we're electrifying the town and we're cleaning up and making emission free the electric supply ourselves since we own so what does all this hat why are we here tonight there there are three things that we have three specific things that we need to run by you folks number one is that there's going to be as you heard at town meeting a resolution presented to town meeting asking for approval of this overall road map toward meeting our climate action goals with the the roadmap involving strategic electrification electrifying you know our transportation our home heating and and other things number two that  resolution is going to call for belmont light to become one hundred one hundred percent carbon free electricity as soon as is feasible consistent with a modest rate impact what to do so it's all tamale up to chris roy and to the late board to decide which dear but number two the language that's in there as soon as is feasible consistent with a modest rate impact that directly households pretty much this is a policy matter but i think we would of course we're doing it all in collaboration but chris roy has told the energy committee that his views his job as general manager as to to do things that reflect the desires of the community since when advantage of a community on electric company is to do with community wants and the way to find out what the community wants is to go to  the huge contributions that housing through a home heating make to emissions wealthy energy committee has talked about doing and we've talked to other folks about doing those are the groups that we've talked to that's far to go through the zoning by law from a climate change perspective and look to seeing the zoning by law what aspects of the  zoning by law might create barriers to strategic electrification where we might create incentives other towns are doing that and then obviously ultimately it would have to go since it would result in propose owning would all go back to the planning board we've talked to the planning board about participating as a stakeholder and then eventually it would go but it wouldn't be like in your town meeting there's no time oh no this could be a of town meeting votes the whole thing down then we'd have to revisit as far as the need the wants of the community and we went to the planning board and talked talk to them about that ok and good in this is special was having one committee talk to other committees but what a back in the energy committee something so that the point for the for you folks is to understand strategic electrification and strategic electric ation is electrifying or indeed uses but first and foremost we rex i would assume because we keep we have to the lights have to come on so we have yes a certain amount of grid power that's not necessarily green to make sure that the that the lights come on but then you can buy racks to offset that and you know shooting for so many new red car registrations your car sales by twenty thirty fifty percent and of course as atomic can't mandate that you buy not as arsenal to sit but what the whole point is with a road map and some of these metrics that are within the roadmap is that we now can and we have targets that we can think about how to implement we have concrete targets a concrete idea that we think about how to implement so then we would be able to and we've been using this boom able to like then think about like what can the town do to incentiv use you know is it more public stations do we talk about that is it going to bylaws and making sure that anytime you do a home renovation that it's easy wired possibly for an easy charging station so that any owner or future presidents can more easily adopt a car without having the hassle like knowing whether they can charge you know there's lots of ways to think about this but by having these goals then we kind of can work back from the goal and see like oh we need you know we're not going to get it we need to push harder how can we look for will be majority of the full blown in this country that's my point of view but when you can pull into a gas station or anywhere and say i can get charged my car as well and i just can pump gas don't you think that's the point so as you misspell a smaller miss polly could we do more to provide do and one quick thing is when we've done the studies and mainly through the bowman drives electric and we've looked we've seen that you know many many people especially in belmont charge at their house overnight and so you know what it was so then what's the how incentive or the town well one thing we did do is of course when people come to who don't live here come it's maybe for shopping so that's why that was for chargers and that's why we put them in there is really there to support it with the belmont have their car charge in when they're in belmont with their car that's and into another aspect to is with new development you know if we had been talking to you six or eight years ago and christine the bradford hadn't been permitted stations we could have yeah at the time we thought a couple of charging stations was a great victory but we now know that that it's we can have new development and have to charging stations i mean think i agree with belmont should be acting on its own on these things not wait for the state to to do things that actually we've been doing that we've designed under the we're still in we he rejoined we're talking about meeting last week about joining the voluntary  green goals even though the muni's are exempt from it and we join the green communities program or time with the spirit energy high schools we're definitely going in this direction and you know we're ahead of others in the field clearly just by my lights rated number one and we're not we're certainly not going to  strategic planning process for belmont life right i think some of these efforts sort of dovetail with one another and we should make sure that if the community is supportive of this that belmont light is ready to also do its part to sign and then there's the details of who monitors compliance what are the if there concrete thing one thing we recognised upon doing the inventory a couple years ago is we didn't have any sort of metrics