good evening everyone and welcome to a very exciting evening here at the belmont media center as we look at the election for twenty fifteen everybody's been talking about it and voting on it and hopefully getting along about it and here we are we're going to have the results i mean reynolds tonight's moderator i'm a contributor here about my media and a freelancer for the belmont citizen herald i am excited to be here and i'd like to introduce our panel first tommy al voted the first thing i want to say is if you didn't vote you can't call us and complain so if you voted in then you can complain but if you didn't you can't complain voting is a privilege in this country and i'd like to think that all of you here in belmont who cared so deeply about this election went out and voted so we're going to start right away with before we get to the selection of the new selectman we're going to talk about the override which brought out a lot of different opinions what they did is they left questions in people's minds about that's why correctly that's correct they left questions in a positive way about where the second year money was going to go they they wanted to they wanted to be more specific about how the money after the first year was going to be allocated because it was only spelled out for the first year that put nervousness in people because they wanted to know specifics and specifics couldn't be provided because we didn't know what the next year help right  here next to you tell us what the yes people did correctly what they do right they managed to get all the schools out there they've got great signs they have just so much energy energy you know but you know i think you know i like to think that if the know people had a little more time they might have been able to drum up as much energy ok so all right so that's good good to hear and  we one thing i have noticed is when there is no campaign against something it's very hard to not pass something so i had to admired that they did come they'd there was a no campaign when last time we were here i believe was about the pool and there every year all of the programs that we're cutting at the schools and the roads that aren't going to get finished and it people do say when is the nowhere i going to go on the ballot and i feel like for the last several years there's been an active no which has kept it off the ballot so people have realized that they're not going to be losing their jobs next year we have a terrible time when the tarp funds went out and people were losing their jobs and there was too big to fail all of that was happening at the same time and now we've had we've seen such a huge recovery of the economy we've had all times high as in the stock market boston had the highest job growth of jobs that paid over seventy five thousand dollars per year so it's the poverty line boston is bring down anybody's fees right well actually it's not going to do anything except for keep the bleeding from continuing to run all we're trying to do is is so up though that's right and i sense the override what was three years ago of people that wanted to take this class they could all fit into one room and then we took a picture and the kids were sitting on the radiator and on the floor and then i had one of my adorable kids that worked out in the afterschool program as a volunteer telling me i couldn't get it there wasn't enough room so there  classes that they said it wasn't going to impact the population of students but it did and the other issue was that at least when my children were in school courses were offered two or three times during the day so when children or setting up their schedules they could always  were backing jim williams and i was curious about that because andy rojas would seem to me to have been very very kind to the business community here in vilma including you and you've been awfully successful and we're all very proud of you for that thank you tell me about that you don't think andy would continue to i just i felt that it's important when i hire someone to do a job for me that that person has the qualifications for what it is that they're going to be taking on so for instance if you are going to be running a sixty million dollar budget i would love to see a proven financial background that shows that you've had to struggle with budgets that you've had to cut and you've had to increase revenues and you've had to look for the low hanging fruit in order to to try to cover some of your comments and i know if you've got a wonderful harvard degree but it's as a landscape architect and jim williams has such a strong financial background in this w ok i mean what do you do i'm a registered representative or and oh no camera and i do compliance for approved companies so broker  a good mix a combination of talents and he's done wonderful that are us the board of selectmen as far as our board of selectmen any done wonderful things he helped out with the playground at the ball or and he used his talent and he did we wonderful work to run it and i appreciate that because my kids are baller kids but i and everybody has something that they're great add but i just felt like watching all the financial troubles that we've been through that i would like somebody who i felt had dealt with corporations in determining whether or not certain avenues were worth investing in or not and and that seemed to be pretty blank i mean there were some things i didn't like about jim because i didn't feel like in some cases he might be a strong investment in things that i liked but that was ok because i just want the overripe and i was actually he wasn't but then he was right because what he was looking at is the penalty they were paying on the open the pension with as much as the override so we said you know we're taken care of that we wouldn't have the same financial problems we're facing today and there's different discourse and snub been totally honest i felt that you know after hearing the presentation from from liz allison and i looked up and spent the past ten years that we have had three and a half percent growth and what was used in that financial taskforce numbers was half of that and i just you know whatever we end up doing if we end up doing an override that's fine but i just don't like people manipulating the numbers who was on the f about the budgets and about the finances of the town so once they came through with their report some of them were for the override and some were not is that right michel even initially was not for the ok well they had different levels of funding that they wanted to put forth  are on it and i understand that they decided if they didn't throw it in now they weren't going to be able to come back to the well that's what i hear oh you know what happens if they're down the road if we need