fixed but the number of towns the participate has increased the match rate has declined pretty substantially if some of the most recent year for belmont i believe was around twenty percent which means that for background ok that would make sense because the there is a overall requirement for c p a projects that they fall if you are one of committee has represented as each one of those then the year by year proponents for projects can submit proposals which are then considered  committee actually has quite limited powers to judge projects on the merits it sounds like their principal function is to evaluate whether the proposed projects qualify for funding rules but in terms of evaluating projects on the merits that's not really something the c p a committee does  video will generally approve them so the only constraint is whether the projects that are proved in aggregate are more demand more money than the fun running at about one point two million dollars if any year like this year the proposed projects in total come to less than one point two billion dollars she died lines requirements of the act the community preservation out and they do eliminate projects at that point they don't qualify for a variety of reasons they i know they eliminated one and some point when they said it wasn't a real project it didn't you know it was an idea but it wasn't a well baked project at that point but then they have people create an official proposal and so by the time you've created the proposal i think you've already qualified under the you know meeting the guidelines meet you know being a legitimate project i don't understand why and i understand this is what you're what you're getting i don't i can't imagine that it would be required that they not analyze them on the merits of it somebody has to analyze them on the merits i don't know jenny sorry for genuine  considerable they do look carefully at each project to be sure that it is viable as a project to be sure that it's doable and to be sure that it's oh yeah if it that it it is something that they think will benefit the community so i think that they do analyze the projects that's that's my understanding of it i haven't had a specific conversation with lloyd about this deal about how they do their business but i do believe that it's true they have this to tear application process and they do vet them for c preservation committee that's them and perhaps them and we review them and then it goes to town meeting but it's ultimately town meetings call to fund or not to fund for that sorry that i didn't get that far but i thought it was going  town boards and commissions historic district commission conservation commission recommendation and studying the projects and study the needs possibilities and resources of the town regarding community preservation and and have hearings on it so it's kind of them and to the fact that they can roll the funds forward forward in the future years memes that there's always always a financial question i mean that they should be weighing you know whether this is worthy of the c p a funds because it's not a use it or lose every year there's actually three buckets for recreation buildings closer to one block so there's three buckets of the amount that's set aside ten percent has to be spent on historical ten percent has to be spent on  affordable housing and ten percent has to be spent on open space slash recreation the remaining seventy perspective seventy percent can be spent however you like and if you don't spend it in one year it carries over so they keep track if they don't allocate anything ed up until now every project that made it has made it past the preliminary phase which is the you know decide whether or not it meets the criteria has been recommended to town meetings so they haven't rejected any of the projects once they have gotten beyond what they got to the full proposal phase and that could be where your talking about floyd and perhaps all of their philosophical approach to it eighty five page thing you find that there's a lot of of you know that's that's what they require part of the application there's a lot of support from the community to say that this is actually a valuable thing so i would say there are a lot of what i would not scribe those letters as a spaces store or community housing and their meaning seventy percent may be allocated to any one or combination of the three main uses including public recreation at the discretion of the committee in town that you are correct  role to determine whether this is a good use of the funds if the funds person who is making the financial decisions in terms of is that the c p c or are they just because when they came to record mission and asked us our opinion on something we're not really in a position to say this amount of money for a playground for tennis court is the appropriate amount of money or is the way that we want to build this this thing we don't really make it and i want to i want to make that very clear to the recreation question we're not a piling know members of the community i'm sorry speaking as a recreation commissioner for i'm saying of that i'm wondering whether i'm just want to find out whether you believe that we should be we the warrant can be should be making the financial decision whether this is a smart way to spend c b s who is making that decision because i don't view it as within the purview of the committee certainly not the recreation commission to do that and it doesn't some of the c b c is that the c b c is necessarily making the financial decision they're making the decision that these meet the new rules for c b c and therefore and they serve the community and therefore they're recommending forward but who is saying well or is there someone that should be saying well let's not spend a million and a half dollars on a dog park let's spend seven hundred fifty thousand dollars as an example is does anyone do that or is this just  sorry for the confusion can i add something to that point because there's another consideration not just how much money from the c p a funds is proposing for each project but also certain projects particularly ones that have to add to the facilities that the town has like the tennis court or like the playground also require considerable amount of staff time both to oversee the process of bidding and setting it up and also then maintaining it afterwards and in some cases i think even overseeing