Select Board September 8, 2026

Good evening. I'd like to call to order the select board meeting of September 8th, 2026 in the Giuliani Room at Town Hall The meeting is being held in hybrid format, broadcast live on Comcast Channel 8 and Verizon Channel 40. And available for later viewing on wellesleymedia.org Select board members here in the Giuliani room are Tom Ulfelder, Vice Chair, Colette O'Frank, Secretary, Beth Sullivan Woods, Kenny Largess and myself Marjorie Freiman. Also here with us are Executive Director Megan Jopp and Assistant Executive Director Corey Testa, and on Zoom with us is Town Council Eric Russell. Our first agenda item is citizen speak. We typically allow a 15 minute period for public comments on items not on the meeting agenda, and we ask that speakers limit their comments to three minutes.

I know we have at least one request for citizen speak.

Excuse me, two individuals for what?

Hi Michael, hi Linda

and Michael just hit the button until it's green.

Good evening. Michael Tobin, 45 Cottage Street town meeting member and president of the Wellesley Conservation Land Trust. This is regarding our citizen petition for White Pond. White Pond is an important six acre sanctuary, pond and connected town waterway at 2500's Road. of concern here is that White Pond may or may not be protected by a 1955 trust that may, or may still exist. What we do know is that the property has been privately preserved as open space for more than 70 years The current trustees and property owners have been working toward a no fee transfer to the town. And last year, Town Meeting funded the NRC's ecological instructional assessment to better understand the benefits, risks, potential future costs of ownership That assessment was an important logical first step.

The citizen petition now before special town meeting asked the town to take the next one, fund town council to investigate the legal and title questions and recommend a clear path forward. Over the next two months, I asked the NRC, the select board, the trustees and the land trust to work together to address as many of the remaining questions as possible. There are issues we may be able to resolve before town meeting the trustees have heard prior NRC requests and have already dropped all conditions upon a transfer. but I think it's equally important to recognize that regardless of how much progress we make, some legal questions will remain. Is an agreed eminent domain taking ultimately the cleanest way to resolve those questions and historic interests? Those are not questions the NRC, the trustees, the land trusts or the select board should be expected to answer on their own. they are exactly the questions town councils should answer and have the resources to fully address.

So in many ways all roads lead to the same place, the prudent next step remains a focused legal investigation so the town can understand its options before making any decision to potentially acquire this Wellesley natural resource that is not currently managed or under the control of the town. Rock Ridge Pond was once privately protected and now it's under the control of the NRC. The North 40 was once privately protected, and now its under the controls of the town. The Mass Bay Forest has been privately protected and its fate is unknown. I ask the select board to engage in this process now and after reviewing the remaining questions over the coming weeks ultimately support the citizen petition as the next logical step in the process, the NRC and town meeting have already begun. Thank you

Thank you Michael. Hi Linda.

Hi, I'm Linda Siebenson 2900s Road. I am a trustee of White Pond, and at this point really I'm the only active trustee. There are supposed to be three. Pete Pedersen resigned when he moved out of town, and Hugh Johnston is stepping back. But the truth is even when there were three of us, we were doing what we could but we don't really know how to take care of a pond. And the world has changed a lot since the 1950s when this trust was set up So I echo everything that Michael just said. The next step is to figure out the legal side of things and look forward to working with you all, try to put this property into the hands of people who can take care of it. Thanks. Thank you both very much.

Is there anyone else here for Citizen Speak? All right, Megan we'll turn to you please for the executive director's report

Thanks, Marjorie. I just have a few updates. First, I wanted to remind folks of the 9-11 ceremony scheduled for Friday at 10 AM at Fire Station Headquarters which is located on Route 9. I also wanted to provide an update and thank our DPW folks at the Worm Playground, opened Friday just before the long weekend And so as I was leaving on Friday afternoon, I saw it had just been opened and should have stopped and grabbed a picture to see all the kids that were playing on. It has been very well received and we have a little fun fact that it is the highest tower in Massachusetts for play structures. And so, we're winning on that one. The other thing I just wanted to note I got to get this lined up here.

So, I wanted to take a moment to recognize our remarkable group of recently retired members of our Department of Public Works. So together, Michael Carmody who was our Health and Safety Program Manager for 15 years. Antoine Parker, Highway Foreman A for 38 years William Romers, Highway Foreman A, 32 years. Cricket Flass, Park and Tree Superintendent, 41 years. Depper Serna, Executive Assistant, 32 years. Mike Quinn, Park and Highway Superintendent, 24 years Bill Nagel, Water and Sewer Foreman A, 33 years. Dwight Smitty Rogers, Water & Sewer General Foreman, 51 years. And Peter Maloon, RDF Transfer Hall Equipment Operator, 25 years. They represent an extraordinary 291 years of service to the town of Wellesley. When you look at this group, it really says something about the DPW.

These are not simply long careers that represent decades of institutional knowledge, commitment to public service and countless days and nights spent doing the work that keeps Wellesley running. their contributions can be seen throughout the community in our roads, our parks and trees water and sewer systems recycling operations and then day-to-day work behind the scenes that residents may never see but depend upon every day and while every one of these careers deserves recognition, I do want to note one truly unusual milestone. Dwight Smitty Rogers retires after 51 years with the town more than half a century with one organization and he's also a lifelong resident in town is something we may never see again. Smitty's worked alongside generations of DPW employees and the knowledge, stories, and traditions he carries are part of the history of the department. all of these people are people who've worked for a long time and then there's Smitty with 51 years. And that becomes part of the institution itself.

So to all of our nine retirees, I wanted to say thank you. Thank you on behalf of the town, thank you for the years, the early mornings, the storms, the emergencies, the problem solved and the work done quietly every day 291 years of service is certainly an extraordinary legacy and the town of Wellesley's better because of it so we just wanted to wish each of you a very happy and well-earned retirement. And that's all I have Marjorie.

Thank you very much, Megan. I hope DPW has taken the time to mine all that institutional knowledge and take advantage of it going forward for the next 291 years. That's quite extraordinary, thank you. It is unusual for people to have that long a career anymore. It's unusual for someone to have a 20-year career much less a 50 year career so thank you for recognizing them Our next agenda item is the Consent Agenda. One item has been removed from the consent agenda, so we have five items remaining on the consent One is to vote a one-day license for the Wellesley Historical Society's celebration of its opening exhibit on the American Revolution on September 17th. The second is to vote two one-day licenses for the Wellesley Freed Library Foundation, one for the Hills Branch reopening on September 30th

and the second for the Books in Bloom annual event on May 7th, 2027. The library trustees have approved both events. The third is to appoint James Park as a public wearer at the RDF The fourth is to vote the special legislation on digital posting of public hearing and legal notices. and the last one under consent is to approve the Norfolk County Intergovernmental Agreement for Weights and Measures. which would put in place an agreement for the provision of the town's weights and measures services through Norfolk County. So unless there are any questions on those five items, I'd request a motion.

Move to approve the consent agenda as amended.

Second.

All in favor? Aye. Okay, the item that was removed from the consent agenda was to vote the Hegarty Pump special legislation which is for a land swap with the MWRA so they could complete a new project. Town Council reviewed a request made during our last discussion and I believe Town Council Eric Russell is here to answer any further questions. So would the board like to pose any questions or, go ahead Beth?

Marjorie, I just want to clarify it's not a land swap. it's a land transfer with no swapping. So Eric, thank you for the feedback that the recommendation is not to put in stipulations in the legislation, but rather to handle the stipulations in the deed transfer. What is unclear to me is that town meeting voted to the select board the right to affect the deed but that stipulation won't come to the select board again. From your memo, it sounded like moving forward the Board of Public Works would be negotiating the deed transfer and I am concerned that as the board charged by town meeting with ensuring an equitable transfer of that land for the taxpayers,

I don't know how we can enforce that the stipulation of a clawback should the state not use the land for the intended purpose of being a connection of the MWRA line. If that doesn't happen, how do we ensure that there is a clawback provision?