to say how well we're doing we could show you that graph that says we're not doing enough but then we can say well then what's more should we do it right so the roadmap is trying to give us some metrics  kitchen and they provide technical consultants and just have you know their experience from a pilot round last year so the one thing i would get is fantastic one thing i would caution with the whole road map and with anything where you're setting goals is so this up for failure  should be achievable goals i mean you have to do it you have to do in there obviously is going to be some shift people have to shift their mindset if we're going to do any of this voluntarily but you know i don't want to have some lofty goal and then we miss it and it's a to make it clear that we if we're setting a goal like we've been doing with my life we set that goal and we've been trying to me that you know this gets a little harder because belmont like we control this is stuff we don't all totally control aspiratio discussion of better together on a vent on april twenty eighth two thousand  much an event that would be co sponsored by quite a number of departments organizations in the town this is a matter of fact we already have about fifteen co sponsors just without hardly even know sponsor so we could be fantastic at this is definitely you know civic education a public discussion about community building i mean i think about what does a really good job at that anyway by the fact that we have tons of people turning out whenever we  meet but i think that there's always ways to keep the communication going i think this would be really really good featuring just to plug it featuring dr robert putnam author and professor of harvard it would be sunday april twenty eighth from three to five thirty pm the beach street cent wired so i will make it make it a good one to they intend to do it for just eighteen years for some reason if i read correctly i think the leadership has been driving it is turning over the race director  decided to sit down with the fire chief to ken a disgusting you know the history of apparently you know the director for quite some time in kind what we wanted to do we realized it was assistant there the assistant is  who is a firefighter within the department there were concerns because he was a union wrap that we would have to technically maybe open it up to everybody so after some discussion we decided the chief had to just  said discussion of underwood pool and stabilization fund or enterprise fund this is all right so this is something that i've been talking about for a long time to sit back the general idea of taking some of the profits from the pull o enterprise fund or something else i'm open to just demand we don't have a step plan today at the point specific to the pulled rate we don't address so the question of whether we could get in your town meeting something because it's been a few years one day at the pool a few years i in your packet you had a planner preliminary look at a prize fund going back and reviewing some of the numbers with the staff in the office they are a little bit different so i wanted to provide you the most updated information we had and it's also a little bit clearer than what i presented to you earlier so wanted to do that as well so if you look at the first top part of the sheet that i have provided the revenues in these are paid revenues at the pool  two thousand and eighteen are the actual numbers that we have and then if you look at nineteen and twenty those are dissipated in proposed numbers that we would have including debt services as well so  in this sheet i do have debt service proposed in here it doesn't have to be in here but the way that massachusetts enterprise fund in massachusetts general law you can put debt service in so we did get those numbers from the treasurer's office so that i could show what that would be obviously if debt service was included in the enterprise fund exactly so it would need to be subsidized however if you look at the numbers down at the bottom and just looking at fiscal year twenty the proposed the debt service is two hundred fifty six thousand eight hundred  deficit if you looked at the end to spaded revenue and the expenses the deficit would be two hundred twenty one thousand and seventy nine so the enterprise fund would be able to pay a portion of the debt whatever that services right so in terms of the pool it will be set up to properly account for those expenses you can put everything from salaries to general expenses debt service you can even put right around have to balance but it could be balanced by virtue of a subsidy unlike sewer and we were we actually attempt to make that balance the the ability of the enterprise fund at the end at the end of the year it exactly ill informed in terms of what the true cost for the pool is but at the end of the year instead of the funds if we were to have a increased revenue or if we did not expend all of the expenses the remaining money would stay within the fund and retained earnings that would give us the capacity in the future if we had you know a issue that needed to be fixed it would you know have some funds within that account to be able know the point is that this is the concept is that look at recreation in general recreational assets and understand the form in terms of the deficit they were likely running when a recreational assets intent just in terms of other ways  start here with the idea to me i think it's a first step like this in the year would be to as we come further inflamed about the cost of going to recreational assets we have a new high school coming out of the ground with some recreational assets there as well to hear that you know that a fixed transfer that will make such that there is retained earnings because we're not making money it would be over time i think though it's it and then it's not between the two are in the sewer you look at the rates you look at what your rates need to be to support your program slate which i speaking in that capacity i think it's terrific that the enterprise fund is being discussed i think mr chairs long as you and i were on the public works subcommittee we were talking about creation