another override right i would have our job right and then we  need another one right i mean this thing is over two and a half percent it's not like you can tell your electric company you are allowed to raise my electric bill more than two and a half percent a year you can't do that you can't do that with your health care can't do that with your doctor at all  rhyme but the thing is that two and a half that wasn't meant to be a stabilizer it was never meant to actually stay forever it was just something that was implemented to try to help people control their budgets but what happened is that we took it too far and so we said well we're not you know we're going to live within our means because that's what people understood it to be when that was not the intent and so we let things get cut further further every year we call it a level service budget you guys  but you also see all these things cool way every year and it just hurts while our population is growing so we still have the same level service just means same amount of dollars for the budget going out but it doesn't mean the same number of eighty five percent of most budgets are salary and so because then there are things they might do with white wire not the highway department version and they're only half as many people in the highway department today as when i was on the board of selectmen and we have just as many streets and probably dirtier there's more to clean they do yeah they do claim they haven't found this yet but they are doing so many other things they've removed snow they're trying to patch all the holes holes on the streets quickly before everybody falls into them so they're all kind and then they get calls  emergency calls because some kind of saw a thing has broken so the highway department is very very busy and they have almost i think just as much work to do today as they did twenty five years ago and there are half as many people ok plug for clean clean years usually has open seats why is that probably you have more apartments and people move in and now you know they might be going to college or or you know what i mean they can afford to live in belmont and pay for that i don't think so i don't think have every intention of doing everything i can to raise your taxes and they say why is that i say because i care about your kids i care about our roads i care about my town i love belmont and i am sick of seeing her with a black guy i'm going to fix her and so if i'm going to represent you you have to know that i have every intention of raising your taxes and i also expect to see that sign in your yard and they get it they never say a black eye that's a lie and i will i heard it  know about that they go in they bring them down to the precinct that they're yeah because i am from i i actually knew that i was going to be busy with other stuff today and so i went and did  that so so let's talk about the cuts i guess we might as well do that from the athletic department that my husband is part of here in belmont you know be terrible if we had to go through anything like we went through with the freshman to get involved in the election and why do you think that was because i think they felt like the selectmen a lot of people really care about sports people care about sports in this town even though we're not winning people still care when i wen there's no press box in here is to feel which is very very thing if you go to another town and who care about that skating rink which is i did a very big story on it about the birds of live in the skating rink and one of the guys that work for the town told me that the  about sports and about the sports team and i think they decided they better get involved in the selectmen selection and well i actually saw banding of the parents the worst sports theater are great music but is not what is it and so what happened is money it's just like when i have a family that loses a mom and then i'm selling a house and there's four siblings and there's a tendency for this all all this love that they all had it gets weird whenever money gets into the picture it can change the way the dynamic goes money changes people you know i mean maybe we should just all have a currency a warm fuzzy sense that if so you're saying you're saying one group had money in the other group you know i think it's you know it's  then they spun off a division and mark took took charge of it has to do with credit cards and maintaining credit cards to do with gift cards and maintaining the value of those gift cards forever because there was a time if you got a gift the on the governor's race we literally went across the country and did like every race that when it crossed we went to california all the back of the house to the no two o'clock in the morning yeah we still didn't know by the time we went off here so it can take some time i'm not sure why you know where do you draw a line like i hope you go to everybody and say is this ok can i put this house up you know who first i should and you know this year i never have the most expensive house in the street right right that's right i get it i don't want the best house well here's what was happening is that there was builders coming into belmont there were tearing down the houses and they were building the houses so that they could have the maximum square footage of the hospital but save them but they did it to such an extent and this is something the town meeting did put said no more they were building them sideways because they had a porch of any fashion they just didn't want to use any extra space we have deep a lot sometimes right so they were there and then they would have it would be a two families so the front would be here but then nobody knew that there was another unit behind packages mail wouldn't happen remember that you woman that got up i just talked her the other day that said i never got the note that they were fixing my road because they didn't know where my mailbox was the thing about that was what the other real estate agent that i was arguing with was saying how dare you impact how much money this person can sell their house for first of all these houses weren't going on the market they were going to have motherly people and writing them a letter and they weren't getting nearly the amount of money they could  agent had a developer and was working with somebody saying listen you know we've got the money you don't have to worry about anything you want even need to have an open house they don't really have it so so anyway now what happens is they were building these houses and they were saying you know how dare you packed the value to the seller when the seller really wasn't getting what they could have at the same time i might be trying to sell the house across the street and i'm got my buyers in there and they say