So town meeting voted to authorize the select board to submit special legislation requesting or authorizing the land swap between NRC and the Board of Public Works. once this land is in the hands of the Board of Public Works and no longer subject to Article 97 pursuant to the special act, it is up to the board of public works to negotiate the transfer to the MWRA. So because the land isn't under the select board's care, custody and control, and that was not part of the town meeting vote there's no requirement for it to come back to the select board for approval of those documents. In terms of how you ensure that's in there, I think it's just a matter of coordination with the Board of Public Works discussing with them and requesting them to ensure that this is in the transfer documents.

have we had any discussions with the Board of Public Works to ensure that they would support that stipulation or because if we haven't I feel like it should be in the legislation.

So I'm not sure what conversations may have been had with the Board of Public Works other than I know they have been, Tom has let them know that this is a request from the select board that this be included and we my understanding is that at least from the staff that I've heard from, I haven't heard that there are any issues with this request. So right now it's my expectation that this is going to be in the transfer documents

Do you know, I think Eric you were going to facilitate or see if there was any objection from the state for having that in the documents. Did we hear back?

We have not heard back. They requested a copy of the specific deed language and we are preparing that now to send to them, but their initial reaction was to request a copy

So if the land will no longer be under select board control and we have no further control on the transaction, and it's not gonna come back to us. And we've asked BPW to put that language in there is there anything further that the select board should do?

I don't believe so. I think it's just a matter of coordinating with the Board of Public Works and MWRA at this point.

Any other questions? Okay.

move to approve the special legislation language authorizing the town of Wellesley to transfer control of certain parcels of land held for conservation or recreation purposes and file an authorized file and authorize filing with the general court.

Second.

All in favor? Aye.

All opposed? Okay Marjorie could I move that the board recommend to the Board of Public Works that they add a clawback provision into the deed

I understood town council say that he communicated to the board that was our request. Is that right, Eric?

Yes, Tom communicated that request to the Board of Public Works.

Okay. I would consider that request made if it came from Town Council?

As long as... I don't think we ever got a consensus of the board that we supported that. That's why I was asking just so there was no confusion, that it was from one and not the full board

Well, it was your request to pull it from consent so I assumed that there was consent from the rest of the board to approve the way it was. Okay thank you very much Eric All right, moving on to our next agenda item. Too much paper. Thank you very much. I know the computer's not on the same page as the... Our next agenda item is to discuss and vote the select board appointee to the Municipal Light Board. And we have chair of the board, Ned Hall with us tonight. Hi, Ned.

Thank you. I'm here to report that on August 19th, the Municipal Light Board approved a motion to recommend to the select board that Marco Gotti fill the open position of appointee member. some background, we implemented the select board appointments policy as approved in January 2026. So that entailed the board meeting and discussing the skills that we would seek in a member, informing a subcommittee to conduct the interviews. We had great response. We had four very qualified applicants, I've talked to each one of them afterwards and encouraged them to continue their effort to contribute to the community It was a really interesting mix of skills. All of them would have been additive in their own way to our board, but the skills that we specifically targeted

were financial skills as a priority, energy market knowledge, understanding of utility incentive programs. rate design experience, organizational development experience legal skills and ultimately board governance experience with boards Each one of them had some subset of those skills, but Marco had the majority of them relative to the other candidates. So the subcommittee came to his conclusion after interviewing and unanimously approved recommending Marco to the MLP board. The MLP Board, as I said met discussed it, all the resumes and letters were provided to the board for their review. and then we unanimously voted as a board to put Marco's name forward to the select board. Thank you.

Thank You very much does the Board have any questions?

Moved to appoint Marco Gatti to the Municipal Light Board through June 30, 2028. Second.

Thank you very much for having such a nice, thorough process and a great recommendation for us. Well, this is probably the last time I'll say this tonight but we're ahead of schedule. Our next agenda item is to discuss the recommendations of the fire station master plan Siting, Chief Mortarelli, Assistant Chief G. John Domenico, Chief David Soar and I believe Joe McDonough and Glenn Remick from FMD will be joining the board We'll be continuing the discussion of the pre-feasibility fire station master plan study. And Chief, with your permission I'd just like to level set where we are, give a little bit of background.

The master plan facts, FAQs, meeting recordings and all other documents have been posted to the town's website so interested residents should check the website. On the home page there's a box for Fire Station Master Plan and if you click there it'll take you to the dedicated page with all of those documents. The Master Plan was begun in June 2025 and completed and presented to the Select Board on June 3rd, 2026. The planning group was comprised of Chief Mortarelli, Assistant Chief DeJohn Domenico, Chief David Soar Megan Jopp, Glenn Remick and Joe McDonough from FMD Eric Arbini, our former planning director and Brad Downing from the Planning Department. And Brian DuPont, IT Director working with three consultants from Context Architecture

and additional six firms consulted to the project on such things as response time, fire codes, mechanical electrical and plumbing, civil and structural engineering and cost estimation. The master plan included the final report, eight appendices covering among other things existing conditions, space needs, departmental operational analysis Response Time Analysis, Cost Estimates, a Site Selection Matrix and a detailed explanation of the site selection process. In summary, the master plan included findings that both existing fire stations are undersized and cannot support modern fire department operational needs or adequately protect firefighter health and safety. Moreover, there are deficiencies in terms of housing new firefighter apparatus.

Neither facility has space for critical decontamination of personnel and gear or the ability to separate firefighter living quarters from that apparatus or gear, leaving firefighters exposed to contaminants and at an elevated risk for adverse health conditions above and beyond those encountered during regular working conditions. Finally, neither station can be expanded appropriately to accommodate all needs. Together these conditions create extreme urgency to address the shortcomings in our current fire stations and adequately support current needs of the department. As currently projected, it would already be 2033 before a renovated substation on Route 9 and a new headquarters could be completed.

The analysis showed that certain operations and administrative staff could be relocated from Station 2 on Route 9 to a new headquarters, while Station 1 needs to be replaced. Multiple potential sites were studied and 12 were evaluated on a predetermined objective list of 14 criteria applied equally to each site. To meet national fire protection safety response times, a radius was developed within which a new station could be built near the existing Station 1. Two locations on the North 40 received the highest total scores and a third location at 515 Washington Street was also selected for further study. Preliminary fit tests were conducted on each of the three sites. The town currently owns the properties on the North 40, while the property at 515 Washington Street is within Morton Park

and protected under Article 97 of the Massachusetts Constitution as parkland, under the custody of the Natural Resources Commission. The facts and FAQ documents posted on the website address multiple questions raised by community members. including traffic and access for fire apparatus on Weston Road why locating a proposed fire station next to the police station is not the preferred option Why acreage of two acres as estimated need is being considered for the new headquarters? Potential Neighbor Disturbance along Weston Road from Fire Apparatus, Safety of Morses Pond and Drinking Water Resources from Chemicals, history of the acquisition and uses considered for the North 40, and future of the community gardens. Additional work on these questions continue.

The agenda for this evening is for the board to ask questions and review responses to questions raised at the June 25th community meeting. The board will schedule time for public comment about the master plan siting next week at our September 15th meeting where we will also continue our deliberations. Notice of these two meetings has been sent to residents and interested parties. Following the September 15th meeting, the board will host a public charrette on October 1st at the Honeywell School from 6.30 to 9 p.m., and postcard notices to abutters, other interested parties, and everyone who provided an email address at previous meetings was mailed last week. We ask that all town meeting members and community members possible attend the charrette.

Public input received at the Charette and considerations from the Board's discussions will inform the Board decision of whether and how to proceed with a request for feasibility study. the current schedule anticipates that request to go forward at Annual Town Meeting 2027. Tonight, we will be voting on whether to submit the project proposal form to the capital planning committee for the project to keep it on the capital plan. We will need to decide by November whether to move forward with feasibility. Thank you very much for your indulgence and I'll turn it over to the board for questions, and to the chief for any comments.

I'm sorry. I just before I give comments tonight, I just wanted to address one specific issue. So the fire department master plan is strongly linked with the North 40 and although these are separate matters this board is working on through both on these topics, some items must be discussed together. And so to that end I feel it's incumbent upon me as liaison to the Natural Resources Commission to correct some misstatements in the NRC's discussion of the North 40 and the Fire Department Master Plan at their meeting of September 1st. I want to say I appreciated very much the outline that was given by the director Schmidt and the thoughtful and detailed and constructive comments and feedback from the meeting. There were, however, a number of misstatements and I think that I need to correct the record. The misstatement were to the effect that the Select Board had done nothing on the North 40 since its purchase

that the process and intent of the purchase was to protect the North 40 entirely as open space, and that process is not being respected. That nothing has been done in connection with the vernal pool, the dump area, and the community gardens and most egregiously of all, inferring that the fire department staff have circumvented their public engagement process suggesting that the station be sited on the North 40 because nothing was happening there including with the consultants to that effect. In response, I want to note that the town's North 40 website details the extensive work that Select Board has undertaken since the purchase. including assessment and remediation of the former landfill site which required funding from town meeting in partnership with the mass contingency plan The Select Board worked with the Community Preservation Committee on installing the viewing area and elevated wooden path around the Vernal Pole. The intent of the purchase was not to protect the North 40 entirely as open space, but rather at least 50% as open-space and up to 50% for municipal uses.

