Select Board June 2, 2026

Okay. Good evening, everyone. I'd like to call to order the select board meeting of June 2nd, 2026. We are in the Great Hall at Town Hall. Here with me are Tom Ulfelder, Vice Chair, Colette O'Frank, Secretary, and Kenny Largess, also Executive Director Megan Jopp, and Assistant Executive Director Corey Testa. Our first agenda item is Citizen Speak, and Corey has been keeping the list of people who've requested time.

First is Laura Robert.

Hi, Laura.

How are you? Laura Robert, I'm at 10 Greenlawn Ave. Sure. Can you hear me now? Okay, thanks. Thanks for having me. I asked if I could maybe show a slide, but I don't know if that's possible. Just one, of wildlife.

while you're speaking, we'll pull it up.

Okay, great. So I just thought I'd come out tonight to frame how important it is that we protect our biodiversity as we embark on proposals for large developments. And as you all know, I of course want I brought a slide because I thought a picture is worth a thousand words. And it is of wildlife photos taken fairly recently in Mass Bay Forest, in Centennial Reservation, another one up by our Carisbrook Reservation and another one on Brookside Road. And really the picture just reminds us that we have these interconnected and conservation areas that are functioning and thriving.

And second, to remind us what these beautiful creatures do for us, in the photo, if Corey can get it up, there is a bobcat, for example, that is was last week off of the West and Wellesley line, Carisbrook Reservation, and they do a tremendous population management for us, cleaning up mice, squirrels, rabbits, there's a lot of rabbits. If we didn't have animals cleaning up the rabbits, you'd be surprised how many more we have. But they also eat large carcasses, such as a deer, and that returns nutrients to our soils. There's a photo here of a woodpecker. They do the same thing in terms of population cleanup for carpenter ants and insects. They also dig deep holes in dead wood that provide place for other animals to raise their young and for them to hibernate. There's a big snapper here on Brookside Road also just last week, I think.

They eat dead and decaying things in our water, and Wellesley has its own water wells. We don't get all our water from that. But imagine if turtles were not eating dead and decayed things in the water. We don't think about these things because the cleanup is happening for us. So they also... go after vulnerable animals. And that's sort of a form of disease prevention. There's a buck here. That buck is from Centennial Reservation. We've got several photos of that buck. And that buck mostly rubs its antlers up against tree bark and into the soils and is scraping and enabling new growth in the forest. So these are all here in Wellesley. It's evidence that we've got good biodiversity, good spaces, and

We think these large developments, this large development in that particular area, you've seen the maps, is just going to be devastating and really decrease our biodiversity. Governor Healey is all over biodiversity. She's actually set goals to increase biodiversity 30% by 2030 and 40% by 2050, don't quote me. but I don't know where your conversations are going on MassBay. I hope we can find a solution to reduce the size of this development but I think this topic would be near and dear to the governor. And this is something that we really want to protect here in Wellesley and not see a reduction in our biodiversity. If anything, She seeks to increase our biodiversity. So I just wanted to highlight what we have here and what a great job they're doing for us. Thank you. Thank you.

Paul White.

Yes. Just press the button until it's green. Yeah.

OK. Firstly, thanks to all of you for all of your hard work. particularly on the 40 Oakland Street project, which is what I want to speak about tonight. Let me start by introducing myself. I'm Paul White. I'm a resident of Oakland Street at 132 Oakland Street, which is just a little bit down from and the Sisters of Charity, if you know that area. I'm also a recently retired trial lawyer and I practiced in the area of commercial litigation. I probably tried about 25 pretty substantial cases which is an unusually high number actually and I also settled a lot of cases and I know that You are faced with the task of negotiating with the state at this point, and I want to offer some thoughts to you about that and the task ahead, so to speak. And the first thing I want to say to you is that very, very few cases settle before lawsuits are filed.

And the second thing that I would say to you is that very few cases that are filed actually go to trial. In other words, most cases settle after a lawsuit is filed, but before a case goes to trial. That's just the reality of how this works. and there is a reason for that. And the first is the reason why cases don't settle before a lawsuit is filed is that there's really no impetus for a settlement to take place at that point on the party that is going to lose something. And at this point, it's the state that thinks it is going to lose something. The state thinks that it is giving up its right that it claims it has under the Affordable Homes Act. And it thinks it's going to give that up, and why should it? and that's the way that it is thinking. And the way that you stop that type of thinking, and that's why they're saying we won't negotiate a number below 180. Well, that's ridiculous.

the way that you stop that type of thinking and that type of negotiating is by filing a lawsuit because now everybody is facing the problem that you have that causes cases to settle before they go to trial. And that is that parties are now paying legal bills. parties are facing risks. And the state faces those same risks that the town would face. And by filing a lawsuit dramatically changes the negotiation posture that the town has. and I want to... I want to talk a little bit about what the points of leverage are here, because the state seems to think that there are no points of leverage, that it holds all of the cards. And I want to just... explain my thinking about why that is not the case.

And this has a little bit to do with the fact that the state seems to be winning the sort of PR battle at the moment. that it has positioned this whole dispute as being about affordable housing. And it really isn't. It's not about affordable housing. That isn't why the state wants to build in this location. It's about raising an enormous sum of money in order to fund expansion at the MassBay Community College. And so one thing that I want to suggest to you is that You can and we should regain that PR position of superiority by making clear that we are not against affordable housing. The citizens of this town who have spoken up so much about this dispute are not against affordable housing. They're against 180 units of housing. and of that 180 units, 150 of them are going to be multi-million dollar homes.

Mr. White, you're approaching time, I'd like to ask you to

I'll finish up very quickly. What I would suggest is that one of the things that you bear in mind is that you can say as part of your initial negotiation, we will only negotiate about affordable housing and the number of affordable housing units that there are going to be because the burden of raising money to fund Expansion at Mass Bay should not fall on the town of Wellesley. It should fall on the state. And at the moment, we are the only ones that are facing that burden by losing this incredibly valuable public resource. And we should stop that and we should reclaim the advantage in the public relations battle right now and it will position us very effectively for the negotiation ahead. Thank you.

Sue McKay, Sue McKay

My name is Sue McKay. I reside at 186 Oakland Street and have lived there for over 27 years. We all know Oakland Street, and being a resident there, it's a very busy street. It's a major artery in our neighborhood that is heavily settled. It's an artery to Route 9, to Brookside Road, to Honeywell, to Route 16, and other secondary roads. In addition to residents such as ourselves using Oakland Street, there are buses, trucks of all sizes that come right by our door, student cars from MassBay, and they all add to the heavy traffic load of our street. The second point I want to make is that by eliminating the parking lot,

for 180 units only exacerbates the traffic situation between Oakland Street, Route 9, and even Standish Road. and I am asking the select board to negotiate with the state to significantly reduce the number of units being proposed. As an aside and sort of a follow-on to what Laura Roberts had just noted about wildlife just today around lunchtime, a deer was seen crossing Oakland Street from the forest to the college campus. So it's alive and well and we hope we can keep it that way. Thank you.

Thank you.

Doug Youngin,

Hello. Hello. Doug Youngin, 162 Oakland Street. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak. I'm here to ask for your help. As the president of Friends of Centennial, with over 600 signed displaying members and over 3,200 petition signers, it appears we are struggling to get our message across to the select board. So I'm here to try to clarify the best I can. A large number of residents in the surrounding neighborhoods to the proposed 40 Oakland Street development think 180 units is significantly too many. We just heard more today. There was a great turnout at special town meeting by those who want to stop or significantly reduce the development. of the 208 non-town meeting members who attended, 153 are aligned with negotiating for a large reduction.

That is 74% of the attendees. So you wanted to hear, and you've heard not just a little bit of a majority, 51%, but it was 74%. The Select Board wanted to hear from all these people, but unfortunately because of procedural restrictions, and I know that goes to the moderator, there was only 40 minutes allowed for that group of people which allowed only 12 of the 153 people that were there to speak. and we knew this in advance and they couldn't come prepared to speak because they were going to be turned back. And if you ever want to hear from these individuals, we can set up a time. Anytime you want to do it, we can get you in a room with all of these people or a lot of these people. on another issue.

For some reason, the town of Wellesley on the MassBay Community College proposed land disposition web page, a mouthful, has excluded the reduction of density as a critical priority item when it comes to negotiating with the state. We have twice, once verbally and once in writing, I'm asked to add the reduction of density to your critical item list. Both requests have gone unanswered. And for Paul's point, this weakens our position with the state when it comes to negotiation. When it comes to density, Tom Ulfelder made an excellent point during the Charles River Regional Chamber Select Board candidate debate when discussing the 40 Oakland Street proposed development. Tom said, and I quote, that simply isn't an appropriate location for dense multifamily housing.

And we completely agree with Tom on that point. We ask you as our representatives in the upcoming negotiation with the state to listen to your residents. Do all you can to significantly reduce the number of units proposed. Please make this a critical priority. and, as 84% of the town meeting members said by voting yes for Article 3, if it is necessary, proceed with litigation. Please let us know if we can help in any way with the negotiation process. We have a lot of people willing to help, do what it can to help in any way. So please let us know, and I thank you.

Leslie Hanrahan,

I'm here tonight to remind you that the most critical priority in your negotiations with the state Must be a dramatic reduction in the scale of this project. A development of 180 units is simply unacceptable. Building 180 units would irreparably alter one of the town's largest conservation areas and overwhelm wildlife habitat and environmental resources that benefit the entire community. I have repeatedly heard that quote, we are saving the MassBay forest. The notion that commercial development of this scale constitutes saving the forest strains credibility. You are elected to represent the will of your constituents, and their message is unmistakable. At its current scale, this project would do a permanent 180.

negatively transforming this area into a development resembling the Newton Woodland Tea Station, the avenue at the Natick Mall, Hill, downtown Boston, downtown Wellesley, and other highly developed commercial districts. It reflects a top-down planning approach in which local government local environmental priorities are subordinated to predetermined development goals rather than the expressed wishes of the community. Residents are asking for a different path, one that respects the environmental significance of this land, preserves the character of the neighborhood, and provides conservation benefits for the entire town for years to come. The results of town meeting are clear. Only 6% of residents supported accepting the state's proposal of 180 units. That represents an overwhelming rejection of the project.

A majority of town meeting members, 57%, voted to first negotiate with the state, including on the number of units under 2BD. another 37% voted to proceed directly to litigation to challenge the surplus designation of the land and seek Article 97 protection, which would reduce the number of units from 180 to potentially zero. Most significantly, 84% of town meeting members authorized nearly $1 million for litigation if negotiations do not produce an acceptable outcome. That authorization is a clear directive to address the scale of this project. The public response has been equally clear. 75% of those attending town meeting, 153 out of 208 people present, were there in support of reducing the scale of the project.

These residents signed petitions, displayed yard signs stating that the land is not surplus, donated to Friends of Centennial, and are members of Friends of Brookside. More than 3,200 people have signed a petition asserting that this land is not surplus and more than 600 households are displaying yard signs communicating the same message. Yet the concern that the project is simply too large appears to be falling on deaf ears. And I don't mean that just as the select board, I mean at the state level and also potentially our elected representatives. Accordingly, I would like to ask you to advocate for what your constituents want. Revise the town website immediately to include as a critical priority dramatically reducing the scale of the project. make clear to all town residents that if negotiations to reduce the scale of the project fail, the town will pursue litigation as authorized and funded by an 84% vote at town meeting.

and keep 40 Oakland Street on the select board agenda with regular public updates until resolution as it is one of the most consequential issues facing the town in decades.

Thank you.

Eric Warasta, I'm sorry if I pronounced your name wrong.

Eric Warista, 122 Oakland Street. I too want to speak about 40 Oakland Street and what may happen there. I want to start by thanking you for the opportunity to speak tonight and for all the work that's gone into this project so far. I know it's a big issue. As the select board negotiates with the state following the recent special town meeting, I want to urge and encourage select board members to negotiate aggressively on density, specifically in reducing the number of units. Building 180 units on the parking lot alone, five acres, or inclusive of the adjacent land, approximately eight acres in total, Plow, implies between 22 and 36 units per acre, which cannot be supported by the surrounding environment. The damage to the environment would be irreversible. Any development

should be consistent with Wellesley's sustainability and preservation goals, including public transit proximity, and should be consistent with the character of the neighborhood and surrounding community. As such, the number of units as proposed by the state must come down significantly. I want to finish by again urging you to negotiate aggressively on this point of density along with all the other points laid out at special town meeting which are also important objectives. Thank you for your time.

and Mara Lanza.

