to break with tradition and actually be the one to walk us through this but let me start by saying my plan is not to go through each slide in detail as a formal presentation but more to let my colleagues on the board and the public know the thinking behind where we are right now and what we'll be discussing as we go forward and do more public presentations in the community by way of background pam mike myself and tim are consulting with compass meant met with about two thirds of the finance commission a couple of weeks ago and walked through a lot of th so as we look at this and just think about where we are in this in the process of bringing the police headquarters forward to town meeting we will preview the article this article along with others next week before but not walk through this whole presentation they know where we are presently will give as current information as possible and we'll save a formal presentation to the finance commission for their public hearings but they will be curious where we stand on some elements of this especially as it relates to the financing of it and i hope during the discussion if there are any questions that we have  him that we raise them now but it would be nice walking away from tonight to get a vote of endorsement as to where we are with this project so that we bring it forward to the finance commission is as an overview next week and as we step forward that the board of select but i just want to let people know what we're trying to frame the conversation and that came out loud and clear from the finance commission so a lot of people in the community when they hear about this project and hear about school projects ask where are we going with our capital projects in town but one way to best express where we're going is to first lay the foundation for where we've been this particular slide shows capital articles that have been approved by the town outside of two and a half meaning they required a ballot vote as well as town meeting vote the upper portion give school projects and i just want to highlight in terms of building projects there were four large school projects since one thousand nine hundred ninety and the total capital amount that was approved through these projects for the building ones is sixty million dollars in terms of municipal projects we have as many people know the municipal side covers many things the equipment that d p w as has the the sewers and everything else but just calling out a building project we had the new library approved in two thousand and ten that required an override vote and that was a nine point three million dollars project so that's just gives me giving you a little bit of history outside of two and a half this next one is capital projects approved within two and a half and again it's broken out between school projects at the upper tier municipal projects in the center of the long list and sewer projects at the bottom and again i want to just highlight the capital projects for schools it was about five point five million it included a supplement to the high school project that we went back to town meeting for to finish the project and station police station and then the capital we approved for the fire station last spring that totals about ten million so all i'm doing with that is highlighting the capital projects so the really large ones have been done at it historically outside of two and a half and we were very fortunate last spring to be able to do the fire substation within two and a half and here's the list of things as we look ahead bringing to town meeting we expect to have the police headquarters for the new construction and given the input we've received from departments and knowing the conversations that are around the school department for the elementary schools in the five to six years beyond this year we have a rather significant list of very important projects nonetheless elementary schools just to be determined i know they're having ongoing discussions of how to approach that could be renovations that could be new bill and we know long history of the main fire station needing renovation as does this building and then looking forward the senior center has had on its long range planning and expansion and that's been there for a while the public works has additional garage facility needs and then new construction of a community rec center which is i think more of a wish list item versus a replacement it would be an additional facility so for the public to know these are the types of things we're looking at and discuss these as well as many small capital projects when we formulate the five year capital plan both from department submitting and long range financial planning reviewing before it comes before the board of selectmen and ultimately to t this is just the key milestones of votes that have been taken to bring the public safety projects forward and as the public knows we started that process back in two thousand and thirteen in earnest to actually have projects come to fruition but fire stations both of them in the police headquarters have been on our long range planning lists for an extended period of time and this slide will just provide people with a summary of critical steps that have been taken by the task force in the town since the formation of the group in two thousand and thirteen we're all familiar with these but it's our hope to kind of highlight for people that this is been a very involved productive process and clued in many members of the community and especially many town meeting agenda items that have been approved along the way the next two slides are simply a recap of the reasons why we're pursuing the police station discussion and we've seen those before and they were included in town meeting  again remind people of the rather unacceptable conditions of the current station and we do have a very thin line that people can go to to see more information in our discussions with finance commission i think it's pretty clear people understand the need it doesn't mean that the public at large is completely familiar with the station so we want to continue to make that information available and this is just a recap of the site plan to show the positioning of the police station and the deerfield avenue extension that we approved at town meeting and the addition of a new parking lot so once we're ready to do the police station all the other elements are in place and we'll skip that one that's just another site plan one that we don't need one thing we've spent a lot of time on in the task force in the past few weeks is really how to explain the building proposal that we have created over the period of the past twelve to eighteen months jeff working with the sim mike and staff really drilling down on what is the police station need what are the space requirements what are the operational requirements of really how has life changed for the police department in the how many years since the last building was built forty years since the sixty's forty plus years so this is color coded and i'm just going to highlight it would be hard for people to see on t v but those of us who have in front of us can see better is to delineate