The Select Board has worked extensively with the CPC, or the Community Preservation Commission to determine the conservation restriction including consideration of appraisal drafting the Conservation Restriction Agreement and authorized uses The select board convened meetings with town boards to chart a path forward for the North Forty and at the request of the planning board, the North 40 planning process was wrapped into the unified planning process. The public engagement process we are currently planning is based on the Select Board's Public Engagement Process Outline, which is on our website. And that itself is based municipal best practices. The Vernal Pole is at the center of this Community Preservation Commission's recommendations for the conservation restriction and that follows strong advocacy from the NRC on that point. Finally, the assertion of improper actions on behalf of the fire department and staff is completely unfounded, undeserved. And I object in the strongest fashion to that assertion.

I do invite and encourage all 10 partners and stakeholders to avail themselves of the information that is publicly available on our website, to watch our discussions and participate in the public engagement process. So that's a comment I felt I had to make before I start. I have more comments than questions, so I wonder if we might turn it over to other board members to ask questions at this point and then I'll come back to my comments.

Okay, anyone else like to start with questions? Go ahead Kenny.

I apologize in advance, this could be meandering but it'll get to a point eventually. But the background I think matters so my focus is on the site selection and so I spent a good amount of time with The Matrix and trying to understand how that was derived. And so the way I understand it is 12 sites were looked at based on the criteria in the master plan. And then 14 criteria were overlaid onto each of those 12 sites, and before that was done, the criteria was picked before the sites were determined. Is that correct? Don't worry, this is not a trick question. Was the criteria used to evaluate sites determined before the sites were picked?

I believe so, yes.

That was not done by the fire department. Right, that was done by consultant who does this for work they have a criteria you have to meet for stations

What I'm trying to establish is that the process was to put that matrix together was, I think thorough and done in an unbiased way. And so why that's important to me is it was done in advance.

Kenney, can I just maybe add to that? So I just wanted to highlight more for the public. I've sent this directly to you but in Appendix H of the Fire Station Master Plan those are the meeting notes Excuse me. And Joe McDonough actually went through, Joe was helping me address some of Kenny's questions and pulled out those sections but that is in there where it says you know they brought it up they were going to return to us things of that nature just to document that process

So the 14 criteria are overlaid on top of those sites. And when I went through the sites, you had three objective criteria where you could actually pull data and say this is the response time, this is how the communications and utilities are impacted. And that was so the way that the scoring work is there's 100 points right? And everything was scored out of a hundred and 156 Weston Road came out the highest. So everything was scored, it was based on like a 10 point scale in a certain number of there was a weighting to each. So for the purely objective criteria 17 points were assigned. Somewhere between subjective and based on professional expertise, you had another 83 points that were

I would view that more as gray okay so um so to me it really matters like how are the weightings done. So there's two components, there's weightings and then there's actual score because that's what's going to give you your whatever the score is out of 100. And so when I looked at the weightings, like I said 83 points out of a hundred were sort of subjective to some extent But what I also did was, because I'm a cynic at heart. I stress test every one of those weightings and if you were to reshuffle the weightings in any possible way. So for example, I took the weighting out of it and said weight everything equally everything gets it's out a 10 point scale or take out the land acquisition cost out of the equation totally, or take neighborhood impact and multiply by two. The response was exactly the same.

156 Weston Road was the one that would have been picked under any of those scenarios, so that's by way of background. The other component to the math is what each score was within the matrix. So here's the location, here's criteria, what's the score that goes in the bucket? and so that is, question was how did you figure that out? And so context provided a plan for lack of a better word articulated their process for coming up with scores. And it was pretty detailed, and the two most important parts to me were first it said the consultant is going to score every one of the criteria independently and then the town is going to score every one of those independently. And then there's gonna be a reconciliation process where if

if town said nine or excellent and the consultant said excellent, well that's fine. It all works but if the town said excellent and a consultant said poor that's where the rubber hits the road to me because that could dramatically affect outcome. And so what I asked Megan this, but I didn't get to read the response yet was I want to understand what the reconciliation, like I said it's a long-winded way to get to probably a short answer. What was the reconciliation? Did you follow that process and what was the reconciliation? How did the reconciliation work? Were there material differences in the scoring, and if so is that all documented in those notes. Sorry, that was very long.

Maybe I'll start and then Chief and Joe and Glenn feel free... So that is the process that was followed. In terms of documenting where there were modifications, I think it would sort of happen they would give their numbers and we'd review each site so it sort of happened in real time. Weston Road, so if they had them weighted equally I would say well hold on one's getting closer to the and that's actually in the appendix H1 is getting closer and we also have a conservation restriction that we're looking at. Let me send you where sort of the draft conservation restriction is to see if that would abut next to where you'd be looking at another one when initially we were looking at the 515 Washington Street they weren't looking contextually that that's owned by NRC or Parkland right so then when you get into that discussion of well, what are the barriers?

Well, the town already owns it. It's also Article 97 land and by the way this is what that means in terms of the aqueduct and so on, distance loading what you can put over it. What you cannot put over as we looked at a good for instance would be two to 20 Linden Street right? So I said, well that's gonna be a significant expense. Here's what it cost us to take like 2,000 square feet of that land when you look at the value in terms of what it would be from an economic standpoint in terms taking it and here's potential barriers. and so those would be I think the discussion items that we would have as part of the initial rankings.

Can I just chime in for a second? So I said there was subject, 83 points were subjective Sort of. That's sort of what I was referring to, is what Megan said. So you look at a parcel of land and you could extrapolate the value based on a slice of it. So that's not formulaic necessarily, but that's based on sort of professional opinion that's grounded in data. It's not just kind of put your thumb up and guess.

Well, Turner Road's another one. So you look at that, that seems like a great location until we say well you should go there in the summer and you understand how the parking situation works where we already have significant parking issues, we have no parking because of the people that come in you know when the lots filled so that would be a poor impact to the residents to add that additional or potentially access to that particular location. Also noting that then you're closer to the landfill as we dictate where the AUL is in terms of accessing that also looking at where we had the conservation restriction so on Turner Road there was a very small window of opportunity which then brings it, brought it I think just outside because we then have to go up Turner Road or left or right. And so it did impact the response times when then we looked at that as a for instance, but Steve I don't know if you want to add or the Chief's assistant chief add to that?

I think you hit the nail on the head but yeah if we're looking at you like deer in headlights because a lot of the matrix piece of it We really didn't have, we were just there for the results. There was some dialogue about things like you said about maybe an acquisition of land or something like that, that you knew was going to cost $10 million. What's that gonna do to the score? but as far as the, we were just kind of there waiting for their results so that then we could discuss them. So what went into it? We had a very small P or really nothing to do with our this table here our responsibility was to look through the lens of the fire department from an operational standpoint. So there are many different pieces to this and many sides that went into this, the political piece, the building peace with Joe and Glenn and then of course the operational piece with us. So we really didn't have a ton to do with context portion of that, I know Jeff Shaw from Contex will be here next week.

So if there are any specific questions about the matrix or the weighting of it, he would be the person to ask because he designed it.

So on that point then who was the That makes sense. Who was, from a town's perspective providing kind of the counterpoints what context logic scoring was?

and I certainly have my opinions on parcels. But I would say Joe and Gwen also with their expertise in how we're going to construct, provided a lot of input there was one actually when we looked at the Dana Hall soccer field and I think the chief got some announcements that's right next to the dormitory they have to cut food there to get to the various areas it's a huge walking corridor like that's not going to make sense to take that particular location. Jill has a stand up. Oh, sorry. Hi, Jill.