Good evening. Ann Maralonza, 18 Oakland Street and formerly of 61 Oakland Street. I came here to respond to the letter that you guys sent recently. I was not aware that we were still talking about whether or not to sue. And so I actually want to start by saying thank you so much for hosting the special town meeting and allowing town meeting members to weigh in These were the people that were elected to represent the community, and I think they were very clear in how they spoke. I thought there were a lot of really well-spoken people. I don't agree with the interpretation of some of the previous speakers. Unfortunately, we didn't actually debate the size of the project. Most people didn't talk about that on the side of negotiation. They just said please negotiate. So I know a lot of people who voted for B, including myself, that are quite comfortable with 180 units, but we want more. So we didn't want to just take the offer. We wanted to have traffic mitigation, public safety, things like that talked about.

So I don't think that you can put that spin on the vote. So once again, thank you for that. And thank you for that broad input on this project. What I was surprised about in your letter, and I have to say that I was surprised because I didn't think the letter reflected the tone of town meeting. and I was a little disappointed in how hard you guys came out on the very next night. And I was particularly taken aback by the sentence that came after the list of demands that said it would be untenable unless all of the traffic from the students was taken off Oakland Street. And I didn't know where that came from because that definitely didn't come up at time meeting. And untenable is a very strong word. and I was under the impression that we were not gonna walk into negotiation with a poison pill, that we were gonna be open to discuss things.

So I'm just going to say something very unpopular right now, which is I've lived on Oakland Street for 30 years, and I actually don't think the traffic's all that bad. It is not Weston Road. It is not Route 16. It is not Route 9. When I was a library trustee for all those years and I couldn't get to the library, I took Oakland Street, went around the golf course past Babson to get to the center of town. When I hit Oakland Street at the wrong time, when there were students letting out, I would say, oh no, and I'd sit through an extra traffic light. So who was it that decided that we are so privileged in this town that sitting through one extra traffic light is unacceptable? It's not all the time. There'll be no traffic on Oakland Street for the next three months. There's no traffic on weekends. So you have to think about the school schedule. I think moving a lot of that traffic over to all those parking the other side of the street will make a big difference.

absolutely commend any effort you can do to mitigate traffic but I'm just going to say please do not walk into these negotiations with a hard and fast if you don't do this then we're going to walk away because for me for what I thought we all agreed on a town is the most important thing is saving that forest. and to me that is worth all sorts of things. So I guess that's what I wanted to say tonight is I want us to walk into negotiations in good faith I'm concerned that we're not doing that. I was really concerned as many people were by the vote at town meeting by the five of you and that As far as we know, walking out of town meeting, there are four of you that wanted to sue and only one that didn't. And the one that didn't want to sue, who wanted to negotiate, wrote a very, very strong letter that I would have read thinking we didn't want to negotiate. So I really do hope that there is an open and honest and good faith negotiation.

And I really hope that you get the best you can for our community. I also do want to respond to is this about affordable housing and it is about affordable housing because you cannot expect a developer to pay for the affordable housing without those market rate units. if we are going to allocate some of our tax dollars to build affordable housing, great. But if we're not, which we don't seem to be interested in doing, we have to live with the units that are market rate because that's what pays for that affordable housing. So every time when we say we want more affordable housing and less market rate, it just doesn't work. The math doesn't pan out. The numbers don't work. You can't get financing for that project. No one's going to build it. you've got the 20% that we asked for is more than most communities do in the state. We had to prove to the state that that was a financially something that could financially work for developers. We did that. We can't ask for 30%. We can't ask for more.

And for every 10 units we take off the project, we lose affordable units. I think 180 units is going to be fine. Five years after it's built, we won't even remember. We're never gonna miss that five acres of asphalt. We're just not. who wants five acres of asphalt? I think the bobcats and the deer, they're all going to be fine. We're going to have almost a hundred acres of preserved forest, which is going to be amazing. So thank you.

Thank you. Is there anybody else who'd like to address the board? Okay. I ask you to keep your remarks to three minutes, please. Sure.

My name's Lynn Hlatky, and I wanted to start by sort of saying thanks to everybody who's spoken, and I agree with most people. I guess I don't agree with the last speaker, I think everyone's good intended here. I wanted to reiterate what Paul White said, who was the attorney, which is, you know negotiation is fine but we've been doing negotiation for a long time and I've unfortunately been in a lot of legal concerns myself and Nobody pays attention to you until you file suit. Once you file suit, that's when the real negotiation starts. And one of the, well, my legal problem was with Stewart Healthcare, which also involves Maura Healey, okay? and if you know Stuart Healthcare, most of you are probably aware that there was a big fiasco with Stuart Healthcare because they came in, took over the Caritas Christi hospital system, blah, blah, blah,

and they had to go bankrupt and then, you know, Maura Healey and the administration are all like, oh my God, how did this happen? I want to tell you that I ran a huge cancer lab there. that was funded by NASA, funded by NIH, funded by the Department of Energy, and we had more individual funding than pretty much anyone in the country. and we were doing really phenomenal, I mean, as peer reviews say, cancer research. Stewart Healthcare was, we had the lab at Stewart Healthcare, We knew there were problems. We knew they were taking money. We knew all this stuff. We went to Maura Healey. We went to all these people in the administration. This is when Maura Healey was Attorney General. would she talk to us? I mean, they knew what was going on. We showed them the documents, because when you're in a legal situation, you have all these depositions and everything. We showed them everything. They knew the money was going there. It didn't matter.

It was politics and Stuart was powerful. We weren't powerful. This actually went to lawsuit. I won against Stuart as an individual. That was a really, really hard fight. When did Maura Healey talk to me? After I won, okay? And well, she actually had her assistant attorney general talk to me during the lawsuit, okay? But I'm telling you that you know there's so much politics here this isn't really about them wanting to have preserve the environment or even about health I mean about affordable housing This, in my mind, is about elections, okay? And why do you need 180 units? Because you want to say, this is how many extra units I got for affordable housing for the state because Elections are coming up. And that might sound cynical, but we had, whatever, decades of cancer research incinerated, and they didn't stop it. Incinerated.

So what I'm saying is you won't get anywhere without doing a lawsuit. and negotiation. I mean, believe me, I tried to negotiate for years with this. And as I say, they wouldn't have this problem with Stuart if they had taken action then. I'm going to ask you to start wrapping up, please. I guess the thing is, the July 1st is when they can start selling this to the developer. I don't see how you have to have filing before July 1st to get any attention on this.

that's okay thank you very much thank you okay this will be our last speaker

Hello, good evening. My name is Dr. Janina Lisa Garcés Ambrosi. I live at 7 Turner Road. I'm a Hopkins and Harvard-trained neurosurgeon, anesthesiologist, and critical care specialist, as well as a health care founder. but what about all of you here tonight? Happy, healthy, active enough to get to a town meeting, politically active. What if I were to turn to any of you and say, What if I were to turn to any of you and your children and say, you have 100% healthy children. Let me just have 10% of that health. I'm going to take that 10% of that health and use over 80% of it for my own financial late capitalist gain.

and then convince you that it is financially untenable for you to second guess me and say that you need a second opinion, you would all look at me as if I was deranged and evil. and rightfully so. And yet, how different is that from what we are discussing tonight? At the last town meeting, I really appreciated everything that people were saying. except I started hearing, just give them a little bit of the forest. They'll back off if we'll give them 10%. that may not have been the exact number, but in turn, all they have to do is less than 20% of affordable housing. Tonight, don't forget that we have a healthy, thriving ecosystem in MassBay Forest, currently at 100% health. We must protect it no less than we would protect 100% of the health of our children. you must fight for every percentage of the trees because those trees are not our trees.

Those trees are not even our children's trees. Those are the trees and ecosystem of our ancestors and the ecosystem of generations who will never know us otherwise. As a human physician, I'm here to tell you tonight, the trees and the wildlife of Mass Bay Forest are no less alive than we are. We all need each other and it is time that we continue your efforts to recognize and protect each and every tree in each and every forest of our beautiful and recognized USA Tree Town, Wellesley. Thank you.

I'm sorry. We've exceeded our time allotment for Citizen Speak. Not tonight, I'm sorry. I'm going to ask you to write to us. We're meeting again next week. And send us any emails you have. But we have a very big agenda. And we need to... No, I'm sorry. Not tonight. I'm sorry. and we have received them and read them. Yes, I know. I'm sorry. Citizen speak is concluded for tonight. Thank you. Okay. Okay, we're going to move on in our agenda to our next agenda item, which is the executive director's report.

Thanks, Marjorie. I have a few updates here. Let me just pull up my notes. So I'm going to give a few updates and then I'm going to turn it over to Corey to give one update. So I wanted to start by thanking Congresswoman Catherine Clark and her team. and all her work in acquiring a $500,000 federal grant for the Natural Resources Commission and the Charles River Watershed Association and also for attending and acknowledging the regional partnership between the town and the CWRA which occurred yesterday. We also wanted to announce that the Wellesley's American Legion post-72 will be holding an event tomorrow, June 3rd, from 11 a.m. to 12.30 at the Council on Aging. and the public is invited to attend the ceremony and help recognize the contributions of the veterans. This is their 107th anniversary.

If you plan on attending, we'd ask that folks RSVP to Kathy Savage at ksavage at wellesleyma.gov or call the COA. We also wanted to announce the get a scoop of ice cream and get the scoop on sustainability event, which is happening June 17th at the Honeywell School Playground from 6.30 p.m. to 8.30 p.m. Rain Location is at Honeywell just in the cafeteria. The event is sponsored by the Climate Action Committee, the Natural Resources Commission, and the Sustainable Wellesley. and we'll have information on sustainability, including transportation, how to lower utility costs, home energy coaching, quieter lawn care and we'll also have kids activities, so family event. Before I turn it over to Corey, I also wanted to recognize something that's really special that's happening next week, actually. So many of you know Cricket Vlass, who is our park and tree superintendent.

Cricket has worked for the town for over 40 years. and Cricket will be retiring next week. So we wanted to thank Cricket. Her work for the town is truly embedded in the town's landscape. as she has served as the town's arborist, horticulturalist, and landscape planner. And then she's been the town's park and tree superintendent. Her work in the town's parks, landscapes, and the impact on private projects has significantly benefited the town. We're forever grateful for the many years of service Cricket has provided to the town. Her upbeat personality, problem solving, and patience will greatly be missed. We extend our well wishes to a long and happy retirement to cricket. And she doesn't want anything, but Dave Cohen has set something up for her. So we look forward to celebrating cricket next week.

and I know all of you know her and the staff, the only thing I'll add to is it's going to be very weird when we have to say you have to go speak to someone else about landscape because I think the entire community knows you have to talk to cricket. So we wish Cricket a happy retirement.

Please extend our thanks, Megan, on behalf of the board. We all have worked with Cricket and it will be weird to say go speak to somebody else. That's quite remarkable, 40 years for the town.

Corey has another exciting announcement.

Yes. So please join World of Wellesley and UU Wellesley Hills Church on this Thursday, June 4th, to celebrate the start of June as Pride Month here in Wellesley. from 5 to 7 p.m. on the front lawn of the church, 309 Washington Street. We'll have live music, lawn games, some food trucks, and it's a great way to reconnect with neighbors and meet new members of our community. To my knowledge, this is the first official Pride kickoff event held in the town of Wellesley, fully organized at the grassroots level by a motivated group of residents and town volunteers. and we're hoping that this is just the start of more exciting programming next year with more of a heads up. In addition to our generous primary sponsors of World of Wellesley and UU Wellesley Hills, This event is being co-sponsored by the Hills and Village Congregational Churches, Temple Beth Elohim, St. Andrew's Episcopal Church,

the Wellesley Freedom Team, the DEI Task Force, the Elliott Church of South Natick, Representative Alice Peisch, and Senator Cindy Cream. all are welcome and encouraged to attend we kindly encourage folks to register on worldofwellesley.org it is not required it's just going to help us plan ahead for numbers So again, please join us this Thursday from 5 to 7 p.m. on the front lawn of the UU Church on Washington Street. And the forecast looks amazing. So hopefully that stays.

and the only thing I want to add is Corey has been leading the way with the other civic leaders on this and so I want to thank him for all his work in establishing this.

Thank you, Corey. It's nice to see that we will have a celebration this year for Pride Month. Okay, thank you both very much. Our next agenda item is to discuss a change in hours for Shake Shack. at 74 Central Street for wine and malt beverages and common vitler license. So I'll turn it back over to Megan.

So we have received a request. to pull this from consent. And so David Himmelberger representing the applicant is here. We also have several folks online including Deputy Chief Renzella, KMAR support service managers, and other representatives as needed to answer questions. from Shake Shack. David.