the construction and that is a significant opportunity cost at least for a staff that already has full time jobs and that's something that i i'm actually kind of disturbed by what you described i have always assumed having gone through the process that what the c b c is doing is deciding whether or not a project is worthy to recommend because what they're doing is i thought recommending that it be funded not just advancing it for a town meeting to make a decision now i understand the fact that town meeting is the decider so in that sense i can understand why they would do that is you know with the idea that the committee is not supposed to decide the town meeting is but i do think that means there's really no body varying whether or not it is a good appropriate project to do and i don't think that's really our responsibility we're not going to spend the time going in deep into these projects town meetings not going to go deep into the projects up until now they've all been i'm sorry up until now they've all been approved and i assumed it was happening in one place but it it's almost like it's not happening well i too principle maybe in reality it doesn't hasn't really happened so much bill maher all well and i have a different view i mean i mean we've we've been here and we've been watching people come with  don't i'm not saying that i mean i we got asked a lot of questions and we took our budget from you to see busy and so if i think if they felt like the project wasn't well baked or anything like that that they would reject us but in terms of looking at a project and saying you are applying you know joey's park you are applying for one hundred thousand dollars do we think that we should give you one hundred thousand dollars and it is you know give it i mean  it it is it is a zero sum game at the end of the day you've only got a certain amount to give shit and just because you have the money to give doesn't mean that you shouldn't hold it over till another year when you have something more worthy and i agree but this seems to be a situation projects i think what we'll get to tonight is an example of a project that was initially proposed for the middle skill and then it suddenly well and then it ended up proposed in a much larger scale because there was an act an expectation that money would not be exhausted and at that point i am concerned that the governance process so to speak is not all that strong and those at the project books doesn't raise any standards seems to be the project doesn't raise any obvious red flags that and it's so that's that's what caught my attention i mean the law says of the committee supposed to study the project to make recommendations to town meetings so you tell them how to do that any more than they tell us how to evaluate  meeting we're here to assist town meeting in my mind to like we do with everything else to look at these we ask a lot of questions of these committee preservation we have those charts and we ask a bunch of questions and we put them through the river of life and understood but i think our perspective you know i think i know that since the c p a has been on the books in belmont the war committee has had a pretty limited involvement figuring that this  undertaken but it does seem to me the issue that alan raises an important one which is even if you're not a good trade off among projects proposed today implicitly you're making a trade off cross projects that may be proposed in the future and in which case you'd be better off saving your money today for that for that leader time what one example of that is the underwood pool which was given a two million dollar grant from the c p a fund clearly that's more than was raised in one given year so they were able to do that because there was money that wasn't that wasn't spent in a prior year and i know that there are other projects that may come through that you know want more than a given year yes just want to point out those who have c p a funds projects that  for the town like tennis courts that would not otherwise be able to be funded because of the limitations on the capital budget and the town's finances so it does serve a purpose in th sense and i think the question is well you know who was the one making the decision that you know you know among projects at the c p a what's prioritized in terms of for the town of those not priority projects well it goes further than that though because the projects some of the projects proposed for the c p a are proposed by town departments but some of them are proposed by citizens and so it expands the reach of the imagination of what projects might be done in the town and that is that that's a significant factor for the staff well  but it seems to me based on what everyone is saying and and from my own very limited understanding of the c p a that you know it's entirely within our purview to look at the longer term spending a book ations of any project for the operating longer term implications for the operating bunch of i think is a very real one and and something that we should be paying attention to well i think that has been the the role of the warrant committee up to now i think we're all agreed on so if it might be worth running down the list of projects that has been proposed for this year just so we get a sense of what they are i had a couple of thoughts on a few of them and then  larger discussion with the end of march when the proponents of various projects actually come here the first one is grocery tennis courts for three hundred thirty six thousand dollars i didn't include in each one of these projects had quite a few pages of detail which are not included in this package but i had a couple of questions and replaced with grass or some some other use of that return medium rejected that a temporary repairs was made a couple of years ago  for actually quite a few thousand dollars with the understanding that it wouldn't last very long because the subsurface conditions of the port were so deteriorated that the repair could not be expected to last and sure enough the repairs now failed so the proposal here is for four new chords in the questions that are raised to span the kinds of issues that we've just been discussing because if you remember i think it was last year we were discussing with a representative from the recreation commission with him about the number of ports that belmont should have and  of course we're losing two courts