Hi, so a couple of things I'd like to say about the site selection process. And I think it starts with the working group and we had great representation. I don't know if everybody knows who was on the group, aside from the fire staff. Megan, former town planner. We had the current town planner at the time. We have the IT director who also oversees GIS. So we had people that really knew the town know the town and I think that was really helpful in terms of the process. And so we hired a consultant who is an expert in designing fire stations They have a process they use that they ran by us. And, you know, they have criteria that they use. They start with base criteria or issues as we called it

they presented this to us and the working group all weighed in on that. And said, is that appropriate criteria for this project? And generally it is there's no surprises, right? The criteria of the issues. And then we also weighed in you know the weighting, whether it was 10-9-8 whatever the scoring I don't think there was much of a surprise or difference between what we thought were the proper weights for those individual issues and criteria and what the consultant thought. Even as we started to apply actual scores to sites, we would question them about certain things, as Megan was just saying, based on the collective knowledge of the working group. I mean, the working group knows a lot more about the town of Wellesley than the consultant did.

But the consultant understands process so I don't know if that's helpful in understanding how we looked at the site selection process

It's helpful understanding how the matrix was put together and that it did follow their process. For the most part, it sounds like.

Anybody else? Beth. So just to follow up on that, did the preferred site change after you had the discussion, so it sounds like context came with their scores. And then there was a discussion about town staff perspective on how they looked at the scores did the preferred site change after the discussion?

I believe that... Yeah, I don't believe anything changed. I think those two parcels on the North 40 were always one and two in 515 Washington, I believe was number three. I'd think the discussion was more along the lines of what Megan was referring to earlier, and they were probably parcels that were down towards the lower end. And whether are they even feasible? Do you include them? when the, we'll use that as an example. When Dana Hall came up and we asked well where on Dana Hall? Anyone that's familiar with the campus I mean there's no way you could ever put a fire station on that piece of land. I mean it was literally in the middle of the campus Blocking a dormitory from, it was in between the dormitories and the classroom building. So I think that the conversations we recall having were more on that end of it, but I don't recall anything changing as far as the order of the preferred parcels.

So I spent a lot of time thinking about how we got to here because it's, we're kind of in a weird place. given most of our town projects. Because usually, our town project start by the time they get to a completed master plan there's been a lot of community input and so this project I think was not like the others because it came more fully baked, and I think the feeling in the community is it looks done because we didn't have that input part, but it's got solid recommendations and it's hundreds of pages long. So I think for us we need to

align on what the process is because I think, I'm gonna just say as those of us that have been through a lot of big projects we're used to the project being a concept having a joint staff and board subcommittee task force, a lot of input, right? A lot of vetting. And then by the time the report comes out there's a lot more knowledge about what's going on. And now we're in a different place because it came out and there's like a fire hose of knowledge but there wasn't a lot of working up to it so I think that's part of the challenge that we need to unpack over the next several months of kind of the place where the community gets to influence what they ultimately buy or don't buy.

And so that's, I think for us to figure out and I don't feel like we've fully figure that out and articulate it in a way that we can explain to the community how we go from of a master plan to something that everybody understands and is aligned with. So it was my first kind of takeaway.

I'd like to respond to that briefly. We had site selection issues with Tolles Parsons, we looked at different places for Tolles Parson's, we've looked at This is very different because the fire department is working within a constricted area to meet their response times. It's not like they could pick any place in town and that makes the process very different because citizen input can be anything we want, but it still has to meet the response times. So it's irresponsible to say, well this is not what we want. We wanna put it over here if that can't adequately protect everybody in town so I would say that is a huge difference in this process.

Yeah, so I just would like to respond to that. I don't think it's as clean cut as that because I think our residents can understand the ground rules. Like we have to have a response time of this and work on that or look at the second piece, which is the assumption that we can't expand the main. We can't buy land to expand the Main to make Central Street replacement smaller. I think that conversation is something the community's used to doing and we kind of jumped that step, so we need to figure out how cover that ground so that people are on board with how we move forward.

Can I just make a comment to that, Beth? So if you say we jumped that step but the So in the master plan, they looked at that option. They looked at several different options and one of which was to expand headquarters. As a matter of fact going into this I kind of figured that would be maybe that was the best option. Again, but that was purpose of this we didn't know so we didn t know if they were going to say a two station model was going to suffice. Was it going to be a three-station model? Was it gonna be a four station? We had no idea, but they looked into expanding and came to the determination that it wasn't feasible because of the landlock, the train tracks to the north historical building to the east privately owned businesses to the other side. And then, of course, Route nine so they pretty much from the beginning said that's not an option and that's when they pivoted and said, we would probably need to build a new headquarters.

So I hear what you're saying but I wouldn't say that step was missed it was delved into by the consultant and it was put to the side for a different option.

And we're also governed- It didn't happen, but we've had projects where we bought land to solve the problem like the high school. We bought a lot of homes to fix the space challenge we had. And I think without that discussion happening and conscious buy-in or not in the public, it makes it hard to accept that that's not an option. That's all I was trying to say.

I think part of that from our end of it is that we are governed as the fire department as to certain mandates that have to be in that building because none of us knew how big this building was going to have to until we knew what the standards were that you had to have different spaces for different things. But we didn't know exactly square footage-wise how that all would play out into the building. We knew station, your station one right now is too small Headquarters, we really thought that we could do that and renovate headquarters and have it be big enough. we didn't know but there's a strict guideline that they have to follow and they come in and say, that's what it is. It doesn't fit on your footprint They told us that right away. As soon as they walked through the building, they said we can't accommodate giving you can't have what the NFP requires you to have and put it on this piece of property and continue to run your operations the way you do.

Well, even if you could have expanded station two, you still needed another station on the west side of town. That would not have solved the whole problem. You still need another station.

Just a follow up on that. So we looked at acquiring, or at least thought about acquiring space at Dana Hall and that was a 2-20 or Linden Street. and so did we look at acquiring the cat hospital? And if so, would that have been big enough

So we did look at that and I put the map up exactly for that reason, Kenny to tell you two things about it. Number one looking at additions to this side of the structure This is a National Register historic substation, and this is the main entrance in. You know if you're heading eastbound this is how not just the fire department but DPW and MLP access the site so any addition to sort of this part of the building um oh you can all right I just like hope you can see my cursor basically impedes the flow to the site. And this is a pinch point to basically get the vehicles Brown, and this is the main exit. Right? So you could potentially bridge over to the Cat Hospital, right? And we did look at that. The issue is there's a significant topography change here but

That's not the main issue. This is a retaining wall for a reason because as folks come around here, the number of accidents that we have in this particular location is very high and so that was a consideration when we were looking at, okay you could potentially acquire this and do an addition. And it's likely gonna get hit I mean, our fire station is hit annually at least two times a year by people coming through the signal. We've had the bay doors hit and we've had fatalities multiple fatalities right at this location So that's one of the reasons we actually took that off the table because of the amount of accidents that have occurred right here in this vicinity to make a substantial investment. You could put bollards up. That defeats the purpose of us having adequate bay space to have our trucks exit

The other thing it does is this, as you reconfigure this. See? You could add the land here but its a pinch point in terms of the frontage which did not assist us so then your taking additional land from two parcels and then the swing at this location because now you're going uphill makes it more challenging. So we really did put considerable thought into whether acquisition of that parcel would be work. So on the flip side of that, you know, that's where they�the contacts who has been great got creative and they said okay well back here this is where the mechanics bay is. You could make that usable space we could move the administrative space to expand and create the decontamination area. So, to really renovate the building and sort of take those uses and put them in a different location which then allows us to maintain this flow, which impacts all of the other departments.

and getting in and out onto Route 9. I mean, they would have to reconfigure that whole piece of Route 9 if you acquired that piece of land as to where the apparatus comes in, where it goes out, how the traffic flows go and that's not something the state really wants to get into. I know at one point they wanted to put sidewalks through there, across the front of it It couldn't be accommodated because of the station and the way traffic flows in and out there.

So Colette, do you want to go and then I can follow up?