Thank you. Good evening. David Hemmelberger representing Shake Shack on this request for a change of hours for both CV and alcohol licensing. also available tonight, Sinead Riley-May, who is the manager. Nick Bolio, who is the Alcohol Compliance and Licensing Administrator, and Will Poppe, Regional Director of Operations. This is a request to extend the hours in the morning from 10 to 11 and the evening 10 p.m. to midnight Monday through Saturday. and to extend the Sunday hours 10 p.m. to 12 midnight, both as to CV food and to alcohol. So happy to answer any questions that the board may have.

Other questions, comments from the board? Collette? So it was me that asked for this to be removed from the agenda. When I was thinking about this, we had a request not that long ago for a change in the license, which we actually talked about for a fair time, and it was not a unanimous decision on the board. but I think those two situations were quite different. The other situation was for a small non-chain restaurant that was really looking to create, encourage a brunch crowd. and I just see this as very different so I have a different feeling about this one. I actually, I'm fine with the hours the way they are. I don't particularly support extending them. Some of the questions I asked staff were, what are the current hours and what are the operations like in similar burger shops?

and I think that the areas that are being sought here are more than some of the similar chains in the neighboring areas so I just wanted to share I'm not so comfortable with this because it's just a burger joint and I think that having the hours as they are approved are fine and we talked about a long time when we approved them the first time because I think there was a little bit of discomfort on the board about this being a sort of a place for kids to come as opposed to like a family restaurant things like that So I'm just saying that I like the hours the way they are. I don't see the need to. And I'd like to hear what the pressing business case is, because that did make a difference to me in the last hearing. But I see them as very different.

So thank you. The driving force really is to extend the CV hours, to extend the ability to sell food from 10 to 11 a.m. as opposed to beginning at 11 a.m. Monday through Saturday and to extend the hours in the evening from 10 p.m. to midnight and again on Sunday from 10 p.m. to midnight. If the board does have concerns about the alcohol hours also being extended to meet that, The alcohol is not a driving force for the business model nor for their revenues and what is really important to them is the ability to extend the CV hours. So I don't see this as a binary choice up or down on

both alcohol and cv linked together and so if the board does have concerns then we would again ask you to kind of bifurcate your vote to one for the CV hours being extended and the other for the alcohol hours being extended and or modified however the board sees fit. So thank you.

Thank you for clarifying that. I mean, particularly I'm fine with extending the common victual part of it, but not the alcohol part.

What's the genesis of the alcohol request from management or requests from customers, do you know?

I think it's more that if they're open selling food, they would sell the alcohol at the same time. I don't think it's a driving force, again. It's not a significant component of the revenues and it's more just an accommodation, I suppose, if there was a patron who wanted service in those earlier hours when they were having food. But it really is just following the desire to extend the food hours.

Thank you. Comments from the rest of the board? Questions? Tom?

I agree with Colette as well. I was opposed to the earlier hours at the other restaurant, but I certainly once again disagree with serving alcohol in Wellesley at family restaurants earlier in the day. I don't see the need. I don't think it's conducive to a family environment, particularly extending them earlier into the morning. I'm not as opposed to the common victuals license. I think that with the change in alcohol regulations generally, We've seen just a remarkable growth in food and restaurants generally, and I think eventually that's going to encourage are non-food retail interests to be open longer later, employing and paying people later into the evening. It's going to create

I think more energy for a longer period of time in terms of economic development generally so the food I don't feel as strongly about but I certainly remain opposed to an extension of the hours for alcohol

Thank you, Tom. Beth, did you want to say something?

Yes. So how is the business in the 11 o'clock Time when they're open now. Because I generally favor opening, allowing a business to be open earlier. The rents are high there. so that if it's busy, I think it's a food type we don't have downtown and I think we've done a really good job downtown with infusing more energy through food and Shake Shack has been part of that. So I feel like the common victual or license absolutely makes sense to extend. The alcohol portion, I have to say, I don't see the need to start at 10 a.m. with the alcohol license. But I have to say, I've not seen alcohol consumption in the Shake Shack. I don't know.

No, it's a very small, as I said, it's less than 2% of their sales.

So I think we should, and how long does the alcohol license go right now for into the evening?

It goes until 10 p.m. Oh, 10.

And how long does our alcohol license go at the other restaurants nearby? Till midnight.

Till midnight? Yeah, we've approved several others till midnight.

Kate, can you answer the evening hours for the other alcohol licenses?

Hi, everyone. So in the area directly near Shake Shack, the licensed hours of operation are allowed to go to midnight for Juniper, Boccato, Altostrada, not Lockhart on Sundays. However, Lockhart on Fridays and Saturdays most definitely is to midnight. What I would say is I know from speaking to several of the restaurants in that area as well as throughout town is even though they are licensed to be open to midnight, there's not generally a need to remain open until midnight. Most nights other than a Friday or a Saturday. And even then, a lot of them still close around 11. I think there's very few that are open until midnight, but they are allowed to.

The other thing I would note is a lot of our restaurants that serve lunch do open around 11 a.m. I believe that's also the case for Fiorella's which also has a beer and wine license.

Okay, so I would be in favor of starting the CV at 10, the alcohol at 11, and having the alcohol be consistent with all the other restaurants on Central Street in fairness to Shake Shack just because I don't actually see it as a draw, but I don't find a compelling argument to shorten the license at Shake Shack in the evening compared to the other restaurants on Central Street.

Kenny?

Does Shake Shack plan on serving mimosas at 10 o'clock?

They do not. It's a beer and wine license only.

So I won't go into detail, but I agree with what Beth said for the same reasons.

So Mr. Himmelberger, can we amend the request to leave the alcohol license the way it is in the morning? Yes. And is the board comfortable with extending the alcohol license till midnight and the CV until 11? I mean until 10 in the morning, opening earlier, right?

I think the request would be the CV license to be modified from 10 to 12 basically and the alcohol license to be amended to extend from 11 p.m. to midnight. Without starting earlier.

Correct, and that would be, just to clarify, that's Monday, Saturday, because Sunday doesn't start before noon.

Right. Okay. Would that be acceptable? Yes, certainly. Okay.

Okay. Okay, here goes on the fly. So move to approve the change in hours for the common victuals license for Shake Shack. to Monday through Saturday 10 a.m. through 12 a.m., Sunday 12 p.m. through 12 a.m.,

Newcom and Vidler, we want to start Sunday at 10 too, right? Oh no, just leave Sunday at noon? That was the request.

Okay, I'm sorry. Should we take the common victuals first before I lose the plot? Yes. Okay. So I've made a motion.

Second.

All in favor? Aye. Okay, so move to approve the change in hours for the liquor license for Shake Shack to Monday through Saturday. 11 a.m. to 12 a.m. and Sunday 12 p.m. to 12 a.m.

Second.

All in favor? Aye. Okay. Thank you very much, Mr. Himmelberger. Have a good evening.

Thank you for putting me through the wringer there, David. I appreciate that.

Good job on the fly. Okay, our next agenda item is a presentation on the Fire Station Master Plan. And I see we have the chief and assistant chief and former chief, David Soar. So we'd like to ask you to join us at the table, please.

We also have Jeff Shaw from Context Architecture.

And Marjorie, while the chiefs are sitting, we just got some feedback from the audience that a few of the members, can you just get closer to the microphone when you're speaking? They're having a hard time hearing you.

Okay, thank you. Good evening.

Good evening to you. I'd just like to say a few words as I introduce Jeff Shaw from Context. First off, I would like to thank the board for having us here this evening, for listening to the findings of the fire department master plan. Jeff Shaw and his team at Context for the better part of a year have been performing a comprehensive analysis of both Fire Station 1 and Fire Station 2. evaluating functionality, conditions, long-term viability of the facilities as well as response time data and operational need both current and long-term. Having been a member of the fire department for about 20 years now, I can't say that I was caught off guard by the findings.

I think for the most part, anyone that's worked there pretty much knew where this was heading. um, I guess at the end of the day, we have two beautiful looking buildings. Joe McDonough and his team at FMD have done an unbelievable job along with the Wellesley firefighters in meticulously maintaining these buildings. but I think what the research shows pretty much what we know already is that these buildings are no longer conducive to being fire stations. The research shows that station one, that's 100 years old, 100 years old, has reached the use of its lifespan. It needs to be replaced with a more modern type facility.

that is designed to handle such things as current operational needs, firefighting operations, firefighter safety, and community needs. Fire Station 2, which is our current headquarters, needs to undergo a major renovation for many of the same reasons as Station 1 in order to operate as a fire substation. Now, in addition, the assessment has also identified that there are several areas that these facilities are no longer or never were able to satisfy, such as very vital or important NFPA standards. such as firefighter health and wellness, exposure control and the ability to store and handle our personal protective equipment, our PPE that we don every day.

Now, I think in my own personal opinion, to a fault that firefighters have a bit of a no excuse type attitude, meaning that we're programmed to show up anytime anyone calls, no excuses. We don't ask any questions. If you have an issue, we're there to mitigate that issue. I think somewhere over time, we've gotten accustomed to overlooking certain things. We share bathrooms, we share sleeping quarters, we share locker rooms with both male and female firefighters. We store our equipment, our gear that we wear every day in contaminated areas. We're used to the fact that right here in District 1 that we can typically know

typically never have any type of mutual aid coverage during a major call because neighboring communities do not have apparatus to fit within our buildings. So we know all this, but it doesn't make it right. Now, sadly over the past several years, I could probably name off about a dozen active and recently retired firefighters that have contracted some form of cancer. Just last week alone, I had to place two firefighters, one active and one recently retired on Disability Pension under the Cancer Presumption Law of Massachusetts. That's two members last week, and this is not Chicago, this isn't New York, this isn't Boston. We don't have thousands of firefighters in Wales that we have under 60 firefighters as a part of our, that make up our department. So those numbers are alarming.

We know when we sign up for this job, it's dangerous. We know we're going to be in situations that are hazardous in that we can't control the environments. We know that when we sign up for this job, we have a 15% greater chance of dying from cancer than if we chose another career path, right? We understand that, we know that, we took the job anyway. as fire chief it's my responsibility and I think as community leaders it's our responsibility that we provide a safe environment for our firefighters so that they can do their job to keep the residents of Wellesley safe all the while keeping themselves safe. With that being said, I would like to turn the microphone over to Jeff Shaw from Context where he can walk you through the findings and recommendations in a little bit more detail, and we'll be happy, of course, to answer any questions. Thank you.

Thank you, Chief. Hi, Jeff. Would you like us to hold our questions until the end, or are you comfortable with us just asking them as you go?

I'm comfortable asking as we go. It might be easier when the slides are up if people have questions at that point. Although there might be parts where we want to skip ahead to something that deals with that question.

Thank you.

But I'm happy to get into it as we go. Chief was accurate on all of his facts there on the sort of general synopsis, but I'll go through the process. You did get the presentation, I think, in the packet as well as the full report with all the appendices. We have completed our work. This is the agenda for tonight's presentation. Hopefully we'll go through this fairly quickly and get into questions. But I just wanted to I recognize the number of people in town and staff, department personnel that have really assisted with this process. It's really been thorough and top to bottom of the department. We met a significant number of times very frequently throughout the last year to put the report together. We also produced individual sections of the report as we went. starting with the existing conditions as the chief mentioned all the way down through costs involved of addressing the needs that the chief mentioned.

We've also spoken with the board. a little while ago back in December to brief you on the progress we had made to that point. And then, wanted to get into some of the current challenges. The chief mentioned, I think, all of these. They're older facilities, the buildings themselves, so they come with their own set of structural challenges, but the town has spent a lot of time and effort, money, and sort of chasing after the problems that can be addressed with preventative maintenance. I think we're at the point where the structural issues are overshadowing those preventative maintenance things. There's only so much the town can do to repair and handle things. The size of the buildings are an issue, the sites are an issue, how much you can do there and what you can reconfigure. As the chief mentioned, at station one, when they have mutual aid, they can't actually get that neighboring neighborhoods vehicle into the bay.