there's no way i want to live across the street from that it is and it would it was big bless your town mean is they said look you can't be that funky you've got to kind of fit in with everything else and you can't be so out of the scheme so that stopped and now the new thing goes so you can't build a sideways house without porches and you can't put your conditions in front yard and you have to have some sort of entryway something that looks like a door and actually has to be a door so now what they're doing is they're what they're saying is that in a neighborhood where you've got nothing but capes and kind of smaller houses you can't build the four thousand square foot because that goes to the edges because you're we have numbers no because what we're doing is that the people are saying like i can't even see sunshine anymore i look out and i just see the side of my house the planning board has some initiatives that they're going to bray about they've cut you know they've based basically said if you've got a lot of nine thousand square feet you can do to that around forty five hundred and so the you know like i know when we lived in raleigh road we had fifty three hundred square feet in our total so and i mean the land from lansing land mass and so i hope your house was in fifty three hundred square no no did a wonderful job and then you've got guys like to stefano who's on the planning board who is actually building less than white he could have got the way with because he's this is his town to town and i like it when our boat a lot of people build our belmont houses because they have to live don't do they have somebody town hall cloying the man you just said all right numbers we are just we are waiting for official numbers from the town clerk she has to approve these before we can put them up just so everyone knows and i guess we're not getting anything official every single bit of that when we build these new houses there sadly any green space around the houses at all and where a community that needs to think about storm water retention and doing all kinds of things that's not in the  somebody by now it's six months if somebody buys a piece of property they have to wait six months or if you want to sell your property you have to have you are required to do that yet you have a six month moratorium on doing any is so that there might be some discussion between the town or neighbors and the the person who wants to tear down the house there are lots of houses where about a month that have put very tasteful additions on the houses and people get quite a bit of room in the house and they haven't had to tear down the house and start over so you're saying if i want to tear my hair the house down i have to tell my neighbors and they they get to you know you're not going to you if you want to sell your house right someone i want to take care i want to tear it many little doggedly pulled all over your floor i am going to go back to one thing that ann said because we can and paulson i mean you know i guess maybe i trust too much ok now now i happened to go down cottage street just yesterday or the day before and i noticed to my left i was looking at where the new pool was going in and if i lived on cottage street my house my living room window is now looking into the back people are tearing here in the studio for it by not not a lot but it still did pass so nine hundred so people again these are unofficial with all of this is all eight precincts reporting watch the election and i want to say that in the that you know god bless you because you did you work three years and you did a ton of hours of service for belmont on top of being selected and you also donated your time and talent to other things for the town belmont and one thing i learned from matt being able to be selectman is that it gave me a tremendous amount of time to do things that i really enjoy and for the for the town and but also that i also for yourself i pick my you are a different career path the funny thing about real estate is because i lost i decided to bring people to belmont that would vote for me and then when i became so successful at bringing people to vote when i decided that i don't really want to be to like me anymore because it was too generosity to that i believe we have something that i'm interested in how many people voted in the town of belmont not sure this also unofficial and i think it looks like if you add up in that for is what yes  certain things we don't know how many s l kids are going to come in this year how many next year how many when we have a kid with extreme special needs situations that single aid can cost us eighty thousand dollars so because of the variables we can't be specific about what happens gaining anything we're trying to keep what we have going into next year so now the over it's possible they gain anything know what they buy they're not going to have to lose on a teachers they're not going to lose classes so right now my son is watching jack you get to take honesty and full disclosure that's really the issue for me is that i think i need to have that information before you end and not have a financial taskforce that gives this information on the thirtieth of january having the select vote to have it on the ballot on february seventeenth there was really no time for people to even react to this but you know what makes it hard for me know hold on a minute is that we've all got if you look at the average income sure i mean i think that the override is beneficial not only for the schools but also for the town the five hundred thousand dollars that will be put towards the roads to add to the what one point three that we use now it also allows bonding to take place this amount of money and that that will allow bonding to take place and then that money bill used to pay back the bond every year so i think that the town as a whole has really benefited from  this i think that was something i think we were excuse me i think we were due kind of you are away right i mean all the other towns have had overrun is there's no question about that but i think at the legs it took with the parents who were very concerned about their children's education and so that that took on and people got very nervous about that and i don't blame them you know i would be nervous too so so i think the whole issue of the benefits of the t people for the override i think you all did a good job getting your base out and getting people to the polls and making sure everybody knew how important it was so we look forward to every year we'll be back again and we'll  see what happens next and here in the great town of i am dan reynolds thank you so much for watching again congratulations to jim williams i think i forgot to say that and to the yes for belmont people so congratulations everyone a