of such a fun to feed we were take proper care of the pool  i was going to say but it sounds like even the penalty reached a similar conclusion that it probably is not appropriate to include debt service as part of this for the reasons we've already identified but i have two further secondly as part of that there's been always been a question since the new pool is opened about the pricing for nonresident memberships and i wonder if that's been looked at that is the direct commission purview but john you want to talk about this is one of the reasons that you're here short that is as as you said mr chair the fee setting for the pool is the rock commission i will be attending my first recreation commission in my capacity tomorrow but you might want to go to the meeting and tell them what you think and i think other media spying things i think this is also by putting  pool in an enterprise fund it is a vehicle to allow the commission to properly look at the revenues and expenses and what decisions need to be made on fees so i think this is a great move and you might want to give the warren committee th yeah it into something the waters interesting so waters in it but you know any any of the pensions any of the administrative overhead that is allocated whether or not that's that salaries are but you know real estate  cost of sort of overhead for employees who jory if we're going to use these to be sort of true measures of the cost i think we should probably avoid going to be consistent across what i do yeah i think we have here i know we have that summer entirely you know great so i mean what we're seeing with the revenues is anything that looks a little bit below collection is a lot of it has to do with timing for example payment lower taxes you'll see it's at eleven point nine percent that's because when this report was derived the belmont light transfer did not occur so in terms of revenues though we're seeing that we're pretty much where we should be trying to think public works you're sixty two percent say sorry you're forty four and a half percent so we had some increase in contracts we've had a lot of issues in regards to just unplanned things issues that the buildings have had and what we're seeing is it's causing a slight drain on the budget so we're working on a plan to bring forward to the warren committee to address some of the problems of maine that was transfer outside of of course other look at the long term is do we establish some kind of a pulse here around in your will expenditure related to capital improvements you know i can do this at one point time where they said x percentage each year that's the floor that will be spent when they went to the voters for a pretty significant overripe much larger than ours john i think right now we have to get a six million or whatever it was that there were components of that is just going back over years and i know they've had some since then there were commitments to the community that we were percent x percent it cheats here on capital and that's a floor and that's a commitment from a policy point of view i think unfortunately some of the issues we're seeing have little to do with the appropriation of capital funds and want to do with whitney it was installed it probably wasn't done the best it could have been that's what rolling along with that is perhaps some kind of a maintenance staff monitoring like that because if you may maintain it and we came in you know that i mean this is an obvious statement then we have to sort of the expenditure for replacement is much greater i think the task force needs to look at facilities at least in a five year period because of the new high school that's going to be put on my that's a good idea i ask you about a public works why public works like expenses already seventy eight point trash a timing issue yeah because overall the budgets at fifty point five percent at the end of q two is pretty good so yeah yeah we're i mean we're we're on target where we have some challenges well you know stuff happens i think in q three you'll see of town treasurer position alexion versus appointment this was something that came up just for the public at least where we're doing the liaison reports at our last meeting and with all the high school bonding and it's sort of struck us that they're the having a skilled and smart treasurer as we do is skilled we often something that's important for the operation of the town and we're lucky that we have floyd but as an elected position you can't guarantee the summer before it's caliber would be the treasurer is for it floyd thinks about a possible retirement because this is nothing to do with floyd obviously we don't want floyd going anywhere but it might be a time to discuss the future of the position and how you want to go with this if anything we so i went back to because i remember when this he ran against in yellow and the vote was no fifty eight point six three percent and yes forty one point three seven and i think at the time folks said it two issues that we have concern ourselves with here gentlemen is is it or is though for the position yeah so when i pass in the community now when it when it passed the person that currently sat in the position of just finished out their term and then we did a search for so we couldn't just like o'clock noon committee creates is important for us and perhaps we should trust the residence for a community to elect someone who is qualified i mean those are my thoughts i mean i don't have any i'm not discussing anything with the town clerks i think someone who runs the elections in town if they're going out for bonding for something like the high school if these aren't like political policy decisions they're just sort of always ministerial sometimes i mean what's the independence day i mean i'm not trying to defend franchise but i'm just trying to wonder what i'm thinking aloud and if about you have to  balance that against i think he increasingly our bond rating in our ability to show others the thoughtful financial stewardship of the town treasury i think that is something that has been very valuable for the town is something we want to continue and you do worry that perhaps candidates that would