generally because of the modulus but the proposal here is for four courts at seventy thousand dollars roughly seventy thousand dollars a court  and the question of whether it should be for courts or to courts is something that cannot be further discussed at this point because the project has been approved for four and now wen went broke with rebuilding from this court so i'm expecting the answer in march will be that the thirty seven thousand is up to amount but they don't expect to spend the to add you mentioned the two courts that we're losing the other thing with these courts is that it's anticipated we're going to lose the high school courts as we go into that project you know these courts become very important in in that timeframe and the reason for four is that they well one reason for four is that you need four in order to do the tournaments so if they're going to use the ones where there was because there was certainly discussion i think it was last year about putting four courts when broke for that reason so high school could use it for tournament so i don't there has there was no discussion at that time about grove street use the same way but maybe there is an expectation that would be necessary i don't know  i would add i made a little discovery and i'm sorry that i have to call it a discovery in the last few months that there are two virtually brand new tennis courts in park that go largely unused view that really is something that should be part of belmont's resource but they're fallow unfortunately but in case you ever want to if you're looking for a court appearance that is if you go to waverly oaks road you will see to find tennis courts with a lovely parking area just waiting for somebody to use the week will be beautiful ports the only thing i would add is that they are used a lot of the groves to go ok next project is assessment and project redevelopment of sherman sherman gardens for a hundred seventy three thousand dollars this is in the affordable housing category i don't i didn't really study the details of this because i believe this is an assessment or feasibility study it's not actually proposing work so but that's that's a lot of work for hundred seventy three thousand dollars  the next project is in the category of historical preservation belmont turns out to be the massachusetts headquarters of the sons of italy fratern organization in massachusetts and this project is to propose is to preserve records and artifacts that they own and that building this project raises a couple of interesting questions in some sense it's small it's only twenty four it's only i would say in quotes twenty four thousand dollars but it raises again some questions about  fiscal policy in a town where we're facing constraints everywhere and in this case what's not clear to me is the if if there is a belief that these materials are important how much is the belmont chapter of the sons of italy contributing but moreover because it's a statewide organization how much are the statewide members of the sons of italy contributing to this or or other c p a organizations state wide why is it that the amount is carrying the full cost and maybe that seems academic when it's twenty four thousand dollars but i think it's an indication of the way the c p a is playing out that because the fund is generating this cash which is not being claimed otherwise that the there's an ever greater likelihood that the twenty four thousand dollars gets funded without being questioned whereas twenty four thousand dollars and many other areas of town be scrutinized very closely yes and i think the military totally understands why but they just briefly looked at it but i think it is being done for private organizations right around whether they will use funds or private organizations because you wouldn't typically use taxpayer funds to fund writing projects i think this came up when the c p a was first proposed and it was made very clear at the time that they had under the statute very broad discretion to spend the money on public projects or entirely private properties as was the commission it i guess i just raise again that if again this would be another way of looking at what you're saying is that typically if we're using taxpayer money we're looking at projects and trying to determine  i share that feeling and i'm in particular you know it's very hard to get a sense of a true evaluation so to speak of projects if somebody doesn't have to put at least some of the bill because in other contexts i say talk is cheap and in a case like this i would have contribution project happening at the moment i don't know whether they're contributing something to find out by the end of march when the boys are contributing  that's a key point is that it is a state way organization whereas you know if you look at the belmont women's club that is a bellwether going to zation it is belmont history and i know this conversation came up in town meeting who had to make reasonable question for the way the c p a operates you know in my day job when you write academic articles the first you're told by the editor to revise and resubmit but in the context of a a application i think there's a certain deterrent to town meeting if revising resubmit means waiting at least a year which may seem like a long time i don't know what the alternative is to make it easier to modify a project in ways that seem reasonable but also not terribly complicated in a way that's more that's quicker grove street park which is an intergenerational walking path site plan for thirty five thousand dollars so that's planning it's not act excuse me not actual construction  experience is any guide i assume this will be followed next year the year after with a very sizeable request for constructing the walking path and  will spend well over a million dollars in walking paths between clay pit p q and grow street and that is a an impressive amount of money to me given the other discussions we've had recently about all the other issues in town and i know the answer is well the c p a funds things that somehow don't get attention elsewhere but i have to say playground so i mean i wouldn't look at p q as you know whatever the amount is for a walking path well and i i hesitate to speak because i haven't studied the one application in detail but i believe the original i believe subject to correction the i q playground proposal started out as approximately three