They have to sit out outside. So it is a problem and is creating future problems. There's a couple of other things that are going on in addition to the facilities themselves, but the standards in firefighting as well as station design have changed. Well, significantly in the case of the 100-year-old building. But even in the case of the building that's only 40 years old, there's a lot of changes that have happened. And the chief mentioned a number of the ones, the most specific and concerning ones. So lack of critical spaces is a major issue. You can see here in the graph, station one, approximately 50% and contains probably 50% of the space that should. Station two has about 60% of the required spaces it should. And that's just looking at

what programs and staff the department already has and is already performing based upon the space needs that they should have for those programs and staff and equipment. and then the deficiencies as I mentioned here, a list of them. There's really no fitness room. There's undersized facilities for both living quarters as well as equipment spaces. and then because the bathrooms and living areas have gendered spaces, it's hard to be flexible. The apartment's not huge. These days, the best practice design of fire stations allows for a lot of flexibility and you actually have bathrooms that are kind of like the ones you'd have at home. They're single user, anybody could use them, and they allow a lot of flexibility in how you staff that building. and then of course the biggest one being a lack of apparatus storage. And then looking at the sites themselves, it's very difficult and almost impossible

in case of station one to expand the buildings themselves vertically or horizontally on the sites. So we looked at both the space needs and the critical components in those buildings for physical needs. The Chief addressed it earlier there's major challenges to health and safety within the existing layouts and certainly we have designed as an architectural practice buildings in Older Buildings, redesign them to meet more modern standards. And there's ways that can be done. But some of them are beyond... the ability to manage that and in case of both stations as they're currently configured they just don't have enough space to actually house these types of rooms and what we're really talking about is segregating living quarters working spaces from the places where you store the equipment and the apparatus that go and travel to those fires. And it might sound strange to say,

there's places in the building that have hazardous materials in them even though they clean their equipment and they clean the truck these particulates are persistent they don't completely go away and so we really want to best practices to segregate people from those spaces and operate and design mechanical systems that pressurize the building in certain ways to keep those particulates away from the people that live there. and that's very difficult to do in an existing building, but particularly when you don't have the space for these types of areas, it's difficult to do. And then secondly, as the diagram shows, you really wanna be able to handle as the personnel come back from a call and they might need to decontaminate because they were in a fire or some other event, you really want showering facilities and equipment washing facilities done in a certain progression so the people and firefighters can exit

to the clean side of the station, which is what that diagram is showing, coming in what's called the hot side to a cold side transition. And that's another lacking element at both stations. And really, it's the space to provide that which is lacking.

Kenny.

There's a question about this because when I was hearing about decontamination, what I was thinking was come back from a fire or some other incident and there's contaminants on the engine, on the people. it gets washed and then you're clean. But what this is suggesting is you are currently living with contaminants among you, basically, because of the lack of segregation. Is that right from a layman's perspective? That's correct.

So with newer fire stations, the design, like Jeff said, from a hot to a cold, but the gear is stored in a separate area, a ventilated area that needs to coincide with NFPA standards. Right now in each of our buildings, we don't have that area there's just there's no room for it it wasn't designed like that because when these buildings were built obviously it was prior to to these to the different design model so our gear is stored right on the apparatus floor which is actually the most contaminated area in the building because that every time we start up the truck which is you can guess how many times a day it's blowing those contaminants all over our gear.

Yeah, and I want to be clear that, speak a little bit for you, Chief, but I believe the department does implement best NFPA practices for the fire ground treatment of PPA and decontamination. But when you get back to the station and you have to live with the quarters that you're in, the cleaning can't 100% get rid of the problem. And so I think they're doing the best they can. It's really at this point where we're lacking the station design that kind of gets the other 50% of the problem taken care of, really segregating the people so they're not around it all the time. and also properly storing the equipment and the apparatus in ways that isn't mingling unnecessarily.

So this all sounds horrible. How much of a risk is it? Because it feels like something should be done about that tomorrow.

Yeah, that's why we mention it. It's a serious risk. This town is not alone in facing it. Many towns... all over the Northeast have old fire stations and most are in the process of trying to figure out what to do about it. you know like I said before our office has designed projects from new buildings to renovations there's there's ways that can be dealt with and we'll talk about in a second what our recommendations are for the town, but it is probably, if not the most, it's up there in terms of the more serious concerns that the town's facing.

Could I ask you, Jeff, just to pull your microphone a little bit closer to you as I'm hearing you, but it's a little bit hard.

Absolutely. How's that?

Will those recommendations include recommendations for the period between now and the time the construction's complete? I think I'm following on what Kenny's saying.

There's limits to what the master plan has recommended and we've kind of given a long-term trajectory and what sort of next steps might be for projects that can be undertaken, major projects. there's certainly interim measures that could be taken and I think that's probably a conversation directly with the fire department if there's things that they they can consider funding might be needed for them. But again, space tends to be the biggest constraint because if you have gear for let's say 48 firefighters in lockers, Where do you put that if it's not where it is currently? They just don't have a room. big enough for it. And they also need access to it immediately when they're on their shift. So that is a challenge, but it certainly wasn't part of what we were considering in the overall master plan, but I think it can be addressed.

One other question about code changes. How early or how far in advance are code change considerations socialized? In other words, the construction on this will be a couple of years out. How do you prepare for potential code changes before you get through or after you've finished with design so that you don't create something that's no longer according to code?

It's a good question and I'll start by saying the folks that designed the building 40 years ago, the current station two, were following what was known at the time. And there is limitations to what all of us can predict in the future. We don't have crystal balls, even though we wish we did. but we are following all of the latest trends and discussions in firefighting fire station design and in NFPA was the National Fire Protection Association and that's what promulgates all of the standards that the fire department will follow. And there's a lot of, just like building codes, there's a lot of discussion about potentially incorporating changes into it that is discussed before they become actual part of the standard. So we'd have a good sense of what's kind of out there, which might look forward five, maybe 10 years. but again, there's limits.

We can't understand what's gonna happen 40 years from now, which is why we really try to focus on flexibility and designing into a building, designing into a program, a space needs component that gives the department the opportunity to make changes over time because I can't tell the chief today what he's gonna need in 20 years, but that chief in the future will need space and flexibility to say, okay, I need to reconfigure how we're operating. So that's a basic principle, best practice fire station design.

Thank you. Beth? So could I ask you, based on this chart, do we have any space in the main fire station like this? There's where the trucks are and the gear is hanging. There are no showers on the first floor, right?

No. As of right now, our model doesn't really look anything like this.

And is the proposal to create a model like this on the first floor?

That has been incorporated into the master plan recommendations.

and in a community do all the fire stations have this or is it the main fire station has a meaningful area? for decontamination and the satellite stations have less, I'm just trying to figure out the mechanics of this.

Totally understandable. The way it works is that this is intended to be used by firefighters returning from a call back to their home station. So you would want this in every fire station and it would be sized appropriately to the crews that are stationed there. So headquarters might have a bigger company amount of space and maybe more showers to handle the added crew versus a substation, for instance. Chief Sewer?

There are steps that have been taken as far as the contaminants go. When they're at a scene of a fire, after the fire, they do decontaminate their gear to the best that they can. and all the equipment gets washed, the air packs get washed, but it's still, it's not, it does not meet standard and it's not code. Plus when you get back to the station, they take their turnout gear off. Now they still have their clothing on, which is contaminated. And they have to walk through the building to get to a shower, to get their clothing, to shower, to change. back down into the basement to wash their clothing. And that's where the gear extractors are for the washing. There's one extractor in the station. and it can take one set of gear at a time. So that's kind of where everybody got two sets of gear, but it's a long process to get all this stuff done because there's just not adequate space to take care of it.

the standards used to really be one extractor one set of gear took a while and you know probably back when the station was built there was a pride in having kind of really grimy Nasty Clothes, because that meant you were working hard. You know, you're doing a lot of good work for the community. And now we know a lot more about why that's a bad idea. and so the standards have evolved to allow for two sets of gears so that as one's being washed you have a gear to wear so nobody's forced you know to kind of go out to a fire ground without the proper safer pieces of equipment.

Beth, one more question and then we're going to let Jeff continue. So for decontaminating the equipment, that's not on the chart, right?

We have in this chart, it's a little hard to see, but there's the big boxes kind of representing the extractors and the dryers that would be Decontaminating, their personnel gear. I meant the equipment. The trucks themselves would be washed. And those are washed currently as they are. And that's not necessarily Illustrated here, but in any station even in the current station that can happen.

So like Jeff said, the apparatus and the equipment itself, that is washed. But to Jeff's point for our gear, you need to bring it into the building down to the base. You would actually have to bring it through an actual living area. in order to wash them. And just one more comment, Marjorie, on the future codes. I know Jeff touched on this. The good news is obviously, yes, you're never going to be able to stay ahead of every single standard because you don't know what tomorrow brings. but we are in a good spot because through Metro Fire there have been so many stations that have been built over the last several years. Needham has built two, Natick has built one, Weston just got approved to build one in several other communities that we work with those chiefs of what has worked for them and what has not worked for them. So it's a constant back and forth about

what some of the better developed stations for some of the older ones so we know how to move forward in that aspect of it.

Thank you, Chief. Okay, Jeff, go on, please.

Okay, great. I'm going to change to response time in terms of the town and how the fire department responds to calls. So part of our charge was to look at how the Department was performing and the response metrics. So these two graphics here on the left show the current response times. The good news is that the town actually exceeds or betters the current NFPA metric of being able to get to 90% of the calls within four minutes. The areas of town where it's Not as good. We're sort of calling the north, although it's kind of northeast corner of the town there. You can see in red. And then the east, or sorry, northwest, and then the east section off near 128. again there's some red sections over there and then on the right hand chart or map you can see the volume of calls and most of the town as you would expect is fairly low volume but then there's hotspots

Spots where you would kind of expect them in the colleges and some of the assisted living and medical areas. So it's important to know that the fire department is doing a good job. right now and where the current stations are and being able to respond. It's meeting all of those performance metrics. In the next page, we're looking at future performance. The concern of course is what is development going to do to that response and it's not just where the development goes it's the nature of the development is it high density is it medical or assisted living that tend to drive a higher range of calls and where those calls are also then and the volume of them start to then provide some

Friction on the department's ability to maintain that level of performance that the town has come to expect and so that's where we see the biggest challenge what we've sort of distilled at this point is that the department is fine with two stations for the time being but as development increases and as the pressures on the department to respond increase and the number of units in the town that's fire engines in the town going to respond gets more pressure, there would be the need to have a third station. and we also felt that it was important to give the town not only that feedback but also provide you with a mechanism to determine when does that actually need to occur. So we put together a simple mechanism that indicated that

a new station three should begin to be planned as you'd see a 3% decline from the 2025 baseline response. So the department has those baseline call volumes and response. they would be monitoring it and then each year they would provide a status report. How are we doing? And then as you, if you got 1% decline per year over those three years, you would say, okay, now is the time we need to start the planning process. and that would take a number of years of course and the goal here is that this metrics design that you know should that planning process be fairly straightforward, the department's performance would not decrease more than 5% over that baseline by the time that third station became operational. you might dip slightly below the NFPA standard just as it's coming online, which would then boost you back up above the NFPA standard. And the whole intent is to keep the town on par

with what its current expectations for service are from the fire department. So I know that's a bit to distill and absorb there, and I just want to make sure there's no questions.

We're familiar with triggers. We've dealt with triggers in populations before.

Go ahead, Beth. So I have a question about the trigger for a new station versus expanded capability in existing stations. So if our coverage map is strong so we can get everywhere within the timeframe that meets or exceeds the standards, Why would we need another location as opposed to more apparatus and more staffing at the existing locations?

Sure. So the concern is that at the one location where it is, it potentially would overwhelm that ability to get to the calls that it needs to get to. at the fringe of the town, and also that there would not necessarily be enough space in that location to house the units that would be needed. It's sort of twofold. Number one, the space constraints were a primary challenge. If you had to have multiple engine companies, multiple ambulance companies responding there. but also thinking about how you might configure the town or the stations within the town to respond to that and so on.

So I think it's really important to think about that. Bucket, I would say. And providing that additional station gives you more flexibility to handle the various types of future calls that you might get. For instance, The current station two, the headquarters, has limited space. Based upon this master plan and what has been discussed and presented as recommendations, it would free up space, but it wouldn't free up enough space to provide a whole other unit to respond. And because of that, trying to kind of make it work, kind of jamming that other unit in there would, I think, compromise the flexibility of the department to have specialty vehicles and have the floor space that they need.

So it's kind of both things at the same time, but mostly driven by that capacity.

Is it more space than that a station gets too big to be operational?

No, it's about specifically Station 2 in its current location isn't big enough to handle what would be needed if we were to fold this future station into it.

So if we had more space, then two stations would be fine. I'm just trying to like mentally figure it out. If we had more space, we wouldn't need to buy land and build a third station.

Well, Beth, I think it's also important to note that you're looking at the call volume as of today. We're looking for future development. which like Jeff said we don't know we we know there's a lot of potential permits down that end of town but we don't know what the makeup of that is going to be and that that's how these triggers were built so that if the call volume grows so much we would actually need to distribute some of our apparatus and possibly an ambulance down to that end of town.

And I think the challenge is they'd still have a similar issue with not being able to get to that end of town within that four minutes of that's what's really skewing the numbers and thank you for reminding me chief.