the community space on the first floor it involves the e e o c training room and that is also a publicly available facilities so for the future we could even see board of selectmen meetings there and the upper part of the slide the  entrance area into the building light blue is the dispatch and as most of us know that covers both police and fire operations we have one dispatch center and the room is getting fitted out to show where the are desk spaces and everything else and as chief silva has explained to many of us there are often three if not up to five people in that space so currently the one we have is a closet almost and this has a lot of operational equipment plus many personnel that need to be able to work out of that space at any given time the green is put for police operations and again if people have questions on any of these the chief is really the authority on it the dark blue to the lower right corner is intake space so if somebody has been arrested and brought in booking detention areas so there are cells it needs to be accommodate men women and adolescents separately so that's why we have more space than we've seen in the current space and there are two garage bays to the right one allows police vehicles to drive in they have detainees that they are bringing in for booking and to the far right jeff can do it more justice but that is an area that has some storage some vehicle repair on the author cage and that a vehicle needs to be inspected if it's been from a crime basically you they want to sort of you to have an operational question that may you may not have details  have to set up the emergency control stuff in the new building would you do it right from here dispatchers or would you move it would be right right across the hall in that area right there ok ok and what are you go between it and the first story is the area over the booking area and the sally ports does not have a second story but we've had the architect design this space this that wing of the building so that if in the future the town needs to add on for reasons we don't see today or don't need today it's designed to support a second story addition walking through the color coding again the upper left hand corner is a conference room that is also an accessible community room public space the red area are the roof necessary lockers their lockers for storage of a quick meant personal clothing if we're changing onsite it would be there whether or not there is a wellness facility room which is the small gray area in the center it has just been positioned near the lockers and the showers for obvious reasons but we've tried to separate the color coding of this to show that the actual workout area is fairly small and jeff give us per perspective about this room to where you are so it is  an equipment would be provided by the police association and it would not be part of the capital project the locker room space has is of size where additional lockers could be added in the future if necessary it would have lockers to support the near term size of the police force and it is also male locker rooms female locker rooms and a big difference we have from when our current station was built as we now have women on the police force and i think it would be all our hope that we would see more of a gender mix of representation on our police force going forward and i know the chiefs were tired during the last round of hiring to get more diversity think that's on the first floor and yellow on both floors the light or pale color in the center on both floors is the circulation area the the hallways the connections between the spaces oh yes thank you chairman well just noted there is a small square box right below the upper left hand corner that is a building infrastructure facility maintenance room so hopefully this will help the public in understanding how where the space when we first put together the programming requirements and the architect started the process the building size was about twenty four thousand square feet and making efficiencies and positioning of rooms and making sure that we were using rooms to their maximum potential the building size was brought down to about two twenty thousand when it was determined the best design was to enclose the third story where feet from the current building to the proposed building and to try to summarize it as to what the drivers are behind the space changes with the doubling of staff it's estimated that about six thousand square feet we double the existing building  we necessarily need a bigger building so that's the first line safer and modern intake booking and detention about seven hundred square feet meeting current code requirement technology standards and gender diversity is about thirty five hundred square feet evidence or retention requirements five hundred square feet the iau see community room training facilities twelve hundred square feet and having dedicated space for weapons and patrol storage about seven hundred square feet so that brings us to the almost fourteen thousand square feet and so we really are just trying to help summarize what the space is all about and make sense out of it for people to understand and what we did along the way was check this and we've seen this before we've checked the building size against comparable towns this provides a fairly long list of communities comparable populations or in the vicinity of ours  full time employee numbers the size of buildings and then looking at the that size the building over the number of staff so we we come up with an average you can see to the far less left our existing structure is way below the peer group in terms of facilities size and when we look at the same statistic with the new building where in a pack that's generally hovering around the high for hundreds low to mid five hundred and we have some outliers to the right but it's a gut check for us to does this make sense that the building is of the size that we're proposing and for the public we just will continue to show what the design of the station is and this is in the context of it compared to town hall and that was very intentional to have the buildings relate to each other but not to the twins they're cousins and at this point i'm i'm going to invite him to speak i'm just going to frame this and then we look at the financing site back last year when we were doing the fire station and had the  in we were in an environment of escalating construction costs and the fire station costs were higher than the estimates were suggesting they would be as much as two to three months before so we went about putting these ranges of cost structures together for the police headquarters we added in a much higher escalation factor thanks to the perseverance of selectmen ahern and we continue to work in the range of cost expectation of fourteen to nearly sixteen million dollars for the construction costs and i know from what tim bunfight is shared with us current estimates are at the lower range but we're going to continue to work with this this band of the fourteen to sixteen million until such time as we have bits in hand to know the final price and it will be going out to bid next month february