hundred thousand dollars  became six hundred thousand dollars would be addition of a walking path not mistaken about one thing i believe that the most of the edition has to do with the drainage project ok so the walking intergenerational because it was just a little kid's playground is kind of beaten on right now and it floods all the time because there's an underground river that goes under which you can see on the plant so the idea was to to fix up the playground make it intergenerational and fix the fl the neighbors there were very happy to fix the flooding as you can imagine and also there are picnic tables and people sitting right under their back windows and back porches and this kind of moves that away from their houses so they were all happy about that and people came in there's a lot of  people wanted who were concerned about him to have access ability and while the kids were playing what are they do you want a place for like you know a grandma brings the kids in the grandma can walk around while the kids are playing that sort of thing there is a small path there now that that goes in from the street and goes around that little hill where the kids like to play the preserve in the hill that was a big big thing to preserve but do young so they're basically they're keeping that and then they're expanding it over around the existing project it's really a town infrastructure project which requires now considerable oversight and engineering and so on from the ten departments which was not originally contemplated which is going to take quite a lot of staff time to do  or any allowance in the in the budget in the budget for the commitment by the town that i know or i don't know what the exact i don't think so i think they're just expecting that the town the overseer will some historical perspective on some of this drainage work when they did the butler playground first of all this was right before the c p a so nearly all of it was funded through private donations and they g i know they had to do that because there were issues i think they did it town field as well all of those with private money but it's it is something that you do need to take care of when you do these projects well hopefully these remediation affix efforts were successful and i know that can be a child might not i wouldn't denigrate any of the projects personally but what i do wonder whether we shouldn't be thinking about husbanding some of the strike me that you know it as as we're we're planning for someone not not we the warrant committee but we the town are planning for some of these larger investments that we perhaps ought to be thinking about reserving some of these kinds of funds to help contribute to know i just got i just came from the from the they're doing the central part of the path meeting tonight unfortunately keep having the meetings the same time as our meetings were so i don't get display they're very short period time but they started out tonight's meeting i was telling roy that they were saying that the they felt that these this federal highway money that this is that these community paths get almost one hundred percent paid for we pay for the feasibility study in we paid for their w one other thing which c p a money could go towards but as far as the construction was goes people were saying oh this is looking really expensive and it was looking really expensive the feeling was that as a matter of fact it was going to be almost entirely covered seriously expensive as well i'm not sure if they're going to be coming for construction money for that or not well chevron gardens though raises this  issue with c p a is that the there is an obligation to spend money on affordable housing so that these other projects which c p a requires you to fund projects in ways that could be at odds with what you may think as the most urgent priorities out wide because that's where the statue framed right is only ten percent  not so i didn't mean to in any way be passing judgment on the merits of p q because i haven't even read the proposal so case there was any misunderstanding about that but  i i guess my major feeling is that it is a a large amount of money which by belmont standards is all in all likelihood going to be approved with remarkably little discussion compared to the intense scrutiny that we devote to many other topics and i think combined with our other observations  about priorities over time and i guess from the very beginning of c p a been concerned about what i would call these governance issues i think there's also i guess a governance or oversight issue and i know the c b c has discussed it in trying to figure out what to do about it when a project is proposed say by the d p w it is managed by the town and when it's proposed by private citizens you know a lot of them will be implemented by the town but it's like all of the vetting so far i'm sure the town has been somewhat involved but it's you know decisions about what features should go into it in such are decided by a private organization or private committee or it just it does require time from from the town but it's not on the priority list of the town well and i'm not sure that the town even has say so in some of these design questions because i heard and i guess it's at the level of a rumor ricos i don't know a whole lot but after the recognition of the water issue at the peak you playground one suggestion was to simply move the playground to a different portion of the park which did not have similar water issue and that was vetoed  by the proponents of the project and the immediate of others which is a pretty narrow perspective of that as it was so while it is true that if the playground stated its current location it would probably be better too do something about the water infiltration the alternative of moving the playground a short distance away was vetoed in a kind of this discussion raises for me again the whole notion i mean funded a few years ago with the capital budget money the evaluation of the grove street park which now a plan but it seems to me that the town needs some look general universally at all the parks to say what facilities do we need it each one of them how many tennis courts and how many soccer fields and how many of those that are the other thing and we haven't ever done that  of hard to continue to yes all these things without a plan i'm going to not aware of any kind of effort like that right into that