joined by others later but i've got some stuff in there for th thing we i made a list of all the minutes that i've circulated that are awaiting approval i hope we have a chance to review them if not just we're going to vote tonight upset may sixteenth i was a saying no that was a separate email to acknowledge the service contributions and departure of my cleavage has been on the war committee longer than anybody except me and i think it's tied with adam but nine years eight years ten years that is a fabulous record so thank you very much think the letters of nomination have appointment upon out this week those are lynn read paul richter and dan hall's them i know them all by reputation they're all very good i'm looking forward to meeting them and i'm hoping will deepen our bench on the legal side of things but we will meet them all earlier than i thought because we were having a special meeting on july thirtieth just a monday night  town officials including adam me and remain on me and i'm sure also has been working on building a new and improved budget forecasting model which has certain similarities to the five year forecasting model the financial taskforce worked on but this one has a greater degree of detail to models certain what if situations and expect it will be quite financial best practices you can ask questions directly of them and since all these are the committees involved for the most part whether people are on vacation or not rather than just have the chairs and all the engine and that we will have everything in place in the summer so that we get into the budgeting for next year in the fall we'll have this all ready to go are you going to post a meeting for us yes yes so i we all have high hopes for the value and utility of this model and recognize that in a perfect world you would all be there but maybe you have something else to do in the july and if you can't attend we'll you know we might even have a makeup session later on but that's on the immediate horizon  let me just say a word about officer nominations which i have brought up a couple of times so far my preferred scenario has materialized in that we have at least one person who has indicated interest in being chair one person being vice chair and one person being secretary so with that i am comfortable  convening in september and then having an open nomination process and discussion and as i said earlier this is an experiment if it doesn't work we're free to change our procedures next year but this is what i'd like to try because the open meeting law which was presenting complications before has only presented further complications in the last week or two i circulated a memo i fairly complex memo from town council discussing certain recent cases where open media law procedures were tested unfortunately one of those members of the war committee are concerned that the open meeting is being applied in situations that are we say further and further afield from what maybe was originally anticipated to the point where i'm concerned it's having a chilling effect on our ability to function and i'm not sure what the answer is at the moment other than at this point  i think we need to avoid any discussions amongst ourselves unless it's in a post a meeting with minutes and the whole apparatus of open meeting law hopefully will for example it seems technically impermissible now for two people even to attend warren collins center meetings because two members of the war committee who were there in a purely observer that if we if we send off a group of our members to do a task forget forget that for the collison of the moment but if we send a group of people officially to go do something regardless of how many even if we don't make them a subcommittee they become a body and the body is subject to a big media law i don't think it's a problem if you create a  collins task force or whatever and there's a couple members of the work with the on it i don't think that's a problem because that's an official group that's going to have i mean it would have to have minutes or whatever i'm not sure that we've even i'm not sure that those columns such a reading is have been treated as a public meeting so far but i'm not sure if it raises a host of issues which may not have a lot of  practical importance short run for the work committee but i would like to get clarification and ultimately you know there may be an effort to see some kind of relief from those but it's a complicated situation yourself so i would like to ask that somebody work with george to put together various scenarios like i was i was listening to a committee meeting the other day and they were trying to figure out you know how to how can you collaborate on creating a document together and i know that one of the things that we got that the planning board was cited for was sending a documents to the members so they could read it before the meeting i mean if if if you have to spend thirty minutes in a meeting with everybody reading the document before you can talk about it you pretty much kills the meeting and i think there's a lot of us you know it impacts what we do it impacts what all of these other committees do but i think we all do things in slightly different ways and so instead of just asking him to tell us what's ok i think we need to actually identify you know the ways that we want to be able to interact and have him give us advice on all those different things because this sort of theoretical had with a client is very hard yes and i'm not sure that we could even  know well we have subcommittees and we do minutes for and everything there are times when drafts circulate or there are comments that are mean that they're also we're invited to the flecktones meeting it's not we don't post the meeting when it's like when have their division department had meetings but people  memo that i thought there was a belief in the past that if members of a committee communicated to the chair only thing that did not trigger open meeting issues but potentially now it might so because the the attorney general i guess is taking an extremely there's the seeking maximum applicability of open meetings law in situations that i don't think we believe it ever where it was not applicable before and now exactly how far the range of our ability extends it's just not clear you know and for routine matters you know maybe it's moot but when a controversial issue comes up and you