with the expectation that we have b you don't really need to go forward with a perfect example was two of the two of the sides of the buildings themselves not very noticeable by the general public they're not curable from the street and sort of the deal that was lockers that we have for staff that are currently available with the provision that space was maintained or reserved to add lockers as staff get added in the future so do you have any other examples you want to in terms of size because of the hard work of everybody involved and we're learning from what other areas did where they had much of the same thing but we said well how can we put like balkans together how can we work before so it wasn't just worcester and it was i think if i remember correctly was an eighty five thousand square foot building and we would look at component parts and one of the things that saved us what i thought was an enormous amount of money was we had the prescribed cable hangers that they had initially put in the project we went back through and looked for different cable hangers and saved like ten dollars a cable hanger you know maybe five thousand square foot building i don't remember the bottom number but it resulted in a tremendous amount of savings and i'm just wondering if there was an effort to also look at component parts in certain for this through a long term borrowing as you saw in those earliest flights that's how we pay for all of our capital the time it's all stuff so we would issue a long term bond and what we're showing here are just the two ranges that  to mention the top bar being the fourteen million dollars range in the bottom of the fifteen point eight just to show the cost of what we look at a bar on it how do we pay for that we look at what's our average annual pay the principal and interest payment what we're showing you here is that we have done most recently in any of our large buildings the high school project the library project the middle school module as we've done as a twenty year bond we are looking here now at possibly doing this as a thirty year bond treasurer gavin and i have been talking with our bond advisor and looking at some numbers they indicated many towns have gone out to thirty year terms for some of these large municipal buildings and school buildings first to capture the great interest rate environment now before it might change and also because it's really a better match for the useful life of that building what did we borrow from the fire station and what was the interest rate two point six percent for you rate we get so we're just trying to give a range of what that might be so we did get last summer two point six for a twenty year bond for the fire station so we're showing you here the cost for a twenty year bond at three percent and thirty y bond at three and a half percent so on that lower range at the chain million that would be twenty years about nine hundred twenty thousand a year in payment at the thirty year seven hundred nineteen thousand and at that higher range we're showing you the same  just over a million dollars a year for a twenty year and eight hundred seventeen thousand for a thirty year so we are comfortable with using the thirty we can go through that with the long range committee last week at that meeting treasury gavin is comfortable with that so that's certainly something we should be considering as you look at that and i don't think anything is changed since our last discussion and you probably will cover it with the budget again but this kind of thirty year which talked about that they would have several different buckets of how one would use some of the new tax revenue coming in and this would be one piece of that which would go through and i think you know what's really important is that if we are supportive of that and  can express that it will help us we're going to finance next week and in the future meetings down the road and we're going to end our presentations with the public with us life like this and looking for input but really trying to summarize for the for everybody why why this project why now through the presentation we've expressed the reasons for why we need to replace the police station but just summarizing it at its current size it's the next smallest station built in the last fifteen years if we look at our comparable communities and many of the conditions of the current police station make it untenable secondly we are looking to take into account the changes that have occurred in policing in the last fifty years that our station needs to address but we're also trying to create a building that will satisfy the town's needs for at least the next fifty years and that it appears at this juncture that we will be able to afford doing this project within two and a half and not sacrifice other critical talent needs our operating budgets our maintaining our financial policies that are very important to keeping our borrowing rate down because we want to maintain that aaa bond rating that we have and we can't do any better than that bond rating so sustaining it is our goal so that's that's it in a nutshell looking for feedback but really want again people to understand what we're going to be presenting go for it we've talked tentatively about two dates in march having community meetings one probably at the middle school and the other at the downey school really working very hard to publicize those meetings so that the really want to segment it out and give people many opportunities to learn about it ask questions about it and understand it so that meeting we can successful outcome you know people understand that we're not creating a giant government as i've heard from a lot of people so i think that's going to be somewhat tolerant like forward to show that statistic as far as other comparable times i think it's also important understand that times have changed yes i agree with you it was the toast of the book right but if you talk to it and you'll notice all use the term more senior lawyers  i would venture to guess when this station was built i had been told there was one section of the grand jury sitting in new york for county in the annual basis maybe two it's right there was no opiate little kids can quote miranda warnings from watching crime shows now and i'm sure our first of cho you when they sometimes have to detain young people they immediately inquire about their rights to a benches with two metal bars where you have to handcuff people who may have just been in a fight you handcuff them right next to each other why don't you just give them gloves at this point in time because you're begging for them to get into what again restraint is not something that happens in those situations to anybody who's done any kind of criminal prosecution or criminal work i don't like spending money i wish we didn't have to build a new town and public safety is not something you want to bargain with it's something you want to make sure you cover because if you bargain with it you're going to lose that deal every single time i think you know where i stand yeah i support this completely i'll move that we move that we approve the police headquarters presentation and