Yeah. I just wanted to follow up a little bit on the topic we've been talking about of when do you have public engagement in a master plan as technical as this and so I think you know the, I try to stick a big step back because we're, I certainly feel like I've been in the weeds with this a lot. and I'm trying to sort of go back to first principles. The issue we're tackling here is upgrading the fire department facilities to ensure that maintain our first responder service to residents and also address some emergency, I would say safety concerns of the fire department staff. And so I want to emphasize my assumption that we are at minimum maintaining the first responder services and not considering or accepting any deterioration of service. So that's my understanding. I'd love to hear what other board members think and so then you know

The reason I felt that, and I would ask anyone who's interested in this to read the context architectures memo that was in our packet this evening because The question I get a lot is, well if you're picking a site for feasibility at this stage haven't you just essentially made the decision? You've made that decision already. and I think that the feasibility study, so the master plan, the work is done came out with three top sites. it just so happens that two of them are adjacent to each other and so we're in this odd situation where we've got two sites adjacent to one site that's kind of a distant third. And so the thing I'm struggling with is you know to sort of address some of the resident concerns have come up from discussion of a potential fire station at the North 40 do you then do two feasibility studies?

And I think Context Architecture's memo on that was really clear, that that's not a recommended path forward. It's not good use of taxpayers' funds and do we go down that path and essentially get answers that we already know because of the work that we've gone through, some of the points people have already gone through just now about why certain sites were better than others. and I'm also very wary of going down the path of pitting two sites against each other when they're quite different because I think that's going to be causing a schism in town. I'm very wary of doing that unless there's a really good reason for doing that, and I haven't come to one yet. and I think there's some public engagement to do definitely on this process. And we have to talk about what that's gonna be, and what our goals of that are. And I think a big part of the goal, I'm leaning more towards education because the more I get into this and then when I look at it, I keep thinking well maybe we could think about that or maybe we can think about this.

And there's a lot of answers to these questions already done. There is a lot legwork that has been done. It's very technical and I think the point that Marjorie's making is that this is different from other site selection processes we've gone through before because there's, that radius is pretty fixed. And so we had to really evaluate technically which sites could be accommodate this use So I think we need to think about public engagement and what the process of that is. And I'm going to leave it at that for now, but I just wanted to add into your thoughts about why Public wasn't involved earlier. I think it's for multiple reasons, and I think they're good reasons but the outcome here is unusual because there are two sites next to each other and one that's a distant third And that's the outcome

I think it's also unusual because the site doesn't match the model that you see in other communities, unless I missed something. That the station is in a heavily residential area and so that is a challenge because you can't point to another town and say that fire station is in a deeply residential area. And it's okay unless, I mean I may not see those stations, I don't know. Are there other stations that are like residential versus kind of main street-y?

In the departments that I've worked for, my first job basically they're weighed out by the town's topography. Where I first worked, they were done by the village. They were called... The town was broken into different and each village had its own fire station. They are right smack in the middle of residential area. They're the neighborhood fire station that's what they're called. When you go to the cities, those stations are strategically located in certain parts and some of them are right in the middle of neighborhoods because their neighborhood fire stations. Some places they have a center of town and that is geographically the best place for a lot of times your headquarters to go. So they put it there with the police station. They usually end up being built together at the same time and they usually go in on the same piece of property, not every City of Town does that.

It really depends on, the police station is not as driven by the response time as the fire department is and so it really, it changes from town to town. And it changes time to town as far as the size because some people said why do you need two acres? Well this is gonna be a headquarters that's going to have all of the administrative offices, when you're in a bigger department those get broken up into different parcels and they go into different stations. This station has the training piece, this piece is administrative, this is mechanical where you don't have that luxury they kind of have to be put into two or three stations, everything that has to be done.

So in Metro Boston what could we tell people to look at where there's a fire station in a neighborhood?

Nadek just built their station for within the last couple of years that backs up to a residential neighborhood.

Where is it, Steve?

It's on the corner of Speen Street. So Speen and backs up to that neighborhood on Travis Road. But to the chief's point, it depends. So your question is are there stations?

It's just a regular question we get all the time.

no I sympathize with that and we do so the answer is yes there are plenty of stations that are in residential neighborhoods In this situation though, because that question comes up. Why aren't you going every... Let me just backtrack. I appreciate all of the feedback that we've gotten. The reason why we had that meeting in June, because we wanted to use this summer to do the legwork. We knew there were going to be a lot of concerns. We wanted to begin building the website, like we did and worked all summer on it and we put a lot of work into it because every time we had a meeting, we wanted to be able to kind of chisel down the concerns so people could be directed to the website and they could see the answers. and so again, we've been working on that but with your question. So we have...

So the other point was fire stations should always be with police stations. Well, not necessarily if you already had that application right? If we already had a public safety building that was built 80 years ago and you had the need for another public safety building, then you would most likely build it on that same location in that same parcel. And you would repeat the process where we don't have a public safety building. And I'm certainly not going to speak for PD or Chief Whittemore, but I don't believe they're in the pipeline for a new building. You wouldn't just necessarily put it next to the police station just because. So we are so limited with where we could put the station in that footprint, that context recommended to be able to maintain our response time criteria. That it just so happened that this particular parcel is in a neighborhood, but I wouldn't say that that adds or takes away from it. It's just land that the town owns.

My assumption as context looked at that as an asset because you don't have to now acquire a piece of land. the town owns, it's our understanding. And I know this is a big question and I'm not going to speak on it because it's over our head but is that deemed for municipal use? I think that all played into it. So just the fact that is in a neighborhood, there's really a small piece to it. That's where they think the best opportunity to have it because its town-owned and again, it's located smack dab in the middle of that criteria that can still maintain our response times.

One point I just wanted to add for clarification to anyone listening. The distinction from police and fire is keep in mind, police officers are assigned sectors in town so they're not stationed at the police station and then get sent out to calls. They are roving in town, therefore the location of the police station doesn't have the same parameters as the fire station, just to clarify the comments from Chief Soar.

So I just wanted to follow up. That's one of the reasons I asked about the diligence that was done on expanding the main fire station because I think one of the questions I fielded a lot which makes sense to me is if you decided that the main station was inadequate, not decided but determined that it was inadequate. That created the need to make a bigger station else where Central Street, replacing Central. If the main station could be larger where it is then the second station would be smaller so different sets of land candidates might have emerged. That's I think a theory, could you?

Is it because we determined early that it wasn't practical to expand Route 9? that's how we got to needing the larger footprint. I just think that's a little bit of a mystery in the community, how we ended up needing so much land from a little teeny station to a two-acre SWHAAT.

Because the short answer is, the model changed, right? So we're at a two station model right now but the model that we have is a headquarters obviously at Route 9 and a substation at Station 1 it was deemed that we cannot have, like Chief Soares said at our current headquarters. We cannot renovate that station in order to meet standards, safety standards and still have it be the headquarters. There was not enough room to expand, they deemed you could only probably add on about 700 square feet which wasn't going to be enough So then they, and I don't wanna say pivoted because again this is kind of our assumption was that you were gonna be able to keep the headquarters at station two. When they realized they couldn't do that they then proposed to have the headquarters to station one. Okay, so up that end of town and then make station two the substation but going into this we didn't know if they were gonna say right off the bat actually the first station you need to build is Station 3 down on the Newton Line.

But it was determined, and this is good news, this is a good problem if you want to call it for the town to have is that our response times meet and exceed and the National Standard. So our current model with a two station model suffices for now, and then they added in the trigger type measurement tool for future use in future development down on the other end of town. Does that make sense?

And so the other question that I've heard is, Well, all the buildings at the other end of town. Would our response times be impacted if we built the second station on the east end of Town as opposed to the west end of if we put headquarters on the east end of town.

And got rid of station one as it is right now in the square?

That's right, that's the other question that's been asked. Floated. So I'm just putting out there things that are unvetted.

It would be a drastic change because you're relocating those resources from the Station 1 area down towards the Newton line and you're not gonna get the same response time as you would having a station up there.

Okay, so it makes sense to me Did they vet that model? I'm just putting out there the location questions that I feel like are more than bubbling out in the community about how we ended up where we are because that's what we're doing today.

I can confidently say that they didn't leave any stones unturned when it came to the configuration of this. And Glenn was saying from day one, you know because everybody was anxious to... You know we all had our assumptions and our thoughts and our opinions and Glenn was this is a blank slate for them. We don't want to sway them anyway, right? We're paying them. This is the professional firm that does this all day every day and they came highly recommended. They did many stations in Metro Fire, a little on the Northeast. We want them to come in with a blank slate and we want them dictate to us what the best model is. And this is what they came up with.