know we need to know where we  stand so that i have to deal with that something will have to talk about more in the fall libration with patrice and george hall and then the but we're not the only body affected  and you can't share your opinion with us until we're back into it and i'm not hearing that it was very interesting though because in the decision about our planning for it you know they they looked at all of the complaints and the the complaints about you know the working groups they actually said weren't an issue because it was not in a fishbowl it wasn't a body that was a that was set off by the plant sent off by the planning board it was barbara doing her thing and then every now and again she would pull somebody in to help based on their expertise depending on the topic and they didn't have a problem with that they did have a problem but i think if they had been official they probably would have but in that instance they did so it's like two of us just showed up it varied list of topics that occurred to me and then to be curious to know course when my first goal for next year is to resolve the issue of taking minutes of our meeting  we need to find somebody and a system that works but we tried earlier this spring it was not successful but it is it is pretty burdensome to generate minutes  these topics are in no particular order by the way we need to figure out how we will prepare for the high school that exclusion both we certainly have to  vote because that's coming to town meeting but for us to get informed and exactly what is appropriate and effective for the war committee to do is something that we need to take up immediately in september i would say if not sooner but in light of the memo from george howell i'm not sure how to implement something before september  well just generally may i have to say i have not thought what actions we should take but given the sheer scale of this project seems appropriate for the war committee to say something that's right so i think that  it's hard for me to imagine that if the town votes for the new building that the timing is not going to go for the tarp imagine that this committee will not be unanimous or at least are certainly close to it in supporting the new building i think the real question is does this committee want to play any role in helping to inform the town at how big of a deal is as i think you said bob this is essentially the largest most important issue financially that has come for the town in your lifetime and probably in a hundred years and so it's it's i think it's really that question you know does this body want to put it all role in helping with the broader population understand before the how big of a deal it is right i think for me  group in the town it's a it's a role the bit between you could choose to volunteer to do i don't think there's something in our charter that says that we can't or or even necessarily should i think it's really a matter of what this group of citizens would like to do is i guess what there was some piano that happens like maybe a month or so before the vote before the town and he was here and it was somebody came from the state what's her name no longer there katherine say something that is useful without whether or not really taking an advocacy position i think it's appropriate for the work committee well i mean there's a tension there because we i suspect we all believe that the new high school is a good idea but in terms of the role of the good work for many years i have to see advocacy group is not clear to me it's just i was just curious and looking a way for us to not necessarily with a plan b would be how we might use you need for what would be the financial impact from the reading side of things as well which point of view if this doesn't go through i think that would be an appropriate area to explore and i also suspect that once you do that kind of work the the rational course of action will be will become obvious but actually do that work  how to do it in time to be available by the time of the vote is a challenge restore under the state law you cannot use federal or state funds or resources  of the financial circumstances of the town and we could develop some kind of a white paper of just facts yellen said you can do that kind of and do that yeah well that's what she said and i guess what i said you can't do that that's new that was news to me but yeah answer to this stuff he can't put it out there if somebody comes to the window and says do you have this information they can take it from behind the window and give it to them but he can i leave them out as if exclusion includes some of that information like the average tax bill that kind of thing that they are advocating so we're together for wellington was the group for wellington and they have the data and they put it in there on their you know that the amount of going to cost and back and wh to you know just have some thoughts around that answer sounds like we need to give a little guidance from ellen what would be tolerated and also george how we can  have any kind of collective activity but maybe one format that would work would be of the school committee appeared to document and then we could discuss that document in an open meeting and then raise whatever issues we wanted to raise in that meeting i mean i think there was one presented already at a meeting i think at our next joint meeting that might be something else that's more updated that might be presented related to the cause i guess that we can document presented now is not to be a comparison but i think before we did have only voted before what led up to our photo if something through twelve or we had something that had the other options there in heavily on the other options this and the costs he's associated for building in windows eight i mean there's additional you know some of the stuff that you guys were talking about that wasn't considered at that point because it wasn't part of that decision but i think i do any of these documents contain the fact that if we don't proceed down the path we probably contemplate we lose the state money that seems very salient and it seems factual to build those bills presentation makes that clear y well come up with a strategy that you know for example if it's the work of media responding to a school committee document for example we could do that and just start earlier analyzing the merits of this