going forward talk to us about the ongoing development of the budget in two thousand yes we were at your last meeting just going to continue that discussion kind of give you an update of where we are with the budget and said your last meeting we had indicated that you were january is a very busy  lot of people talking about the budget and going to the selections material with each group we have reviewed the overall budget areas the meals tax update the hotel tax option different tax relief options looking at the f y seventeen pul plan that the board outlined going through the university station tax revenue and looking at the capital budgets and really going through all of the different pieces with all of those groups and i will just mention in a later you're looking at your warrant and the long range financial planning committee is recommending each of the selectmen to place on the war at the hotel tax option which is just that adopt the state option that was put in place a number of years ago to increase our current rate from four percent to six percent it was an option that the state gave when they put the meals tax into place and the long range does think this is the appropriate time for the town to make that change and would ask that you put that as well as warren article and they took note of when they looked at that that all the surrounding communities around us have that do we want to do well that they really talked about that there's not you know any real downside to us decisions wouldn't be made and where someone might state based on that they didn't believe i'd agree with that right you know seriousness my concern is in terms of additional development do we not look more attractive we hold off on doing you know because i'd like to see what the revenue projections are do we not make ourselves look more attractive potential hotel developers than that i mean i don't think i was only allows for any other place but where the one is going that's already this is it's not a question of do we want to have this tax we already have it at four percent and if you do that does the community want to increase that from four to six as we sit here today what would increase in revenue be the four to six year as betcha in the new hotel so you're talking potentially from that even at the for a couple hundred thousand dollars in revenue and long range would recommend as with the meals tax that goes into the restricted account  and i just want to point out with all of those groups as we talk about the budget we continue just to stress the need to address all areas of the budget and all of those groups are right there with the selectmen in addressing that that that it's not just possible for us to focus on one area of the budget whether that's operating in our or our capital or one idea but that we need to take care of all areas of the budget including you know the tax bill impact our operating services our long term time liabilities that's the  that people were very pleased to see that that it wasn't all go into one area but again being dispersed to those many and then some of the discussion was just didn't have the right on much at this point to each of the categories  now for f y sixty in the last green bar you know on the right average home is about five hundred eighty six thousand dollars in value and pay the tax bill in the current year eight thousand six hundred dollars so that home  we need to make sure that commercial very is attractive so that we do continue to have appropriate development towns particularly for in the years before the university education project came when the time was trying to bring the more commercial development activity which as our colleague in the rear of the room or employee day will now was long a goal to get that commercial value going again and it took us twenty years to turn that ship around the way it was only eighteen did everything i could yeah it was a difficult time very well but the forty percent of the tax burden in our real estate residential values have escalated at the same time so it's been two factors residential going  get it and you and i talk about this a lot so the bill is not going down by sixty five dollars it's just not going to go up by sixty five more than off my sixty five dollars that i would have if we had not done ok so then to just because some people hear that and they only hear go down and think that their tax bill is actually going to go down and that's not true your voice starts we're going to start wondering here is this until the winter is over aggressive but i like stability and i think it was a good opportunity to sit down and you know start negotiation process with them back in the summer again we've been going back and forth and have what we feel now was a great offer by th n a great opportunity for the town and it's something that we would like the board of selectmen the strong consider and partner us to proceed and sign the extension with a couple items that we've negotiated into the contract it's a four year with the financing and collection of the overflow backs so during the initial contract that the town of signed almost four years ago on the town agreed to finance the book for bags which is so the road consultant to help us with any issues that we have help us advertise you know recycling and that's a new computer with a cycling force or anything like that it's more of an educational so hopefully that will mean we can before you go i just wanted to share with you to share with your team and with others here i happened to be speaking with the manager store manager of wake minutes after monday's storm or sunday night's storm and they were highly complimentary of not only the plowing in the town but just how the town overall it's maintained and that's a new party coming into the town and being in a few communities and share that with your team they were just very highly complimentary and it's a credit  this issue so i'll leave it for the public to profit we have to consider requests to allow a road race on westwood streets on saturday may fourteenth for the second annual run for a vet road race it will impact oak street  right we still think it's worthwhile to do this or digress but if you have the farmers talk to you about maybe finding a different location  will the chief will say that i mean a lot of this is protecting the detainees protecting the police officers and containing things which we can't do well in the current site is protecting the the community i remember coming here one day coming into town hall during a weekday and observing a police car having pulled up in a office or taking someone out and it was a very physical scene and it was early morning when school buses are going by so you know that's just that's not good for the community so what europe's commenting on is completely appropriate so we'll we'll percentile you don't have to find any other questions ok we are going into executive session to discuss one issue related to the acquisition of real property which would have a detrimental effect on the position of the governing body if discussion were held in open session the board will not be returning to open session our next meeting will be on