Is there somewhere in the report where we could see the analysis of the second station being on the east end versus the west end of town?

Joe, do you know offhand if that's in the appendix? I didn't see it. I know it was discussed to have...I think it was somewhere over on Oakland Street. Yeah.

It was part of the three-station model when we looked at response time, so if you change the fire districts to keep center central to keep headquarters and then not have one on the east, we failed to meet and reach Manor Ave. And then down through Livingston area in terms of the response time. So it was I believe it's in the response-time analysis as part of that. And the other thing, just on the two acres, just to go back to that, that's a rough order of magnitude. As we get into the feasibility study, this is This is a concept, right? So you can narrow down how much land do you actually need when you get into the design. And the major distinction with regards to new fire stations versus any of our other two current Station, and even what was Fire Station 3 which was on Walnut Street surrounded by a neighborhood. I just want to remind folks on that is that they're all premised on the fact that you back in right? And so

We were talking about the fire station one. If you have to back in from Weston Road, because keep in mind it is on Weston road now. It's on Western and Central that the grade makes it so challenging that we continue to ding the fire stations hitting Wall, that is between the driveway and the restaurant there basically. because the new concept is you circulate the building. You either come in, like think about how MLP has their garage set up right? It's a drive through to park, so you eliminate the backup which creates a lot of safety improvements for personnel but also for our buildings as we have people backing large equipment in. So that's a design change in terms of efficiency and safety that's occurred. on many of the new designs. And that can happen two ways, again depending upon how you ultimately end up orienting the building

So when they're looking at two acres, it's unclear what swing space you'll need in terms of how you're going to swing the apparatus around to drive through the building or whether it would be a slight swing and then you'd park. That would all be part of feasibility. and just in terms of where we've typically taken public comment is the master plan really is, you get that to about 95% and then you start taking public comment. And then feasibility moving forward on just about any project has been the primary driver of public comment or secondary analysis. DPW following the master plan and following their initial public comment, we then went back for supplemental, then received feasibility study I look back at the more recent two schools, Hardy and Honeywell. We did a master plan then we went back and then we did a secondary HHU master plan to address additional questions. Then we did a two-role feasibility study, given the complexities of that.

So you know, the master plan can always be supplemented before you go to feasibility if there's additional questions to be asked but but I don't feel this process was shortchanged from seeking public comment because we're here now once it's completed getting that to go to the next step. and this was not on our radar a while back, this came. And so the board's been deliberating it for awhile because when we negotiated development agreement with the expansion at Forty Williams, that modification zoning for MBTA. That's where we got additional funding for them to look at the fire station master plan because we had about $50,000 in capital we negotiated that as part of the development agreement given the amount of density that we were creating to then look at whether we'd trigger, said the chief's earlier comment, the three districts. So we brought that to town meeting, that we were going to be doing the master plan.

Then this board deliberated as part of the development agreement and then put that in once they received their building permit not their building permit the zoning change that they deposited that hundred thousand that led us to be able to begin this process. and we did present multiple times in terms of the facility, presented to the board in terms facilities earlier I think in December time period than we presented in March. and then we came back in June for the final report. So those other meetings are able to be accessed as well.

And to your point, Megan, if you don't have a master plan, you really can't discuss what the programmatic needs are. You can't discussed what the shortages of the current facilities are You have to have a sense of where you are and what you need, what you add before you can even have a conversation about where you might want to put it because you need to know what you're going to need. that's what we started with with Town Hall. What are the programmatic needs for Town Hall? That's what they started with the schools.

I think Megan it's also important to point out that we actually looked at a substation on William Street determined in negotiations with John Hancock that it really wasn't practical from a physical construction perspective, and then realized that it wasn't justified. that at that time, we were either going to reach a point where we had to think about constructing a new facility for fire station or police substation in that end of town and that the model we were looking at William Street really didn't make sense for any of the parties involved. I've been quiet during a lot of this discussion because this is one where I really am learning a remarkable amount by listening. and what has been important to me since the initial disclosure of

Master Plan Report. And the question that I have is, are we answering the concerns in the community are we patiently receiving and going through in a factual way the questions and concerns that people in town, residents are asking? I think the answer is yes. I don't think we're through and I think we will run up against something that we all experience personally, which is you ask a question and get an answer that's correct. And it's still not quite good enough because it's not the answer really is consistent with what you're hoping it would be. I think that's just human nature, I do think in that June presentation a mistake we made is not having a rendering and that showed landscaping, showed the way a project might fit in in that location. I certainly hope that's something we're going to cure in the short term

and Glenn and Joe explained to me that simply wasn't part of the contract, and wasn't something I thought of ahead of that meeting in June. So I do think that I have a lot of confidence in the master plan methodology and outcome. but I do think it is completely reasonable for the public to hold us accountable and for us to be expected in the fire department to answer all the questions that come in and answer them again, and provide information and data that underscores the answers that were given. I think thatís our job, and thatís why weíre laying out the timetable that weíve laid to try and engage the public and give them a chance to inquire. So I really appreciate this conversation tonight, it's been incredibly helpful to me as I think about ultimately what the decision is going to be that we're gonna be asked to make.

So following on from what some of the things you said, Tom. I think that there's we obviously worked over the summer to prepare the FAQs and the facts as we publish them, we get a second wave of questions and I've shared what I received with you. And we've touched on a lot of them tonight. I'm going to ask you to touch on one or two more before we go but I think that we need to you know, keep updating that every week. I think there's every other week there's going to be information comes in we have to update that as a live document and I think getting back some of my comments tonight One of the questions I was asking myself is we're at this stage, Context has done a really good job and I hadn't done some of the work that you've done Kenny instead of kicking around The Matrix changing the weightings, taking them off. But it's interesting to hear the outcome of that.

What I was looking at is the context memo and describing how they came up with this process what they did in what order and how the decisions were made, and what the output was. I'm asking myself Is there anything I've heard in public engagement that makes me question certain elements of that? Do I think it's not fatally flawed, but are there things in there that I would change now based on the feedback I've received Is there some problem with that, that I think we should change or reevaluate? I haven't come to anything yet. That's where I am. but I do think that we need to keep, our goal is education. Some people that I know who have written in basically saying I don't think you should put the fire station here. And I wrote back and said well thanks for your feedback, I hope you've seen this information on the website or this information in our packet and the answer was well thanks sending me that because they hadn't

and so I think we've got a lot of work to do on education in trying to push out the information that's in here. There's a lot informations we have to highlight if you have, and Glen talks about this in an interesting way that you have... You think about it in three levels. Skim at the very top. There's people that will swim a little bit in here, they'll get to some information and there are people going to do a deep dive and so the SCIM is the facts page that we've got. The SWMM is the FAQs, and the Deep Dive is the whole master plan and the information that we have on the website but one question that we haven't quite talked about tonight I'd love you to address. What's the difference between HQ and a station? And if you have HQ with extra bays, what does that mean for the location in terms of traffic, vehicles more calls from that site etc. If you can touch on that a little bit that would be great

so really the difference is the fact that HQ is where the administrative staff sits. So, the chief, the assistant chief, fire prevention in some cases a mechanic and this case it would be the mechanic that's where we're housed so it's essentially you have the offices of the fire department are housed at that station as far as traffic and comings and goings and I know we did touch on that a bit, I saw a couple of emails asking that question Historically, yes you would have had more traffic at fire headquarters than you would for a substation and it's mostly because of fire prevention. Years ago if you were applying for a permit or you needed an inspection or a plan review. You would physically have to, there were office hours you would physically come down to the fire station much I'm sure you all remember the same as town hall with the building department that is no longer, everything is done online.

And once we moved everything online now this is probably going back four or five years ago the foot traffic has essentially stopped because unless you're coming for directions or you have a child that wants to tour the station, whatever the case is. That's really what we're dealing with and that could be a substation or headquarters but as far as that traffic, the foot traffic for business it's no longer. The comings and goings would really be the people that work there so excuse me we work 24-hour shifts so a little bit different than any type of an office or business right where you get there at eight or nine in the morning, you leave at four or five in the afternoon were coming there at 7 a.m., well, even at 7 am. Obviously the administrative staff is a little bit different so there's a few of us that would come and go as a normal business would operate but that's basically it.