One other thing Jeff that I think is important as we were evaluating the call volume itself Keep in mind, when everyone's deployed, you're then calling in mutual aid to those stations and it leaves open that sector of town. So meaning, depending upon where the calls are and where mutual aid's coming from, that time, response time gets modified. So as we look at the volume of calls is the critical factor here because it's unknown, right? So potentially you could add development but our call volume remains the same because it's a healthy population they have good smoke detectors and we've designed the buildings better right where it in another instance it could be that it's going to be a high risk population we have as many calls as we have at Sisters of Charity

and now dispersing the crews differently and so you're bringing in more mutual aid and that's going to be triggering the potential need for the third station. So the key as we evaluate this, I think it's important and the maps are helpful, is that response time is a critical factor. and so that goes to the siting of the location, that goes to the streetscape of how we're going to drive there and we can't necessarily accommodate you know 15 years from now the development potential that's already been potentially zoned for.

Yeah I think that the map the current response time map that shows those weak areas of town. If we stay with two stations, it won't change. and as the volume of calls grow where development is potentially now actually gonna be happening in those weak areas and we're not changing the response time there, it's going to really skew the success rate of the fire department of getting those calls under four minutes. And that's what's really going to drive down that 90% success rate. And I think that's where the third station really is importantly

If the resources are spread out, it would be the north end. If we say if the third station is built. For them to go to a call, right now, everything from station two goes. So it strips station two. Now you get another call in that district. You're waiting for the engine to come from the other end of town to cover. If you distribute your apparatus, You can get a piece of apparatus to a building, to the nines or anywhere up in there. If you have a station in that area, they can be there within one to two minutes. They can assess the situation. and if they don't need everything that's coming, because we're mandated, our two and a half story home is NFPA is 17 people. The bigger the building, the more people you're supposed to have respond. So if they can get there, in a quicker time and say, OK, we're all set. It's food on the stove.

Whatever the situation may be, they've cleared up the other companies now that can go back and cover the other end of town, cutting down on the mutual aid that we're going to call. And it makes the coverage much better.

So since the response rate is the crux of your ability and quality of coverage, What is the tolerance for the drop in response rate? If we're at 92% now and we're going to wait until we drop 3%, in order to get a station online before we drop two more percent. Is that an acceptable tolerance below the response rate we should have? Would that be waiting too long?

The NFPA metric is meant to be considered a reasonable standard for the entire country. and so you're talking about you know Arizona and the west where it's completely different way of responding to calls versus the northeast it's dense and all that so A lot sort of falls to the individual chiefs to sort of say what is right for our community. I think what we've seen over time is that this is what Wellesley and its citizens have come to expect and frankly not all towns in Massachusetts, actually a lot of towns in Massachusetts don't meet this standard and it's still considered to be acceptable. So it's really kind of collectively what you all decide. We in the group that was working on the master plan thought carefully about how can we design a metric that wasn't reactionary and really deliberately considered increased development over time. But that's not to say that

After 2%, the town couldn't say, hey, we see what's coming down the pike. We need to start the process earlier.

Go ahead, Kenny.

So I very much appreciate the trigger as the way this was constructed with there needs to be an objective trigger. but is there data that shows there's actually a correlation between increased population growth and decreased response time or could something else caused decreased response time? And if so, how are we going to know what the actual cause of the decrease in response time is?

Well, the department will have a lot of data about the calls it goes to, the type of calls, medicals, that sort of thing, and the locations, of course. So we'll understand the volumes and the particular peaks, as we do in the map right now, which will help to see if we're developing a new spike somewhere where it hadn't been previously. And particularly the drop in response time is really going to be driven by those fringe areas because if you have lots more calls in the center of town, you're still going to perform well because you're going to be able to keep up that frequency and the turnover in the units. But, you know, a smaller demand on the fringes of town will drop the rate faster than a higher demand in the middle of the town where you have more coverage.

So what you're saying is essentially is distance and traffic is the only variable or could it be something else?

while we're gonna have the type of development is really gonna determine how many calls might get sent there.

I get how many calls, but I'm talking how long it gets from point A to B. Is that determinative by the population increase? It's the road networks.

The time is really the road network, yeah.

just to add to that point the other factor is just the number of like the frequency to particular areas because again it's that division and I think on some of the larger buildings, I'm gonna use the nines, I think there's been a lot of lessons learned on how we could improve. As a for instance, someone burns something, right? And the smoke gets trapped in the hall and it triggers the fire alarms and the fire department has to come. and it takes forever to clear there because it's sort of like the ventilation system could have been designed differently. So I think what our personnel do and the chief and assistant chief can certainly speak to this, Our fire inspectors and the staff when they're there, they're sort of logging all of that. So when the next building comes through, those are criteria that they look at. Ian McMakin, who's our current deputy chief of inspectional services,

sort of logs those things, too, so that as we're looking at more multifamily, those are the first types of questions that they're beginning to ask, which are different than just our life safety personnel questions that, you know, how are we going to have people exit the building? What's going to be your sprinkler system? So that's also the sort of science behind that through the building codes and the fire codes have also expanded. So I think some of the newer construction is actually are going to be safer, not only for our personnel and the people that live there, but it resolves some of those problems that you would automatically get a fire truck there. So that's sort of the unknown, too, on the trigger, that we could, we're sort of, Construction profession is improving along the way to try and dissipate those pesky calls, I want to call them, you know, that just happened with multifamily housing.

Hasn't it been your experience that the multifamily construction like the nines generates a lot more calls for the ambulance than actual fire?

not necessarily. So you gotta remember that these buildings are designed so that they have what we call local smoke detectors, right? So there's 350 units in the nine, so essentially 350 families. So every evening between 5 and 7, everyone's cooking dinner. the way that they're designed so if you burn your dinner and there's a slight smoke condition, it's designed so that you are notified that there's a hazard within your Apartment. So that drastically should cut down theoretically on the number of calls that we receive because unless there's an actual hazard, right, what are you doing? Maybe you forget you put food on the stove, you're going back, you're going to mitigate the issue. in the situation where there is excess smoke, or maybe there actually is a hazard, where now that smoke is traveling into the hallway. The hallway is designed so that it has a fire alarm system that automatically calls the central station which notifies the fire department.

So in a case where there's actually excess smoke or an actual there, we will be notified. So I don't have in front of me, Tom, what the split would be, but there are a lot more fire type calls there. than you would imagine strictly for that reason. Because you gotta remember too, as much as we try to educate residents, and this isn't just the nines, this is anywhere in town, right? it's designed so that you keep your door closed well you'd be amazed how many people when they burn food what do they want to do they want to dissipate the smoke so they open up the door and what happens is it travels down the hall and it gets even worse and those halls are so long that's one of the things to Megan's point that we learned because we hadn't had a building of that magnitude here ever and I was part of the of the I'm not going to say design team but I was in fire prevention at the time so we were doing the inspections and the plan reviews

and that's something that you just you learn as you go right I mean having a long hallway now we know that there are different types of systems that you can actually combat that with but we as a fire department had to come up with certain protocols of how to combat Smoke Conditions, and along a hallway because we were never used to that before because we didn't have that experience.

Okay, so we then thought carefully about if we're going to stick with two stations for now and a third in the future, where should these stations go? At the same time, we were looking at The response time, we used some of that data to understand what areas, what zones within the town would be best for two to three fire stations. And it really came down to something kind of akin to what you already have. Station one and two are located in great spots. So we don't necessarily want to change the spot too much, but we do want to find locations that can actually support the growth and the expansion that's needed. So in station one, that area needed to be a larger circle because it's already fairly dense and how many sites can realistically be within there. So what we did there in particular is look at the response time

information to see how far could we shift the station before it started changing to the worse, those response time metrics. And we ended up with this rough circle that you can see on the screen there that gave us a range of properties to look at. For station two, got a lot narrower, mainly because at the same time we're doing this, we're also evaluating the facility and what we might do with programming and realizing that there was an opportunity to maybe renovate what we had there. but also there was a lot of sites that were conducive to a larger station, particularly if you wanted to keep the headquarters in that location. And then in Station 3's case, it really had more to do with siting it in that eastern section of town, somewhere in that area. And again, that's the current focus area, but it hasn't been determined in terms of what sites specifically any station would go there and that would be held off to a future decision.

We put together a fairly comprehensive study of the different sites. And we initially looked at more than that's on this chart, but several of those were not considered for even putting on the chart because there was obvious flaws with them. This chart is weighted in a way to to whittle out the highest ranking sites. We looked at a lot of issues that affect fire stations, particularly a fire station in Wellesley. Wood, the working group really considered all of these issues and what they meant and how we would prioritize them here for this town. So the weighting kind of on the left-hand side influences the score. and then the team scored all of the sites the design team did it independent from the staff in town so we wouldn't influence each other and then compared those scores ultimately came up with a for each site. And this was based on the information we had at hand.

We didn't do exhaustive studies of each site. We didn't go out and do geotechnical investigations and surveys and things like that. higher level studies to really get a good sense of what might fall out to be the best site. It wasn't also intended to pick the winner. It was intended to pick kind of a short list that would then be studied a little further. So what ultimately came out of this were the sites at Weston and the site at Washington Street.

Could I ask you to explain the numbers?

Certainly. So what we did was with each site is that we gave it a qualitative score, essentially excellent, good, Fair, Poor, and Unacceptable. And that equated to, with the maximum value you can get, how many points you would get for each of those criteria. and what's not on this chart which you can find in the report is all of the explanation that goes into what each of these issues mean and how the scoring actually works so apologies it's not here on the screen for everybody but there's a methodology that tags that, puts that together. So if you got excellent, it would mean you get 100% value of that category. So for instance, on Weston, 156 Weston, excellent for lot size program fit. Max value is 10 points. So you get all 100% of those 10 points.

But if you drop down to wetlands and floodplain, or sorry, to vehicular access, it's only good. So you get 75% of that eight points, you get six points.

And the max values are on the left there, yeah.

So we don't, I mean, we've used this chart before in other towns. We don't generally see things that hit 100%. That's just really unusual. Typically, you know, good scores are somewhere in the 80s. maybe 90s. So we really focused on the sites that were 80s and then we also wanted to include As I said before, this chart wasn't meant to exclude just finding the top scoring sites. We wanted to look at other sites that could still work rather than just focusing on Weston. So we did look at Washington Street. which is the next slide and it has the three test fit diagrams which was the next level of determining would it work on these sites. And all three sites can support a fire headquarters at them. and this would be the largest program type. They're all town-owned sites.

They all can maintain or improve their current response times, so they all kind of fit the methodology that we've been using. You can see in the conceptual diagrams, and again I want to reinforce, no design has been done. This was simply just a footprint based upon the total program need that was determined and the spatial need for getting the apparatus to drive around the site. And so we determined they would work.

The challenges come when you... On the land area, could you just maybe say what that, because there's no scale here, so the estimated acreage?

That's a great question. I think off the top of my head, it's somewhere around two acres, I believe we ended up at. So they're not sprawling facilities. They're fairly compact, but because of the size of the apparatus bay and the building and the area needed for the apparatus drive, it does take up a little bit of room. It's really best practice to have two means of and so on. We have a lot of vehicle access off of the site so that if there's blockage, an accident or telephone pole falls down on one side, you can still respond a different driveway, which is why you see the sites set up the way they are. The Washington Street has particular concerns associated with it, which is why on the matrix it didn't score quite as well. It would require Article 97 approval.

there's an impact from the existing aqueduct which is a little hard to see in the diagram but those teal lines that diagonally swoop through the site really restrict what you can do and of course you know during construction that would be a great concern to not disturb that and then it would limit the future flexibility both the actual portion of the parcel that we've identified, but also the fact that it is still surrounded by more parkland and the police station on the other side. So it really is hemmed in as much as, again, we can consider the space needs for what we need going further. We would like to leave the town with the option of still having some flexibility with whatever design ends up getting So that was deemed a priority.

Can I just make one comment on that 515 Washington Street? If you Google it, it doesn't get the right location. So we got one comment today thinking it was a different place. You need to look at it at the property viewer on the town's website, but it's next door to the police station. Yes, that is...

It's not clear from this image, but if anybody's watching this or watching it online later, this is the site adjacent to the police station and sort of the end of the park where the town hall is located.

So Jeff, when you talk about most future flexibility, you're also talking about space for expansion beyond the original footprint.

Yes, it gives you flexibility today in designing a facility that would work for today and what the foreseeable future might be. But in terms of the unforeseeable, it gives you flexibility there as well if you did need to expand it in some way.

515 is in Morton Field, is that correct? And so that's a new road you would put in?