the plan would need the cooperation of the schools schools as well too i guess because because many of the many of the fields or on school department forward and again and the recommendation and there are some you know are directed towards trying to build a recreation department into something that can have more  control or over say over the fields and to change the way that it's been working so that it becomes fair for everybody and that the town can fund some of that with money from the other groups a strategic plan was for a someone to come in for a short period of time almost on a consult basis to help work out the school town horsley so just to kind of pull everything together and and try to figure out something that makes sense because that's a complicated thing that takes a lot of time and effort to because there are funds flowing in lots of different directions or the town pays for certain things that the record parties and sometimes or or maybe maybe hopes that we get into a multi year planning planning process and i'm not sure exactly where i stand on it but i just want to advise us all that if we're really serious about that we should be raising that this spring and raising it with  c because you know there clock for next year starts during during the summer and i think that they're all they'll be even if nothing if if if it keeps on going on as it has in the past they'll be soliciting  proposals by you know by by the start of the fall roberts and so in so if if we want to engage them in town meeting on on the notion of a moratorium or something like that to to sort of let these these funds build up for a couple years i think it would be much better to at least start to have those conversations that this spring them than waiting until they've they've actually you know set everyone up with the expectation that next year is going to i'm thinking about that and you know we're not we're not the body to decide some of that the c d c is taking the approach that they should forward things along  and so really it's town meeting that is ultimately going to decide whether we not only whether we fund things but whether we sort of hold on to fans and to some degree that could be a conversation that is had this meeting way in about whether they endorse or don't or not would make everything much more would would take the uncertainty out of next year's process yes and i think even if the remember not so much as a task for the work committee but just to understand how things are teed up i mean catalyzed as i listen here and see what the feasibility study is what that means is as town meeting tries to decide whether or not to save some of the money going forward in the absence of a master plan perhaps at least we will know i mean i have to say honestly i forget here to hear what some of the things that have been approved in prior years and that's really a very simple exercise here's what may be you know on the we can fund up until this point the c p c has been hoping that more people would apply for projects and they do tend to recommend and then we do tend to fund most of the projects that come through so it's hard to have a long term look at this stage when there aren't or there is not a long term set of projects however there are we could identify at least some things that we know are going to need to be done in the future that might be the design the twenty five percent design for the community power which is a piece that we will have to pay for for other things but i think it would be very difficult now sort of a portion but i'm not sure what the answer is or what will change or whether anything will change but i think it's important for us to broach the subject  the whether the c p u or the c p c committee or town meeting or whatever the organization time may react i think we should at least bring the subject up and try to get such a discussion going in might be interesting to  approach i don't know which of the departments would be appropriate for this but right now we're sort of taking a reactive approach right somebody decides they want to propose a project whether it's safety w or is friends of  either but i do think that we should think about this more in more detail than we have up to now we tended to view the c p a as something that's not really that much within the domain or maybe every department in town takes a view like that that suddenly this activity which is quite a bit of money becomes manage right thank you the next item on the agenda is the team budget and the agenda says updates but then we had a lengthy meeting just monday night and we only received our budget books about on a sunday and the the other thing on this is is is is that we should we should make sure to request a spread sheet for a good version of this book absolutely ok so now i might have said th some last week but i but i guess i'll repeat i mean sort of going back to last year that the current fiscal seventeen budget sort of an easy budget to process in the sense that the for the the funds from the stabilization fund would be needed to balance this this and this budget and we also got word at some point that we were that we were in the queue for the high schools walked in so we could sort of talk about how december twenty first and that was when we first saw the budget chairs for school year in the the teen and two things in that meeting i was surprised that the initial draw from the stabilization fund was two point of years i was surprised that the initial share of this was fifty three point three million when i figured that based on the financial task force model you know the goes on through it and i don't know i didn't bring extra copies of it but i can walk to the first thing which i think is good news to understand is that the issue really is not a question about spending on school budgets in terms of the school year either team but but it really is just a question about how how it will be funded so everything that that i would  that whereas on the council i think you know the town managers need to follow their budget lines very very close to them that it's much tougher to shift funds on them counsel them on a school site and so the big issue is how to pay for the out of the district which is for our students that need special education services that cannot be sort of within or within our budget numbers from seven point five five you know those can be paid out of basically three main there