And then I think it's helpful, and I would hope that the fire department can put together some videos kind of a bird's eye view from the fire department truck about what it looks like to drive from different locations. So if the proposed location, or that from the current location at Central Street, up Western Road on a busy day. What does that look like? You do that a lot right now from the proposed location at Morse's Pond and then sorry, at the North 40. What is that look in a busy D and then from the proposed location beside the police station, what does that look like? There are differences. And I think it's important that people get a chance to see that. And so I think that something we should add as soon as we can now that people are back in town and we can take videos of what it looks like on a busy day because I think there's a lot of initial feelings that there's no way you can go up Western Road

and the reality is you do that a lot already but there's nothing like being able to see it for yourself and I think that's important.

And I think to your point, Colette, I find a lot of the conversation I'm having it could be someone that walked into the fire station or if I bump into someone at Roach Brothers whatever case is and they ask about it. more often than not at the conclusion of the conversation, the answer I received from them is oh, I didn't realize that. So I think a lot of it's just people don't know for instance, what you just said about the response. We actually have all those videos so we did that for a purpose because I know a lot of people in June they actually thought that we can't fit fire apparatus down Western Road and again How would they know? Right. And if they've never physically seen a fire apparatus drive down Western Road, they wouldn't know. So we do have very good footage during drop off at the Hardy School traffic on both sides of the bridge and it's something like you said we do it all day every day One more comment I would like to make if that's okay.

I want to thank all the feedback we received, a lot of questions and concerns but almost every email in the beginning of every conversation from the residents almost every time began with, I support the fire department. I support a safe environment for the firefighters and we want you to have they understand like they saw statistics. They understand that where we have two buildings that don't meet a lot of the safety criteria and they want a new building, which is great. And then it's usually followed with a but because I understand that it's an unknown a lot of people don't know what it would be like to have a fire station in their neighborhood and I think if we were subcontractors proposing a building or proposing a ball field, or proposing an art center the questions would be the same. I don't think anyone is anti-fire station, I think the bigger concerns are it's a little bit more of the political side of it. What, what are you know?

What's the intent of the North 40? Are you allowed to build on it? If so, what can you build on if we don't get a fire station is nothing ever going to be built? I think those the concerns. I think once we iron that out and we dictate what that use is for, I think a lot of people will probably seem to come online a little bit more because it seems to be those... Of course, we have the traffic, the siren and all those questions Those are very easy to answer, but the other piece of it is a little bit more entrenched. I think that's what we have to figure out is the intent of that land before we can move forward.

Chief, following up on Colette's comment about navigating the apparatus of Weston Road. A lot of people have talked about that we've heard talk about the traffic going south on Weston road at the end of the day because of rush hour, but it seems to me that the more urgent direction you would travel would be north. and you wouldn't be in quite such a hurry when you're coming back south, or is that not true? Do you have emergent calls going south as well

but we do, but I think the reason for that Marjorie is because right now we're located south of the bridge. So when we're traveling, when we get in a call up north, we're obviously traveling north, that's where the emergency is if we move and we have to remember, we currently have a fire station on Western Road. Right? It's just located a couple hundred yards down from where the proposed is going to be So where the proposal will be will obviously put us north of the bridge, which means for any call to the North is still going to be the exact same route we take now. the one difference would be calls to the south, but we have to remember where this is being proposed is not that far over the bridge. OK, it's just beyond the Bristol. So there's really a very small piece of that southern road before you get to the bridge and get to whether you're going to take Central are you going to take a left on Linden and run parallel to Central? So those calls are there.

But because of the proximity of where it is on Western Road, more calls will be to the north because we're already located to the south.

I think we're just hearing from people who sit in traffic at the end of the day or at school pickup and they were wondering whether it's just as bad going south as it is going north. I have one other question. Was any part of the master plan, I know you did fit tests for the three preferred sites Was there any part of the master plan that was to address kind of a schematic, what it would actually look like from the street? Because I think that's another thing that's concerning people. Is it going to look like a huge blacktop with all the trucks out front? And what is it gonna look like from west and right?

That's a great question because, again everyone has their own assumptions and a lot of people are envisioning a five bay station right up on the sidewalk of Western Road. I don't know and maybe Joe could answer this a little bit better. I don' t know that we necessarily had a schematic from context, I know we were kicking around different ideas in the way we envisioned this and again you wouldn't know necessarily until, I guess the feasibility stage. But the way we're envisioning this is that you would see very little of the station from Western Road, that it would be turned so that you wouldn't see the bays. You would see a portion of the administrative side of the building landscaped

That's right, Chief. So we didn't have in the scope for the master plan, we did not have the consultant develop any renderings, 3D drawings. and to Tom's point, I think that would be really helpful to everyone who is interested in the Western Road site. My sense in talking to Glen is you won't even see most of the site as you drive by it with the landscaping buffer, the way we set the building back. Careful attention to Lighting, things like that. So I would say that even before we begin feasibility We may be able to generate some renderings for the public engagement That's something Glen and I could talk to the consultant about

That would be very helpful, Joe. I think some example of screening and what the side of the admin portion of the building would look like would go a long way toward helping people understand what they'll be seeing Beth?

So Chief, thank you for bringing up. I have heard consistently we want to support the fire department. We believe that the facilities don't meet the requirements as outlined and to that point, I will say I was horrified that there has been such progress in health and safety. And that we are really behind. on decontamination and making a safer environment for our firefighters and staff. I'm equally horrified that it would take seven years to get a healthier environment for the firefighters. And we've had this conversation, was there any discussion about an interim measure to address health and safety while We do citing feasibility.

Did context look at an interim decontamination site or anything like that, that could get us faster to not all of the issues but kind of core health and safety issues for firefighters.

Again, anything relating to the building itself, Joe and Glenn would be able to answer that better. But it's my understanding that the answer is really no because part of that renovation, right? That's one of the main objectives of the renovation there's not really any, something of that magnitude is going to take a lot of space and that's something we don't have. So in order to meet that objective you would have to renovate the building. It's not something as simple as just putting say a trailer or something out on the side of the building. It really needs to be an engineered space and Joe, maybe you can touch on that but I don't think that was discussed as part

No, you're exactly right Chief. I think we did kind of offhand discuss it with context but part of the reason why the buildings are the size they are is because of the decontamination facilities that are needed you know, separation between the various program areas. And if we were to do some type of interim Project. It would have to go through the usual town process, right? You'd have to do a study in design and it would take you a few years to get that done. Frankly I think the best thing we can do is move this project along as expedient as we can while addressing all of the town's concerns. That's what FMD tries to do with all our projects. We try to move them forward as quickly as possible in the process.

So these are never done as a freestanding site, temporary or permanent to do decontamination. Is that right?

Have you ever seen anything like that before?

no not in the firehouse I mean decontamination is done on a scene through like an hazmat incident they set up a tent and they'll have things like that but in a building, no. I've never seen it because you have to have In the firefighters cases, when they come back from a call from a building fire or anything like that. They're dirty, what they're wearing is dirty. They can't go through the building to get to their lockers, to get their clothes, to come back down, to decontaminate. So to Joe's point you're talking about building a pretty substantial structure to put that in so they can house all their clothing. Basically, you would be building them a living area.

You'd have to redesign the first floor?

Yeah, I was thinking more of a separate freestanding. So that answered that question and my last question is I brought this up I think the first time you presented Wellesley College So there was no site on the site selection that addressed the main, Wellesley College to West of the current Central Street site. There was no land looked at there, at all.

Somewhere in the process there was a parcel on college property that was looked at but the grade was so, I think it was rendered impossible to build on. Is that right Joe?

Yeah in fact it was on Washington Street on the way down to Nahoyden on the right that steeply sloped area there's a small retaining wall Sorry, Joe. But to the

West of the Central Street Station. Was there anything we looked at there? It's just a massive amount of land under their control that if we looked at Dana Hall and we looked all these, it just seems like Maybe there's nothing there, but it's a little puzzling why they didn't identify any options that then would be likely dismissed.

that could be a question we could ask Jeff Shaw next week Like I said, I think the only piece that I remember was that piece that Joe was just talking about.

The only other area we potentially looked at was directly across the street but given the amount of pedestrian activity and The site lines there, that was the one where they're like the existing childcare facility. But that got rolled out pretty quickly. One given the value of the land but two because of the amount of pedestrian crossing right at that particular intersection, which is one of the benefits to moving the existing fire station at Station 1 because of the amount of pedestrian activity that it currently experiences at that same location on the opposite side of the street.