That's the concept? Yes. Well, it's a driveway, yeah, a big driveway curb cut onto Washington Street. Yeah, the parking lot that's there is that brown patch, because at the time this was taken, it wasn't built yet. So the little brown patch above the gray area at the upper right-hand corner is where that parking lot currently sits.

And the Weston Road ones neither come in contact with the Vernal Pool. Is that right?

Correct. Yeah.

on the locations for those two on Weston Road. We actually, based upon past discussions on the conservation restrictions provided that to the architectural firm. and so they contemplated that and so it wouldn't impinge at all on any of the areas that the board has previously contemplated for the conservation restriction.

Yeah, we mapped that out in our software to make sure that that land area was not considered as part of this determination. we did look at two variations one at Howe Street and the other at Curve Street just depending on how much they might impact both the the land that's there as well as potential abutters to the south on that side of the road from the residential areas that are there as well. So pulling it further away from that and having a buffer might be slightly more preferable than having it jammed up close to those residential units there. But that's just variations of kind of on that theme of Western Road.

So this may be a naive question, but I've watched on Route 9 the trucks come out. Weston Road, kind of narrow, granite curbs. So do we have a plan for how the fire trucks would exit Weston Road and cars would pull over and the response times wouldn't be impacted? It just seems like... A natural place to reduce your response time because it's so crazy over there.

It's no secret to anybody that there's a lot of traffic there. The design team knew it, fire department obviously knows it, and all the staff knew it as well. In order to exit the facility there, we would probably install traffic systems there, traffic light or some other type of system that would allow trucks to exit. And there's ways to do that to try to minimize a backup as people are kind of queuing along Western Road to kind of keep that area open. But it is still a concern. It's probably the biggest concern for this site from the fire department's perspective because it is something they would have to live with every day.

It will be an improvement to pulling out on Central Street.

Can I ask one question on that? How many times a day does a fire engine leave the station?

it varies obviously it could be any on average I'd say probably 10 times a day because the call volume could be up into the 20s obviously depending upon whether it could be in the 30s but on average I'd probably have to say 10

And can you, as Steve tell us, and this will hopefully address some questions we'll get, is when you leave the station, do you always have the sirens on, the lights on? What generates that?

Yeah, so I know if you watch Chicago Fire or Emergency or something like that, right, there are always sirens, air horns. That's not reality. Our drivers, they're trained to drive obviously with due regard and that goes for the sirens and air horns as well. obviously any time we're responding to an emergency we have lights on. Sirens are not activated just for the sake of activating. They basically serve the purpose for when you're coming up on a crossroad or there's serious traffic that you're trying to navigate through and people don't see the lights, right? that is when the driver or the lieutenant will activate the siren so it is not a constant just because you're going out on a call you do not activate the siren to pull out onto Western Road and I'm sure that's going to be a concern if that's

the location that's chosen to those neighbors and those abutters well is that siren going to be going all day the answer is no an air horn is even less than that an air horn is designed so that if there is a child on a bicycle that is not paying attention and they cut in front of you, you would activate the air horn or something along those lines. But to answer your question, a siren is not activated the entire time you're responding to emergency it is to note it's a notification device

Okay, so recommendations moving forward is to conduct two projects. The first project being a new headquarters at the Western Road location about 26,000 square feet was identified. This would have the effect of improving the response times in the northwest section of town as sort of a byproduct of this location. also as part of this project, it was really considered to be equitable to all firefighters to make sure that in addition to providing new quarters for some that we also do a project, the other project that's really contemplated as needed to make sure that's paired up so that all firefighters had new quarters experienced the same improved conditions. So we would be proposing an upgraded station two, turning that into a substation.

So we'd move the headquarters facility, the administration, and the mechanic space to this new headquarters building which would be designed for that size and that freed up the space in station two to use the square footage we already have plus a very small addition that sort of squares off the back of the station to provide all of the modern amenities and expectations that you would have in a new building in that existing building just renovated. It would meet all of the standards. We'd be able to provide all of those types of spaces that we just discussed. Station two would continue to house the ambulance company. being central in town, that's really the best place for them. So it would stay there and those programs would be expanded and made Good from a health and safety perspective as well. This project would involve some maneuvering around how to move vehicles around so the department can continue to operate full term.

It would include some temporary space. at the end of the project, station one would become available back to the town to either repurpose for a different use or to sell the building. Sorry, project two, but this would be the future project, would be just solely for constructing the new station three on a new site. Again, we didn't find it. specifically identify any sites yet, but it would be part of the process feasibility study for that and the site chosen in that time. This would also of course come with the trigger point that we had discussed before.

Tom, go ahead.

I just wanted to clarify something. When you were mentioning trying to achieve equity between the stations. I think we have to be careful. We have a tremendous amount of capital projects ahead. and others. Thinking about the presentation that you've given, really the basis for the upgrade is to create an equally healthy facility between the two. It's not really so much just the sleeping quarters, for example, that would be an incidental and significant benefit, gender equality in terms of our commitment to a diverse workforce and all of that. but I think the main reason why you can't fail to upgrade both facilities is what the earlier part of this presentation really addressed.

but I think town residents are going to need to understand that and not think that we're simply upgrading for a new mattress. I'm being silly on purpose. That we're not just trying to do it for nicer sinks and toilets and beds It's really to create an environmentally safe and clean station for the firefighters.

Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. And I think the word equitable probably could be interpreted kind of in that line of thinking in terms of you know quality for genders and and all peoples but we're thinking about it you know more holistically about what's safe safe environment good working practices not giving some firefighters, new things that will help them and make them safe and be good quarters, good training facilities, but then leaving other firefighters to Suffer, and existing conditions for however many long years in the future did not seem like really upheld the values of the town. to your point we were proposing this first project address holistically all of the firefighters living conditions particularly addressing the health and safety components all in one sort of fell swoop

but we did want to make sure that the project was right size for the need and that's why the renovations to station two became important and not simply just a replacement with a new building. but it would still achieve all of those same results with the renovations.

Jeff, can I just add one thing? Just because it occurred to me, we might not have said this. Just so people understand a firefighter shift, because it is different than any other department in town. Our firefighters work 24 hours on, 24 hours off. 24 hours on. During that day in between, depending upon coverage, sometimes they're forced to stay as well from an overtime perspective, depending upon if someone calls out, et cetera. So when we're saying, you know, sleeping in living quarters, I just want to make sure the public understands that these personnel are on for 24-hour shifts, just as a point of clarification.

What will you need in the temporary space and how big do you anticipate that would need to be?

probably great questions for a feasibility study but at this point I can say that we have looked at this carefully with the fire department in terms of how much they'd be able to use in existing station one. And then the new station one is on board. Between those two buildings, how much could we store there? minimizing that swing space, we'll call it, to the smallest footprint has been our expectation. And I think there probably should be some discussion about what might happen with the ambulance company and whether that is part of the temporary facility or is that there's other considerations there. I think it's a premature at this point to say specifically because we haven't really gone down that road to that point. We just know that roughly it would have to house the operational forces for District 2 to handle that continuously during construction.

Steve, can you tell us when you're decontaminating as you do today, how do you collect the wastewater that comes from that? I'm assuming a lot of it's water. How does that get collected and doesn't then go on to do any further damage? How does that get treated?

That's a great question. So that goes through the drainage system that we have in the apparatus flow. again depending upon what it is that we're actually cleaning I mean typically an apparatus is going to be cleaned in the apparatus floor so that's what it is designed for as far as the as far as the gear that was more of a I'm not gonna say an afterthought, but when the design of the station, we didn't have extractors back then, right? It was very rare to even wash gear until we added the extractors several years ago.

What's an extractor?

An extractor is a large washing machine that can handle the PPE.

Okay. Yeah, it has to be heavy duty. They're heavy weight gear. but there's sand and oil interceptors on all the drains that you would have particularly with the new buildings and I know that station two has at them. memories failing me whether station one has one, but I think it does as well. That does take some of the water. all of these floor drains, the garage drains go through that system before they hit the towns systems. So it does segregate out that. But most of the particulate that's coming back It's not sort of what people might think of. It's not actively dangerous stuff. And it would get filtered out in normal filtration systems. there are systems that you can put in place for tight tanks and pumping if it's need be and I think that considering the

challenges of certain chemicals. Any new stations get designed with that in mind as well so that anything going in, any major renovations going in, we're trying to anticipate how to treat that Wastewater before it goes back out.

Thank you.

Go ahead, Beth. So I think there's no issue. I don't know anyone that would argue with providing safe The thing that I think is going to be confusing for people, because it's a little confusing for me, is I expected that you would have a primary station and then satellite stations. And this recommendation to me looks like two, fundamentally equally sized stations so that the second station now is four times as large as our Little Station on Central Street. I'm kind of having some trouble imagining that we're not

increasing our capacity either in staffing or in equipment but we have two equally sized stations that aren't aren't capable of growing for additional service calls. So that's one thing. I'm struggling a little bit with why we're moving the main fire station. And I think that may be because I don't understand what we mean by a substation. Because I'll tell you logically, I could be wrong. I think the Route 9 location is closer to the center of town than let's assume Weston Road is a proxy. I think that the current headquarters is closer to the middle of town and has more access to everything than a location on the west side of town would have.

So for your first question, just to give you an idea of how, I guess you can say, over jammed that we currently are. So at our existing headquarters, which is our station two, like Jeff said, if we plan to move the administration offices, the mechanic, and an engine company, we still don't have room in the current footprint to comply with standards. It would actually require a small addition in order to bring that station up to where it needs to be. That's how packed we are. We have to keep a lot of our equipment, some apparatus, and most of the fleet outside in the elements, which obviously isn't ideal. So just to give you an idea and draw that picture of how jammed we are. For your second question, so we're not actually relocating. Station 2.

When we say it's going to turn into a substation, all that really means is that we're moving the administrative offices down to the other end of town. That's why we would call it the headquarters.

Yeah, it's sort of incidental terminology. I guess it doesn't really mean a whole lot other than really to the fire station. For most people's daily business, first of all, they're not probably going to the fire station, but if you are a contractor or you have some issue, you're maybe going to see the fire prevention office or the chief's office. It's sort of agnostic into where in town it needs to be because it doesn't actually respond to anything. It's just kind of where is convenient for people to get to. We really need to have the engine companies and ladder companies in specific locations and we need to have enough space for those folks wherever they are. So the functionality of station one and station two in the future compared to today is mostly gonna remain the same. They're still gonna be protecting the same districts they currently protect

but because we've moved a whole bunch of auxiliary functions like, sorry, chief administration, they had the mechanic space, a bunch of actual reserve vehicles and some specialty vehicles that become called upon when needed. That's why Station 1 in the future does get larger because we actually have the capacity to make it larger. But if we had a blank sheet of paper for Wellesley, what you might see is what you just described. And then the headquarters in the middle of town is the biggest building, has all the stuff and the satellite stations, the substations are smaller. they maybe have one engine company or an engine company plus a reserve vehicle and they're probably a third of the size of that building. That's more traditional but Wellesley isn't set up that way currently and to force it into that was going to require us to make a large investment in purchasing a right size property in the middle of town, which would be a huge ask, I think.

And it ended up working out much better in this scenario where we had the space to move these functions over. The overall square footage required is not any different because we came up with this scenario versus if it was the imaginary scenario I just presented. It's the same square footage, we just shifted where that square footage goes.

So I just want to follow up. So why is the third station so much smaller? Because I think under your program, the third station is going to be 9,200 square feet.

Yeah, and that's closer to what a satellite station might be, somewhere between 9,000 and 11,000 square feet, depending on what's needed there. And so that's... Pretty much the right size for a substation. And the reason it's that much different is that the department doesn't need to get a lot more new things. It doesn't need a lot more new trucks and types of vehicles. And we're also going to be just shifting some response to that station rather than creating whole new units. So in terms of the stuff we need to house, there's not a significant demand for it. It's really just moving the unit that we would have already stationed to over there.

Keep in mind, Beth, that with that station, typically when you would build a new station, you may need to add an engine company or a ladder company, meaning you might need to add 12 to 16 new personnel that's not what we're looking to do this is simply relocating an existing engine at some point you may need to add one additional firefighter per shift to meet NFPA standards for that engine company But not to say that because again, I don't want to handcuff the next two chiefs down the road. But as of right now, our personnel is adequate for what we currently deal with. This is more of a redistribution.

So on that, just so it's clear, it's basically a ladder or the quint likely and then so the personnel to operate that and space for one ambulance.

Yeah, or a spare vehicle. It's best practice to have two bays so that if you have a reserve or need for spare, you have the space there for it. But even though it's labeled admin on this diagram, it's really just living quarters the company that's living there during their shift, which is typically four.