proposal in the furtherance of a report to the town meeting which we have every right to submit the form of the before and that somebody challenge and if the if the advocacy group the political group wants to pick up then circulate that report of own sake that report they're free to do so let me think about this more we have certainly done we did a detailed report of the pensions for example we did a lot of analysis of management so there's certainly a history of the warrant committee doing a detailed analysis of a big important issue i think in the past it was generally in anticipation of town meeting but even minuteman the issue the immediate issue was a town vote that's a temper before the town meeting so it would seem to everything that's one of the town meeting and vote and we get a right to to advise a town meeting that has the same facts and they happen to get picked up by you or someone else and used let me commit to coming up with a proposal that we can hopefully work with and act on it  report as another experiment which i think being significant revision because it has become a very large extremely labor intensive project and i'm not sure that it's getting new ideas to make it worthwhile and what what the word committee report product should look like something  we've certainly solicited feedback i don't know that we've ever gotten feedback it was it was a little painful to realize that people were asking questions that were the information was in the works in the report and they clearly had not read it and were have not provided with i'm not sure where we are so we need one thousand about that situation well but i think the we should i don't want to i don't want to have us all spend so much time again next year for so little results so i would like to present to you a radically different proposal in the fall but i'm not sure what larger thing at some level than the report what this body does it provides oversight over the various committees and making sure the money the town of bent wisely and to the extent that you know something we're trying to do something that stands in addition to what the consumers want or not well you know the report because it's such a big document it has there are different pieces of it for example the the budget detail tables in the chat in the individual chapters i think can be automated and because i have a spreadsheet that has all those line items and i think if it's feasible to automate the whole thing it just eliminate all of the manual labor to prepare those tables but another another issue that has concerned me for example are like recommendations because the one thing i've learned in the last couple of years  is that there's a huge gulf between making a recommendation and actually have having something implemented it's a stupendous amount of work to actually get to make any change  existing procedure or a policy or whatever and it's it's simply not it's almost not meaningful to simply make a recommendation unless there's some level of  a follow through to actually make that recommendation a reality if you if you really take it that seriously so if it we you know i own new sure the selectmen whatever's appropriate and here's a compilation of our recommendations what do you think of that you know because you guys don't really react to our recommendations in the context of town meeting you know and so i mean it seems like having a follow up dialogue on them would be i mean i have all like i went back through and read all the work you know leading up to this and i did look and look and there are some recommendations that are made like every year nothing happens appropriate and there are things that we've done over the years that actually have yielded policy for instance you guys recommended that we have the housing c p a project contract done prior to town meeting so we ra because we weren't going to do that until you brought it up and i took it back to the slack but we decided to do it because you brought it up so i think there's a valuable i mean one of the reasons i'm here is to not just give you information but to take it in and take it back you know i mean i think the than we were keeping track of them and you know not everything is going to get done and honestly not all the recommendations are necessarily good ideas but you know i think that the that's important i think the process is important as mike was saying of going to the departure subcommittee level really that you know the department heads and pushing them hard on some questions and there are times when i've run no i've talked to the department heads and then what they had in the actual budget book was wrong like oh well that's not right and like well you know i'm glad i'm not stupid that i read it and it didn't make any sense to me so i mean there's the oversight function keeps people honest if they know you're coming they're going to be more closely watching what's going on whether they want to reach the work committee report is a crime beside the point because the yeah i think it's worth worth it for us to to think about what is the best way to communicate what and what is the best forum for certain things so you know if we have recommendations i'm not sure that talking to the departments creating recommendations and putting them in the board committee report is the best way to issue some recommendations i think it makes more sense to bring it in here and talk about it and maybe talk with the time that a straight or or the selectmen or department head to whatever it is but just you know writing it and putting in a report to town meeting to me i don't know if it makes us a little silo as opposed to working with everyone else  breathe the oversight is hugely important the work committee report is a whole lot of it that is identical every single year and it just you know some of it doesn't feel to me like we're doing very much and i think it's worthwhile thinking about what this town meeting really want from us but particularly the recommendations i've always had a really hard time with it because you know we write it down and then we don't do it and then i'd have department heads actually tell me that doesn't matter what you're recommending and i couldn't do it unless you know it had a ministry in her that i can tell you to do it but the what i was this is i don't disagree with that at all i do feel like there's some value in the war in many work in terms of