is money i mean there is a there isn't a line within the school budget that's funded from the general so somehow you know that that when it comes time to actually pay the bills and one of these twitches little comes comes in that the school finance chief has to figure out your charge roughly comes in at about three percent of the cost you know there's a formula to it it's at risk if if the legislature doesn't funded but they've been pretty good about funding funding it since you know since i'm two thousand and nine and so this is thirty percent thirty percent of reimbursement in number has been in you know been pretty pretty pretty in concept but it comes in the following year or so and so so this year in fiscal year seventeen in in the fall the the final i mean the first grant approval came in based on last year so the question is really how much do we want to ask the school committee to use the grant that they get in current year to pay for that use that  additional share number for the school budget the david presented to us at the end of last year and and what what i would say is is the  be you know that the that the answer to the puzzle is that that is right now being projected as a cushion that is not going to be spent carried forward to future future years and so that a positive question because i mean there is a practice to be somewhat can someone conservative because we don't know exactly where the reimbursement rate is and it's also i mean that's that that that we can sort of have a predictable pattern where we where we under budget that somewhere between seventy five thousand and two hundred thousand dollars along with over the years and that's and that's i think you know i think that's a good right years those those numbers are pretty much on right on top because because because there was there was a real you know there was a real there was a real budget crunch and that the school needed to spend every every since of the since the since over right there was more money within the whole within the whole system and so there was no three hundred twenty five thousand dollars more for him twenty five thousand dollars more that came in and then then had to be spent last last year now you know by assigning the twin is to the state red line rather than to the general fund line you know the ad they charged they think chose to have the three hundred twenty five thousand dollars savings carried forward through the through the circuit breaker line and then and then as i said last fall i thought that was a reasonable number because because it's  sped stabilization fund you know which was at two hundred fifty thousand dollars to having three hundred twenty five thousand dollars that was an available for sped to which and you know i thought i thought it was a reasonable thing is that that that that that circuit breaker state grant cushion cushion balance is going to stay at you know at that same at that same level between you know one hundred fifty thousand dollars and a million dollars  and so the issue for us for next year is that every dollar that is kept there every dollar that we that we don't spend out of that  available pool of state grant funds that are from the reimbursements that were paid for by the general fund dollars to begin with is a dollar we have to take out of either the general stabilization fund were the free cash fund and so when i take a look at you know what would have seen if we went to town meeting and the voters you know drawing down very little from the general general stabilization fund i think that's a that's a you know that is a much more  powerful message so i'm so i've just been you know talking with school and committee members and i'm sweating and saying you know why don't we why don't we ask the school to do have a significantly smaller general phone general fund draw that will not change their spending plans but it will change what they do you know what the produce what the projected end of year surplus will be in the state gran the keep that money in in the general general keep that money in in the general stabilization fund and i think that that's a good idea because i think that's actually close as to the recommendations task force report about what the projected school budget would be for fiscal year either team i think it's good good practice to have some separation between the reserve fund that we want to use spending can be can be moved from one when we move from one to the other and then thirdly we heard from the chairman of the board of slipping on monday that we're likely to have a special town meeting this next year should be out by that time so we'll have a much better sort of it said set of information so i'm putting out there and that that we should go into some direction of  six hundred thousand dollars more of the state grant funds that will be carried over to two and two next year paid pay don't pay don't get intuitions based on the projections that will still leave about a you know a three hundred thousand dollar gap and once we know what the with the with the with the m state branches and i'm bringing this to you because you know it's time for our our social committee to move on and  and we should be taking a look at the spending side of the budget in sort of doing our our work and i think this is you know this is something that comes out of the school but it really is sort of a town wide town meeting question about about what is the use of the use of the in general general stabilization fund what's the value of you know of them keeping that draw as small as possible without putting any of the spending programs at their risk so  this and you know we could draw more from free cash and we could in and we haven't even taken into consideration consideration consideration on the new growth from the in property you know not touching the general stabilisation but it's actually a possible goal for this year and i think i think and i think there is a there's a bigger message about that that's you know that's worth that's worth i'm thinking about are on the order of you know fifty to two hundred thousand dollars is sort of a very high tuition but also so a three hundred twenty five thousand i mean a target of say three twenty five three hundred making sure we pay our respects to asian bills and all of our other goals here i just think that we can do that we can make that commitment to know but at the same time go to town meeting and