not be as well regarded as floyd could get it could be elected into that role now that said i'm very much with mark in both your concerns on town has put in place a special act for recalling elected officials which did not exist at the time in two thousand and five so anybody who thinks that we might have someone there and they have to stay for the full time and they are completely you know can act in i future for me because that was one of the recommendations from the us that we form sort of a charter review commission which is an enormous lift but no but i understand he just i'm just throwing this out there do we again you know this is a question which is a balancing act and they're going along time can go by where it doesn't really seem to make a difference one way or the other if it's a point that are alike that it seems like a ministerial function to do this to do that and a lot is nothing really special about the position but then there are times when you realize that maybe it actually does make a difference so in my own experience which admittedly only dates after two thousand and five in terms of being really aware of what's going on in town i don't know what the issue was then but just a general observation says what's broken what are we fixing but in particular with my involvement with this police station and d p w work the town treasurer and the town administrator and the building committee have but it heads at points because financing this project is extremely challenging and to my mind the independence of the treasurer in this particular issue has been really critical and you know clearly the town administrator has her own point of view to some extent perhaps guided by the board i don't know but the fact that the treasurer has a completely independent point of view on issues that are actually quite important i think is a tremendous benefit for the integrity of the of the project and barring some really compelling argument to demonstrate a benefit to an appointed position i don't see the advisability of a change because it seems like it's in the projects that are actually the hardest where the independence of the treasurer actually is vindicated there may be times when in an elected capacity where weak choice is made by the voters for whatever reason but the same could be said for elections or a position and the process by which that gets corrected in a democracy is either at the next election a better candidate comes along or in an extreme case as was just explained there can be a recall provision but i think this is an the having these fees revisit i think the go one or two got adjusted the rest of them did not because you know you can't accept it if you have to only charge the amount that it cost you to administer these otherwise it's a tax not a fee so you can't just pick any number has to be related to actually the cost of doing the work i would imagine having people hook up their system to your system probably doesn't cost you much in the way of work or does it while the big crowd is they have to contact a private vendor ok and that better than we call you all the police to come out to alert you know who's registered who's not registered because they pay if you fill out the form that you might see if you i know i felt the for speech it would be worth to others to tom's point taking a look at these false alarm fees were one false alarm being free i understand that things have greed a second false alarm ten bucks third false alarm twenty five fourth false alarm in the same years fifty dollars me if you haven't that many false alarms you've got a major problem you're sending our police officers on these calls for nothing which is costing us far more than ten dollars i would think that doesn't cover the costs of safety issues associated as well  we give you a free one for a year i understand it and i've tripped my alarm unfortunately i mean i don't want to go if other towns are charging the same then fair enough but i don't look at it but that so the point that's why we brought the information this is good to know it's good to have the check and  so i only have one item to point out to you this week we are working on the f y twenty budget we have originally schedule a joint meeting on for very tall from what time is needed to discuss the budget with the school committee who is meeting on tuesday february fifth and twenty sixth they are hoping to schedule a joint y you may be able to go to them later told you i could do the twenty eighth i could do the twenty six were maybe in the twenty fifth of february but i can talk to john and see if we can  very i'm going to say what we want these people you read the resumes you've met a couple of them maybe you've never really seen them in action you always wonder i hope it all works out phenomenal people last week was the first new transportation advisory committee meeting i went to that one also to help kick them off again phenomenal group of people dan miller is the new chair so i'm really looking for looking forward to good stuff there and with them the c p p you see the business study committee all the new commissions are up and running  the other issue like s would be whether or no you fabulously seen this whole thing with the winter trash carts if you've been getting e mails about that but people weren't thrilled about the i guess the e mail that went out to the notice that went out about what to do with the trash course there were a lot of questions i actually had a lot of the same questions so that got withdrawn and we're going to have to revisit it yeah i'm going to actually speak to mary beth this week or trenchcoats i mean what again and when it snows but where to put  out because there's a we need to be clear like as to where you're supposed to put them i think they're not being collected because of well i don't know about you know the concern is that people are going to know what to do once big mounds of snow or at the yeah we had a meeting of the counselor oh that's right the counselor presentation meeting that's right so i mean most of what's in here is the common center and then there's the high school traffic working group and then we have we talked about the youth commission charge