helping town meeting members understand how the town operates or what the departments for certain departments maybe not and i mean just i think the ed one is very good at in terms of drilling into things that you might not get by looking at their budget book for example yes we're seeing that you know some of the presentations i think that  some of the challenges that they face and some of the opportunities going over and i think for some of the other departments also whether whether we feature a different department every years and i think there is something to saying this is how this operates kind of this is what  what they do and how they do it and and and this is how financially impacts the town i think has some value i didn't i would have like that you know higher being were made to be able to read recommendations and even have a committee a subcommittee of the war committee charged with following up on recommendations to to really vet which ones are worth pursuing it and  then doing something with them ok let me just move quickly to a few other things we've talked a little bit about the some success or organization to the major capital projects working group that would take a broad view of managing large capital projects in the future and i don't have any specific suggestions at this point other than to say the work committee should certainly have representation on such a committee and i i think it would be valuable for the for the board of selectmen actually to take this up and figure out what would be a good structure because i think the major capital projects working group i think was extremely successful in solving some problems that were extremely difficult in a very long standing then there are still a couple of the remaining there i think we could we could be we could address successfully but i'm not sure right now that there's a committee in place to actually take responsibility for i think one of the things if i think th internet is also including the c p a sort of looking at all how we how we fund all our capital projects whether or not we should be looking at is that was that well i would like to be a target but from my point of view i tonight but i haven't forgotten about goals and i i just i just recall it seemed really important that we have more information earlier in the process than we did on several issues yes and i want to take that up first thing  ok let me i have two and a half more topics one is most of you probably do not know that there was a significant project undertaken by the term staffing and services and priorities in public safety and ultimately i decided not to include that because it was i thought it was a very thoughtful and provocative document it generated a tremendous i should say tremendously detailed response by both police and fire and the upshot to me was  that it raised some very important questions and it was they were not going to be answered satisfactorily certainly for this year's budget for this is just one committee report nonetheless the questions remain important and i should say and helping took the lead and interacting that i don't know of and still has the appetite to continue with this but i think something a document of this nature is  worth ongoing study and development because of course to to work that's to save it if it's really raising questions that would change the way public safety does things it's going to have to be done with very detailed consultation with public safety and and that that simply wasn't possible and in the couple of weeks we have to took looked at comparable towns to understand so it wasn't look it was looking at from a different perspective and then the public safety departments look at their business which may be based on national standards as looking at other things that they some and not others it's very hard to suss it out but more looking at just data on the level of also some level of crime level of you know calls that kind of thing and how we compare to other towns and how our staffing and then how the distribution of her staff think that kind of thing just to kind of get it better and also our historical data looking at how has it changed in the last ten years and even more fires less fires with more calls less calls ambulance that kind of thing so and then so we had different sections for and it was a little bit different for the police and it was for the fire department but that was kind of what we're looking at and i had to have the h work we should absolutely work with you know higher but there's also a lot out there around benchmarking public safety on both police and fire i mean it's a it's an extraordinarily common problem that there are we too many fires we don't have this problem but you know we for example we to make fire stations and many you know so there's all sorts of data on this and so it's not that it can't be done or that it is a project but if there is a lot of resources  i mean to say said it's a it's a very large project you know it wasn't really possible to bring it to a suitable level of completion by april but i would like to see if we could return to that next year it might even end up being a multi year project because it's something that the consultant i'm sure to stay with a part of while but see so the let me just say very quickly that i don't want to lose sight of the discussion we had before about trying to do something with the towns i teach that against race me is an extremely complicated question so we made be able to initiate a discussion but well we can bring it forward in september if not seems that and then finally just a small issue is something that arose actually out of this town meeting  whose compensation is really in the form of an honorarium whether they should be eligible for or whether they should receive health insurance benefits now i gather that there's nothing in the town bylaws that address es this question this is a creature of state law but i have i don't know whether we have any discretion in this and if we can have a home rule kind of exception or whether we have any discretion but i think we should examine at least examine the question of whether people who receive honorariums should also get health care and that i think the relevant people are the  selectmen and the board of assessors and i'm not sure there's anybody right on the moderator yeah but the you know these are positions where the compensation ranges from four