I think I just need to think about it because I thought Central Street was more like that. It was more like a satellite. in terms of our resourcing there. And so we can circle back. I don't want to drag us down.

Sure, there's only a couple more slides left. So in terms of implementation for project one, and that includes the headquarters building, new building, the renovation of station two, you can see the timeline here, ideal timeline, start a feasibility study, go through design, which would take a year and a half, go through construction of the station one first while you're then also building out the temporary quarters so that by the time headquarters is online you have room for everybody to go someplace and then you take station two offline and you build that building and then you're done. You can obviously see based on the timeline for the study and the design and the construction with these multiple phases, it does take a while for this to be finished. So even, you know,

the best kind of timeline that we'd like to have it's still a six year roughly seven year process from now to get to that point where we've got two new stations and people in good quarters and then I'll just skip over to project two obviously very simple but longer term and we there's no sort of timeline associated with this because we don't know what that timeline might be but We have made some assumptions about costs and what those costs might be based upon when it might actually estimate to be construction, to be constructed in 2034, which is about eight years from now. finally next steps we have the report it's pretty much complete we wanted to make sure we met with you and had feedback anything that might need to be incorporated but ultimately at this point looking towards future feasibility study, hopefully in the optimal timeline, doing that in the fall, and then

doing the feasibility study, which has a number of different particular components to it, all the due diligence that's needed, refining the design and particularly getting cost estimates, coordinating that with the capital planning and other folks in town to make sure we're all in sync. and then we show a timeline here again optimal that goes through and tied to various town meeting dates in the typical process that Wellesley's used. to go through a feasibility study design and then construction all getting individual approvals and then down at the bottom funding there's some estimates here for the costs of those again they've all been projected out to their various different start and end dates so that they have some escalation built into them. These costs for construction include all of the project costs, so they'll be inclusive of design. contingency, construction costs, and that escalation. So it would be a total sum. So that is the end of the presentation.

And we'll get back into any other questions.

Wonderful. Thank you. Go ahead, Kenny.

That was a great presentation. Clarified a lot of things for me personally. One thing that would be very helpful for me, and it kind of piggybacks on what Tom was pointing out was, To me, there's essentially three components to this. There's building a new station, there's health and safety of the fire department, and then there's modernization. and it would be great to break the cost out by those three buckets. And I know there's gonna be overlap and it's not as clean as I'm saying, but I think people are going to want to know, people are going to be supportive of the health and safety, obviously. I think people will generally be supportive of the new fire station for station one because it's 100 years old and it's tiny. The part that I think there may be some pushback is what does modernization mean?

and what does a new gym look like? Things like that, I would like to see it broken out so we can understand the components of the cost. and one suggestion for the third fire station, I think you should look at the MassBay parking lot.

Couldn't resist, huh?

Marjorie, if there are no other questions, can I just take one minute? Please, Chief. I'd just like to take this opportunity to thank Jeff Shaw and the contacts. They were great to work with. They did a lot of thorough research for this. I want to thank the user group. I don't want to say other names because I know I'll forget somebody, but Brian DuPont, Megan, the Assistant Chief, Chief Soar, of course, Joe McDonough, and I couldn't imagine doing this project without Glenn Remick, who I believe is still here. He's here. The one thing, a lot of takeaways through an exercise like this, but the talent pool we have in Wellesley through the other departments and how we work together was truly incredible. And like I said, I couldn't imagine doing this without Glenn, such a huge asset. And thank you to the board for hearing this presentation. I think tonight, I think we would agree, I hope we agree that what the material that was presented certainly demonstrates the need to invest in the facilities

in order to provide safety for our firefighters, the health and wellness, as well as safe operations in the overall community need. We realize this is a lot of material, it's a big project. and that there's going to be some big decisions down the road but we're very excited to work with you on next steps and to keep an open dialogue as we move forward and navigate through this project so thank you.

Thank you, Chief. Thank you, Jeff, Glenn, David, Chuck. It's quite remarkable. I mean, this is, for folks sitting here, this is the report that we received. And I found every facet of it so interesting. I learned a lot. And if you hadn't had our attention before when you started talking about health and safety, you definitely got our attention. and I agree with Kenny. I don't think there's too many things more important in this town than making sure our first responders and public safety officers have what they need to keep them safe and healthy. and that's going to be a shared thought throughout town. So we look forward to working with you to bring these plans to their most beneficial conclusion.

Marjorie, before you just turn to Beth real quick, we will be posting all of the document which has been posted, but we'll create a webpage so the appendices can also be viewed because they're really chock full of the data that the master plan main document that was already posted with the Friday Night Mel Synthesizes. So I know there was some data some individuals were looking for, and I really think the appendices address that. So we did talk to Stephanie Hawkinson and Andrea from our office to set up that web page, and we're hoping to have that probably even tomorrow.

Terrific. That's great. And can that go on the home page? It'll all be up there because I think people will be interested in seeing it. Thank you, Megan.

Marjorie, I agree with what everyone has said and I think the presentation was excellent and put a face on some of the issues in the report in a very compelling way. I think the thing we need to talk through not now but in the future is the citing because the citing we haven't talked to We didn't talk to us, but we didn't talk to anyone in the community about the siting and about the areas looked at and the fact that the most recommended site is in the middle of a pretty residential neighborhood so I'm just saying this so that if anyone's listening or looks at this they know that we're going to take input and think through the location that this was a first discussion on that.

So, Chief, is the thought that you'll continue to work with the consultants through feasibility and there will be a significant public engagement process in there? Where do you see public engagement on this?

Would you like to answer this, Megan?

Well, there's actually multiple schools of thought on that. And certainly Joe and Glenn, who run our multi-step process, I'll certainly allow them to chime in. In the past, oftentimes, actually, the public engagement can follow post-feasibility. I've certainly, I said to Glenn today, I think the board would probably want that and so forth, pre-feasibility or during feasibility to look at the sites. I think certainly the board, typically you want to have a preferred site that you'd be heading into feasibility to investigate and spend the time designing on a on an actual site location. So there's definitely two different schools of thought on that and you can go different directions. Obviously, our process tends to be, outside of the master plan, it tends to be a three-step process in terms of seeking funding each step of the way.

first would be a set time to go to town meeting for feasibility funds and then that's typically 12 to 18 months and then you would you know after that process go back to town meeting through the public process to seek design through schematic design and bidding funds to get a cost estimate to come back for construction, which is in the presentation. Jeff sort of laid out the timing, potential timing for those. and so depending upon how the board and the timing for that which has other implications on other projects too and we can certainly detail that in writing for the board I think. that would be where you want to begin your process or detail what your process would be. I will just say though I think it's important to understand when inciting you are fairly limited. So in the circles that were on the map that Jeff provided,

We looked at multiple locations and when you shift outside of that circle, in particular where Station 1 is located, your response times fail. So we looked at parcels just to the south of that. We looked even like Beebe Meadow. We looked at a host of different town parcels, even parcels that we could potentially through takings acquire. and as you get essentially south of the square, you start losing your response times up into precinct A. As you start getting further towards the police station, basically if you look just past the police station, you're too centralized to the core and you can't get down to Livingston Street and or up to the corner at Overbrook. So the response time to meet the NFP standards or maintain our existing standards just as Jeff had said it is station one and headquarters were located incredibly well and as a matter of fact the third station which we had which was on Walnut is basically just north of where we'd look to put the other station

at that time when we consolidated in you know the 80s it was exactly as Beth sort of said you know you took the small station down and you created a more centralized bigger operation and obviously in the past 40 years we we've had considerable growth in town. And so the location, those sites, and certainly the 10 variable sites that we looked at, and the data is compelling there in terms of the response time and we are happy to hear the board's comments but I want to just say that it is very limited in terms of maintaining our existing standards.

Yeah, it's not like necessarily like all other projects where you have an unlimited choice because we're really tied to the response time to make sure that everybody is safe in town.

So I guess I would specifically like to know if we talked to Wellesley College about the parcel right across the street from the Central Station because I've got to think the response times would be identical across the street and I don't know if we talked to the college about it but

We did not talk to the college at this point in terms of taking land there. We looked at a separate parcel off of Washington Street. We didn't look at that other parcel. Number one, because it's not just a blank parcel, because then you're paying for demolition of a structure as well. And so, you know, the cost of acquisition plays a factor into that. Now granted, You also have a building that you could declare surplus and make money off of, too, on the square after we complete this at some period of time. Station 1 has value with an architecturally significant exterior, and fire stations are adapted all the time. So that's also an economic value that I think is part of feasibility. The board will need to explore what happens with station one after the fact. and so certainly the cost implications in terms of acquisition, demolition have been factored into that table. But again, these are, this is the master plan level for the Bootsman Corporation.

My feeling is the community supports the fire department. They support health and safety. but I wouldn't want bringing a project forward before we've socialized and aligned on a location to interfere or miscommunicate with the strength of support for the fire department. That's why I'm bringing it.

Right, but we're not the ones who are going to do the master plan. That's why the fire department and the consultant did the master plan. And Megan's told us that we're fairly constrained. So we have criteria that we have to work within. We're not going to start this process all over and do it ourselves. But I also think that a public engagement at an earlier phase would be very appropriate for this project.

Well, I was just going to say, I think where we incur problems is when the public feels that they have not been notified and allowed for input earlier, when we're aware of a project coming up. This is now out in the public. We're going to be constructing a web page. Precinct B, for example, in the Western Road area is going to know that there's a significant chance that their neighborhood is going to be impacted. I think it's now that we have to start and others, providing them an opportunity to ask questions so that we understand what their main concerns might be. I think one of the most important exchanges tonight, and there's a limited number of people is one of the sirens activated, one of the air horns activated. If you're in a residential neighborhood,

All you see is what's on TV, Chicago Fire, everything else where they come blasting out of the firehouse with the sirens on. So I think what's important is for us to have exchanges with the community so that we understand what their questions are. I am betting that much of the community doesn't understand the issues of increased incidence of cancer. about the wellness issues, the health issues, about what it takes to have adequate square footage to address those functions. I think there's an exchange that needs to take place after which there's going to be a much more narrow point of disagreement in terms of a potential site. But we can't wait until we're gearing up for feasibility at town meeting. I'm not suggesting that's what's been said. But this is out there now.

And I think now is when we have to start addressing it, where there's going to be opposition that builds that doesn't necessarily have all of the accurate information.

I just want to kind of second what Tom's saying. I think that certainly some of the comments we've received are asking why there wasn't neighborhood engagement before this meeting. but I think it's really important to point out that we are starting at the master planning discussions and thinking about the most recent master plan that we're all familiar with it was the schools master plan and so you do the master plan and then you start engagement so today is the first toe in the water but I do think we should start public engagement as soon as possible just to get the questions that people have and get the answers from the chief in particular to say okay so we don't come out with the sirens on but it is Western Road so it's busy so does that mean you're coming out with the sirens on but you have experience with Central Street to say that no that's actually not what happens and here's how we deal with it but we need to answer those questions as soon as possible because

as we all know we're dealing with capital issues in the first couple of years of the Townwide Capital Planning Committee which we're now calling CAPCOM because I cannot get those words out. So the first couple of years of CAPCOM are going to be really critical. But there are four major projects that the town really has to plan for in the immediate future. And that's Morse's Pond, school air conditioning, the fire department master plan and the DPW master plan now Morse's pond and school air conditioning are at certain stages right now that they're they're going to be taking their next steps before the Capcom has released its first recommendations and reports so the The first thing that CAPCOM is looking at is what do we do between the fire department master plan and the DPW master plan? How do we break those down into digestible pieces? and which one, we really gotta figure out which pieces of those move forward.

So it's really critical that we start public engagement as soon as possible. We do have a timeline here that I think is important that we try to meet. Wellesley Public Schools is moving forward with their school facilities strategic plan in the next year but that's going to take a year to complete or how long it takes to complete and so the information for those next and critical decisions are not going to be available during this cycle of Capcom. We really need to make some progression in public engagement so we can continue to move forward in a in a very thoughtful manner. And special time meeting looking for feasibility funding is some time away. But there is the summer that we want to acknowledge that people are doing other things with. I think some immediate public engagement, a planned public engagement in the fall will be critical.

Jo just had a couple comments. Hi, Joe.

Yes. Hi. Thank you. Great work by context, too, and a great team, internal team, as the chief said. Just a couple of thoughts. We've been through this process, this type of process many times, including with the two schools, Hardy and Honeywell. I agree 100% that the public engagement process needs to begin and we fully expected this. I mean, frankly, this is the first time there's been public discussion about the master plan because we've been working to complete it. And so I think we know what to do. It's going to be a team effort again with the chief and the fire department and Glenn. and Select Boards Office, Stephanie, things that we fully expect to be able to do, starting with releasing the full report, talking about issues of concern, you know, the horns and when they're used. I think we can begin that process fairly quickly. There is some sense of urgency.