said that we don't question yeah that sort of related to that the you said that the sped to a show that's for out of district placements went from six point five this current fiscal year to seven twenty five for next year so i'm sitting here thinking about how much does that number go up within a given year i know that people come in at any time during the year so you can be surprised with a two hundred thousand dollars so i'm wondering what our history has been and i'm wondering if it went up a million because over the course of this last year we had that many more kids come in they needed that kind of tuition and so how much you want to have in some sort of fun you know when when cases come in we have you know we have the means to respond just wonder if you have a short story why they're expecting the cr alert i think this is great to be talking about this now and i would suggest that we talk to the school committee in the school department whether that be the subcommittee or the forewarning committee and they can decide who they want to come on that side on because i think your question is exactly right what is the correct balance i think they really know beforehand i mean i would just say that having been on the school committee before the override there were times when this graph might look as though they're tracking well but that's all we had to coming at make a request before the reserve for the reserve fund we had to deplete that special ed civilization fine and sometimes the timing is difficult because you either have to collar special town meeting to get permission or i remember very well with tom kingston waiting you know for the work committee vote in may and we're going to have to go to a town meeting and it sort of the deadlines can be very difficult and i think sometimes as we all know that this can be very unpredictable i mean i remember going through i think was my first year on the school send someone i think of the work committee said you know can you tell us superintendent what is the cause of this is it you know new kids coming into the district as a new mix of services is it prices going up and the answer was all of the above which was very unsatisfactory to people like us sitting around the table but it's really true and so if you have someone and as jim said if the circuit breaker is based on the prior year so if you do have worst case some very expensive or several combinations i think you do need some type of reserve and i think the question is very valid where you put it whether it be the circuit breaker line in the school department or one of these reserve funds as i think is a conversation worth pursuing but i don't think we should try to decide what that number should be we should talk to the school department and you know they can pull their special ed people because they have a much better sense of what's coming and what they might expect to come complicated but it sounds like or correct me if i'm wrong but suppose the budget remained as most recently proposed and the the balances in the circuit breaker fund remain higher say than what you're proposing so that would be the budget and let's assume that budget is approved in the springs town meeting then come the fall  we're now into the new school year we have a better sense of what free cash flow but well that would free cash certified as of july one and suppose there's a changed assessment where the question is could the school committee or quit the school the parliament then release more money from the circuit breaker fund which would then free up money to be returned to free cash at the end of the year but that could be done in the fall or as a result of a special town meeting me i mean that that could be done from a technical point of view i would not expect that it would be done i mean i mean they the schools could have president so so i think the mechanism really is by lowering the special the private tuition line that's paid for with your own fun in and then showing within the budget that  draw down the circuit breaker fund more and the general stabilization fund less make that the budget and then in the course of the next fiscal year if it turns out that there's an unfavorable shock from the spread so then you're back to drawing down free cash reserves or general stabilization money anyway well first you go through whatever you preserve created which is i think a good thing because there will be our special ed expenses go up at least a million dollars every year but that to the extent it's foreseeable that's built into the budget  o the biggest concern i guess is a shock but it would make sense to me to use cash in the general stabilization fund the last tranche is to draw upon but use the circuit could have a more stable path going forward i do think i have to respectfully disagree jim i feel like you've been at the all the finance subcommittee meetings and had lots of conversations with them and some of the etc committee i haven't had that yet so i would like to hear from the i think i think i think those things are my i am trying to say you know this is less of a school question because i mean the school is going to spend spend the would it mean to go into the next round of the you know film on building projects and everything else we'll say you know we took you know we still have the three million dollars in the general civilization but you know that we made the sense i think the framing of the question is becoming clear that if i don't know that the war committee needs to make a recommendation so much as maybe now that with the benefit of all this  administrator and just seeing what the answers alone what i take away from this is that it's really a question of where do we park money right and what are the constraints on spending it so if we park it in the general stabilization  vote meeting we park it in the circuit breaker fund and it's schools deciding how to spend it and i think some combination of those two makes sense i agree with you being able to keep as much as possible in the general stabilisation that was carefully composed and rather brief just with focus to the scutching because i think frequently and in the meeting that threat can get lost but in a written form i think might be more effective ask just a quick question jim is there any risk that any of those circuit breaker farms expire if they're not yours yeah i mean they're there they will be they have to be used within