hundred fifty dollars for the business after hours and it's going to be closing early and noon on fridays to make up the difference that's under way now it's going to go through november and then we'll see how it goes permanently and light is done sort of the opposite where they're going to open early or they're going to open from seven till four monday through thursday and seven to one on fridays the people can put permits and such the contracts can get in there early before they start work all with the idea of making this more user friendly and you really taking ideas for post closure use on the incinerator site we're going to be writing them down we like to get a closed universe of options and start knocking through them and figuring out which i'm going to do because we have to figure this out so we can  when we board meeting go june one thousand next week at the beach to senator discuss regulating the recreational marijuana for the zoning to start coming up with the zoning which will be hopefully coming through the town meeting in that november thirteenth meeting along with whatever into the twenty third so going down they're going to be all getting a new trash cans the end of the month and they're going to be left where they're supposed to be picked up so pay attention to where they're left because that's true supposed to put in for pickup repurpose ing them but i find i mean i have quite a few it would be helpful if the d p w would have a afternoon or day or week couple weekends that people could take them to be recycled there will be because they're being there you know whenever there and exclusion operating over and whatever else may be coming one of the things we can do is increase the amount of money by which they can work off their tax bill by doing volunteer work for the town which actually frees us up from having to hire other people to do some of this work that they would be doing it's mostly been lately you know mostly or entirely of the beach street center but it doesn't have to be of seniors have particular skill sets there are other things that we could utilize them for so we're going to be talking july sixteenth of june the conversation plus the tax deferral program for seniors where they can put off their taxes eligible seniors can put up their taxes until they either sell the house or pass away and then their due at that point has the extremely high interest rate which i've talked to people and it really puts them and one of the assessors was there but due to scheduling we were davil to get everybody there and then as you heard our june eighteenth meeting is pretty packed so we're going to take it up july sixteenth we're also going to be taking up in july june eighteenth as far as i don't think is can up right where the ninety subcommittee is because i visor committee rather is going to bring this device called in at all which allows people to remotely participate in the meeting and we're going to experiment and try and see whether we're going to allow people to remotely participate in meetings we were told by counsel if we have one committee do it all committees in town have the ability to do it so we want to make sure we get it right there and this would be that if you're not present it can't make a meeting you could participate remotely through a device like this you still would have to have a quorum president you can't have everybody some different ways of the place but the person would be able to participate in the meeting where is currently the case so that's going to be taken up also a person who i guess is responsible owns the company i guess lives and don't want something they're going to be he's got them to bring the device to our meeting on the eighteenth so we can see how it goes because we want to see it first no it's gone now i don't know why and i don't know what it is but we'll figure it out it sounded interesting i know that we want to try to make it easier for people so that the open meeting last us but we'll find out how this all works out and lastly i guess would be the  openings for committees committee appointments are open for candidates now there's a new online portal to do that on the town website you can click on to pull your information upload your resume to send the they're going to be open till july ni we're going to be taking applications and then late july early august when we do our annual committee appointments i should know that there will be looks like there's going to be an opening on the planning board there's going to be two openings on the community preservation committee so there are or i think we submit it it just means if you get that then we can refer that to the moderator who makes the point is that those committees if anyone out there is interested in any committee you look at this like when don't appoint it you should still put it down on the form you should also go about recruiting people who are good and you think would be experienced and helpful on a particular committee to get them to apply because last year we did that we really beat the bushes and we got a massive dumper of about what cations was really good more than usual is oftentimes i hear it's kind of a little trickle but we got we really be that bush has got a lot of like to see that again we have a really good deep bench to pick from the better and then we can we go back like last year we had a huge wealth of people applying to the planning board and clearly we couldn't appoint everybody  we had some zoning board of appeals openings just come up and we were able to go back to that pile and pull some people out because they were good and they were qualified and we just put in a point everybody so it's good to have that reference book  to go through it took us a couple of meetings to make all of the appointments so even if you missed the deadline maybe you missed the first batch and you get it in time for a later bench of committee appointments that we make so it's not it's still worth it but if you can get them in early and you put down your top three appreciated thing to do in town but it is important for all the reasons i actually ever set out and discussing them or committee report the fact that we are here and we are attentive is one reason why things run as well as they do because i think you keep this keep people on their toes and even if nobody else ever says thank you i will say thank you and look forward to seeing you on september