I think I heard it from you tonight in the discussion. Everybody wants to address these health and safety issues as soon as possible but when you look at a six to seven year uh... time period it's kind of sobering so The sooner we can move this process along, this project along into feasibility, I think we'll all be pleased. But again, it has to be a balance. The Townwide Capital Plan or CAPCOM committee, they have some concerns. So we need to run the project through that along with the other four projects. but part of that process is to move into feasibility the plan is to have this ready for the November special time meeting so A lot of things need to happen, but I think we have a good idea of what that is. Again, starting with the public engagement, working towards getting people familiarized with the project, heading towards the feasibility study.

and I think we can get it done, but I don't think any of us were surprised that the first reaction would be the need for this public engagement.

Yeah, thank you, Joe. As we look out to November, it seems far away, but it's only five months. And robust public engagement takes time, and it's going to take a commitment from all of us to make sure that people have an opportunity to ask their questions, get their answers. get clarification because this is the first time the board has heard this report so it hasn't been you know that it hasn't been made available to the public but we've had it we didn't see it till Friday night so We're going to start the public engagement scheduling and processing because we're almost at the summer already.

and one more thing Marjorie I'd like to add is that just to be clear in order to move forward on the feasibility study we really need to have a preferred site because you would not do a feasibility study on multiple sites. Again, thinking about some of the more costly items in a feasibility study, it's geotechnical drilling, environmental drilling, survey, things of that nature expenses that tend to add up so feasibility studies are typically done on the preferred site

And that's why there's a lot to explain. As Megan was saying, there are land acquisition costs, there could be demolition costs, there could be Topographical issues and other issues that might not appear as relevant at first glance when you're talking about a fire station, but they all go into the matrix. and have an impact on the ultimate site fitness. So it's going to be an education process for the public to understand the criteria.

The only thing I'd add is that I know under the proposal for having a location at the North 40, there's concerns from neighbors. you know arguably station one it is surrounded by a residential neighborhood now although it is in the mix obviously of the commercial district there is a high density behind their historic district as well and so I'd be interested to hear from those folks too because I think the fire department's been a good neighbor and those real life experiences and the commercial properties too. I've been myself in Lockhart when there's calls. You see the lights but you don't hear them. It's not disruptive to your restaurant experience. and so I think that's also something that we can certainly expand on. And the other thing just as part of the North 40, because I know we've gotten calls, not calls, excuse me, emails and questions in particular about like the gardens, et cetera.

So I just want to remind folks, when we acquired that, we acquired the North 40 for the municipal purposes with the notion that 50% would remain open space. In addition, we committed to three years of the community gardens. Three years. So there was no commitment by the town forever for the community gardens. I do think with the open space planning there's there's always should this go forward at that particular location the ability to relocate those as part of the broader discussion on conservation restrictions and what would be allowed. But this particular area where we're looking at, whether it's here or in the vicinity, slightly pushed back, wherever, It has always been essentially the developable area of the North 40, in particular because of the proximity to utilities within Weston Road. In addition to that, I also want to remind people that the North 40 was purchased with taxable funds as well. So although this is for municipal purposes,

We did contemplate development on the site and purchase it with the capability to expand that or to sell a portion of that land. We've had conversations over the years, and I know the board in the coming meetings will continue to evaluate the conservation restriction, but I don't want that narrative lost. Folks can look up the North 40 purchase and sale agreement, North 40 acquisition on the town's website. Those documents have been up there for many years and past documents on the North 40 acquisition report. et cetera. So municipal purpose, whether it be for a fire department, we looked at it for the schools, it didn't work out as part of our school analysis. I just don't want that thread lost as part of the discussion.

Right. It has been a few years since we acquired the North 40, so everybody might not be familiar with the terms of the acquisition, but those were the terms under which it was acquired. and when you talk about the Central Street Station, look at where the Walnut Street Station was. That's right in the middle of a residential neighborhood, 360 degrees. and it functioned fine while we needed it. We're going to have to make some concessions in order to get the right station that has the right facilities for our firefighters. All right. Thank you all very much. Thank you, Jeff. This is a wonderful report. Thank you for the presentation. Thank you, everybody.

I appreciate the time. Thank you so much.

Well, I'm sorry to say we're not quite on time. I blew it. Our next agenda item is to discuss and vote annual appointments. We have five separate motions. For the first three, I'll ask Megan to present them and then I'll turn to Colette for the other two.

So we have some perfunctory reappointments before the board. So the first couple are our annual staff appointments. and so those are yourselves as board of fire engineers which we go to town meeting and seek authorization from. Things like our school crossing guards, traffic officers, campus special police, so these are our are staff members and people on the payroll that have appointed positions. And so we would seek your approval on those appointments.

And staff has reviewed them and recommends approval of them all? Yes, yes.

So moved to approve the annual appointments of staff, town council, and labor council as detailed in the table. Appointments for select board meeting June 2, 2026. Second. All in favor? Aye.

The second list is the town clerk's election workers. So there are 100 people that Casey works with. So we thank everyone for those who volunteer because it takes a lot of people to run elections. and we will have three elections this year and so sometimes we do this a little later but Casey has we have keep in mind the first primary election basically at the start of September is it September or August Corey? and forgetting September. It's like immediately following Labor Day. So we want to take this opportunity to get these folks appointed as recommended by the town clerk.

So moved to approve the election workers as submitted by the town clerk.

Second.

All in favor?

Aye. So do you want me to go through the Council on Aging? Yes, go ahead, please. So just as an overview, the Council on Aging had three members whose terms were expiring. and Patty Chen and Bob McCarthy indicated that they did not intend to apply for appointments, so we certainly thank them for their valued service to the Council on Aging. and as a reminder the Council on Aging discussed their process for interviewing candidates and appointed a subcommittee consisting of the officers which is Judy Gertler, Peter and Pat. And they were appointed and they asked me to sit in on those interviews which I did. The interviews were open meetings, they were posted with agendas and they'll have minutes. So the Council on Aging discussed at one of their board meetings what characteristics that members felt new appointees could bring to the board and that included experience in transportation,

finance background, policy experience, strategic plan experience, connecting with people and seniors and town connections for outreach and town government experience. and when we discussed the appointments at the select board the additional quality that we added was to have a candidate with a connection to the housing authority. We certainly thought that was a desirable element. So the Council on Aging received four applications. Three of those people who applied responded to requests for interviews. and the subcommittee interviewed Karen Monahan, Renée Spencer and Anne Rader on Friday, May 15th. And as I said, I sat in those interviews. the subcommittee felt that the candidates were a good fit for the Council on Aging board and as a group brought institutional knowledge and experience of the Council on Aging Strong Connection to Patrons, Deep Connection to the Housing Authority, Experience with Town Government, and Experience with Finance and Strategic Planning. And I certainly agreed with the subcommittee's conclusion.

So the chair brought the recommended candidates to the Council on Aging board on May 21, 2026, and the Council on Aging board voted unanimously to recommend those candidates to us for appointment. and so you've received a detailed memo from the Chair of the Council on Aging so that's the recommendation on those. Any questions? So move to appoint Anne Rader, Renee Spencer, and Corinne Monaghan to the Council on Aging for a term to expire June 30, 2029.

Second.

All in favor? Aye. And just gratitude to Judy for kind of revamping her policy. following through with this extensive nomination and interview process. It was a great process this year.

It was a great process. So the next is the Municipal Light Board. So the Municipal Light Board has one appointed member, Paul Criswell, whose term was expiring and we certainly thank Mr. Criswell for his valued service to the Municipal Light Board. and again as a reminder the municipal light board discussed their process for interviewing candidates and a subcommittee consisting of the chair and the vice chair that's Ned Hall and Scott Bender was appointed and they asked me to sit in on those interviews which I did. The MLP director also sat in on the interviews. The meetings were open meetings posted with agendas and we'll have minutes. The MLB had an extensive discussion regarding the characteristics that members felt new appointees could bring to the board, including rate design experience, legal experience, finance background, Organizational Development Experience, you know, structure, succession planning, and privacy issues with AMI meter implementation.

The Municipal Light Board received five applications and four responded to requests for interviews. The subcommittee interviewed candidates over several meetings and I sat in on those interviews. there really was exceptional depth of skills and industry experience in all of the applicants and the subcommittee felt that Mr. Brett Estwanek was the candidate who was the best fit for the MLB and the initiatives that they are undertaking over the next three years. And I certainly concur with that recommendation. and Mr. Estwanek has over 20 years of experience in private equity with a career focused in the energy sector. His industry knowledge includes a depth of understanding of energy storage, distributed energy systems, microgrids, renewable natural gas, solar, biomass, propane distribution, and a broad understanding of the New England market.

Mr Estwanek is also financially sophisticated having served as a CFO, has experience setting and reviewing budgets and has experience reviewing over 70 contracts and agreements and has sat on both sides of a board. I would certainly like to express sincere gratitude to the several candidates who expressed interest in the positions and we certainly encourage them to continue their engagement with town government. So any questions on that? So move to appoint Mr. Brett Estwanek to the Municipal Light Board for a term to expire on June 30, 2029. Second. All in favour? Aye. So the last one is the Townwide Capital Planning Committee which we're now naming Capcom. Thank you Corey for that suggestion. So as a reminder, the board established a subcommittee consisting of myself and Tom Ulfelder to interview applicants for the position of the citizen representative.

The Executive Director, Megan Jopp, Chief Financial Officer, Rachel DeRoach, Facilities Director, Joe McDonough, and Project Manager, Glenn Remick were invited to join the interview process. Questions were centered around motivation for applying for and understanding of the citizen representative position, capital planning and financial decision making experience. Governance, Collaboration, Public Engagement, Project Evaluation and Planning Approach and the Committee Operations and Expectations. So four applications were received and two applicants withdrew before interviews. and as a reminder when CAPCOM policy was finalized, the preferred experience for the citizen representative position was identified as having a background in construction or construction finance. The two candidates interviewed had extensive professional experience and one candidate with a background as a senior executive for a large construction firm in the construction industry

and another candidate with legal and investment industry experience, leading investment strategy, transaction underwriting and regulatory compliance for a large investment fund. The subcommittee is recommending Mr. Tom Gohmert as the citizen representative for Capcom. Mr. Gohmert has a 40-year career in the construction industry with 15 years as the CEO of a large construction firm. Mr. Gohmert has extensive understanding of the town's capital process, having served on the permanent building committee for several years. The subcommittee was particularly aware that the initial period and therefore the first term appointment will be the most challenging. is a committee undertakes initial capital planning process and is grateful to have the depth of industry knowledge that Mr. Gohmert brings. Again, the subcommittee would like to express sincere gratitude to the several candidates expressed interest in the position and encourages them to continue their engagement with town government and we had wonderful conversations.

So any questions on that appointment?

I completely support the recommendation. I just was hoping that this does not mean that Tom is leaving PBC.

I have not added anything to that.

Great, because he's a huge asset. Certainly is. I think he will be a huge asset on the additional committee.

So moved to appoint Thomas Gohmert to the Townwide Capital Planning Committee for a term to expire June 30, 2029. Second. All in favor? Aye.

Thank you very much, Colette. Our next agenda item is to discuss and vote minutes of May 19th.

Yep, I circulated compiled edits at about 5.30 this evening. They were very minor, grammatical and ministerial in nature. I only got edits from one board member and I circulated those an hour before the meeting. and again, a very minor.

Are there any comments on the amended minutes? Okay. So move to approve the minutes of May 19, 2026 as amended.

Second.

All in favor? Aye. All right. Our next agenda item is an executive session. I request a motion to enter into executive session to conduct strategy with potential litigation with Albany Road Wellesley LLC and 40 Oakland Street, as I declare that having such discussions in open session will be detrimental to the town.

So moved to enter Executive Session under Mass General Law, Chapter 30A, Subsection 21A, Exemption Number 3. to conduct strategy with respect to potential litigation with Albany Road, Wellesley, LLC and to conduct strategy with respect to potential litigation regarding 40 Oakland Street. as the chair has declared that having such discussions in open session is detrimental to the town and to invite Megan Jopp, Corey Testa, Town Council Tom Harrington, Town Council Eric Russell, Smith, Special Counsel Nick Shapiro, and Special Counsel Robbie Hopkins to join the meeting. Following the close of executive session, the board will return to open session for the sole purpose of adjourning the meeting.

Second.

Kenny?

Aye.

Beth? Aye. Tom?

Aye.

Collette? Aye. And I vote aye as well.