I also don't think it's unreasonable to try to find the best site on land that the town already owns. We have $400 million of capital projects ahead of us before we talk about a middle school and if you don't have to spend, I don't know 10 million even if the town would support spending tip. We don't and we could build on land that we own, it seems a prudent way to start the master planning process.

I just don't think it's an unreasonable conversation with our major educational institution about partnering with the town on public safety when it is a massive resource to them also. Just throwing it out there.

Tom? Well, I was just going to say, I think it is unreasonable. I think its unreasonable to ask firefighters to wait any longer than necessary for some relief from the exposure of toxic materials and I think you made the case a couple of questions ago for exactly why we need to be building on town-owned land and not go through the lengthy process of trying to acquire private property that really isn't any better. than the current location that's being proposed. Isn't this the first time in a long time that we have had no firefighters out on 111F? Almost. So it is unbelievable the good fortune that we have at the moment. We're dealing with issues related to PFAS, In the equipment, for example, we are constantly trying to reduce the exposure of toxins that members of our fire department are exposed to.

and I think you made the case very well a few minutes ago that proceeding with town-owned land rather than the delay of acquiring private land is exactly the way we need to be thinking.

I just want to clarify, I was not suggesting delay. I was just talking about location siting which is the topic of the meeting So I don't appreciate any implication that I would delay on health and safety.

But it does delay. Acquiring private property is simply a delay, and we've been talking about that for months

I remembered why. I just wanted to show the map. As you move towards the main campus, this is all wetlands here. You can see it just to answer that question, Beth along the frontage there. I thought the visual was helpful. Thank you, I appreciate that.

Marjorie can I just make one comment? ask you to look into what you can do to expedite the safety aspect. I don't know how this would work, but if there's any way to do something in the interim your lives safer I think that is the town would be very receptive. I don't want to talk for 30,000 people but i think people would be and I mean our fundamental, I view our first obligation is to make sure the people in the town who work here, who live here have safe places to work, safe places and all that. So I think that should be something you guys look at it maybe the answer is sorry there's just nothing we can do in the short term but i would look into that

Well, with this we know that there has to be research and due diligence and all of that. We're going through the process and it's going to be a lengthy process but time is of the essence and like Joey said we are trying, we do want to get this moved because it has been determined. We do need two new buildings right? the location of those buildings right now is up in the air, but we do know well for one of them. We do know that we need essentially two new buildings and from measures you're talking about We're having our first ever scan. I know we've talked about this before, but in November, we're going to have a scan for all of our members to try to be proactive. I mean, it's the next best thing we can do so this is something that's on the forefront and we're gonna keep pushing it until we can finally figure something out.

We're looking to purchase new gear as well, budgeting in for PFAS free gear. So we're doing the best we can to protect the members and getting them new stuff.

and I think there's been a lot, this was before you were on the board, a lot more investment in training instead of self evaluation for early indicators of cancer. And there's being a lot of engagement with I think it's Mass Fire and other people to assist the fire department staff, to do the best they can to protect themselves but also early intervention.

All right, thank you chief. Thank you chief, thank assistant chief. Oh yes, we have to talk about the project proposal form

We did receive a few questions. I waited to send it to make sure we integrated everyone's. So Joe, Kenny sent some great questions and comments and Joe addressed those I emailed these to the board, but I did just send hard copy or gave you a hard copy here. And Joe's integrated the responses to those questions and comments from Kenney, and I believe those were the only ones we received.

I haven't looked at the edits. I have a question about process and timing so This form, if I'm correct is to get the project on the capital planning committee list but it doesn't lock us in to the particulars of the project. There's a lot of detail here. I just want to clarify that because it sends another cue to the community that it's kind of locked and loaded. and so if you could explain how this interacts with the public engagement, I think that would be great.

I mean, I'll ask Joe to comment as well. But the biggest decision that the capital committee is going to have to engage in this current year of the larger projects that are on the horizon school air conditioning, the timetable is you know either set on the schedule that we had worked on or it might get changed by the citizens petition. The timetable for Morris's Pond is set. You know, there's Morris's pond construction will come before the CAPCOM in due course and so will construction of air conditioning. But the timing of the fire station feasibility, and the DPW master plan next steps that's the big decision we're really going to have to dig into. We can't do both of these things at one time from a staff bandwidth perspective nor from a financial perspective

So the committee is going to have to make a recommendation for which one of those two projects should probably take preference. Both of which? the fire station feasibility, and then next stage on the DPW master plan project. Now, presumably feasibility will go forward for our site and so the details of the site I think can be subject to change. That's not changing the need for the project and as we know the capital plan is always subject to change. We make recommendations, and every year things change for a number of reasons whether it's a citizen's petition or that National Grid is doing work on Western Road or whatever it is, we need to do an additional study for Morse's Pond. The capital plan is always subject to change. Joe, do you want to add anything to that?

I think you actually covered it really well, Colette.

Yep. Okay, any other questions on the project proponent form?

Proponent project form. I just wanted to say I appreciated Kenny's edits. I thought they were great and added more clarity so unless there are other questions you want a motion? Yes please So move to approve the fire department feasibility study project proposal form for submission to the townwide capital planning committee.

Second.

All in favor? Aye.

All right. Chief, assistant chief, chief thank you all very much. We'll all continue working and updating the FAQ page as questions come in. The more information we can put out there the better and it'll address more questions as they come in. Are there any comments, final comments you'd like to make?

I think it would be helpful if Megan gave the email address again for where people should send comments. and also maybe clarify who gets the comments when they come in.

Sure, so firestationmasterplan at wellesleyma.gov. The select board will receive those as well as myself the chief and our communications Corey who's on there and our Communications member and Glen

In my last comments, Margie says again thank you to the board for supporting this project and our objective to provide a safer work environment for our firefighters. And thank you tell the town residents like I said earlier that have been supporting us through this whole process

Yes, we encourage more questions. Any questions residents have to please send them in. We will be taking this issue up again next week and there will be public comment at that meeting so we also invite you to join our meeting next week

The only thing I was going to add is we do have next on the agenda the fire class action lawsuit. I don't know if you need them or not for that.

Chief wants to stay? So our next agenda item is to discuss and vote to join the fire class action lawsuit. The law firm of Napoli Skolnick has contacted Chief Mortorelli to ask whether the town would be interested in retaining the firm, to represent it in an antitrust lawsuit against the three largest fire truck manufacturers and their industry trade association Alleging a conspiracy to coordinate pricing, limit production and create artificial shortages in fire apparatus. The claims would be that these practices artificially inflated prices dramatically and unreasonably extended delivery times Straining local budgets and forcing departments to work with outdated equipment creating possible safety risks.

The board discussed the potential litigation and several members had questions on the retainer agreement, the selection of counsel, and the litigation process itself. Town Council responded to those questions and the retainer agreement has been modified in light of our questions. So tonight we'll be reviewing the modified agreement and Town Council's responses to determine whether we want to retain Napoli to represent the town as an individual plaintiff in advance of a potential class action lawsuit. I don't know that was made clear initially. I think we were contemplating joining a class action lawsuit, but Napoli is going to represent certain plaintiffs individually in advance of advancing from the class action lawsuit. So are there questions or comments on the retainer agreement, Kenny?

So I think it's important to understand the difference between a class action and a direct claim. If we're part of a class, we just sit back and will ultimately come through or not. And what they're asking us to be is a direct plaintiff in a lawsuit, so our name will be on a lawsuit against the manufacturers which I don't have any problem with but that there's a big difference between that and class action. One thing that I don't still understand is what our potential recovery is. And I know in the memo, it states a percent likely are X percent of something. It doesn't say what that something is and I think it does allude to the fact that the delay was not really as significant for Wellesley as it was for other towns.

And therefore, so some of the maintenance costs which I think is part of how you'd calculate it may not be what they are. I don't think we're in a rush. We don't need to rush into doing this before we decide whether or not we want to be in the litigation, I think it's important to understand how much money is at stake because if whatever, call it $500,000. That makes a lot of sense if it's $5,000 I don't know that we want to do that. Otherwise like the document itself I think was fine they should clarify that if we do get moved to a class there's no double dipping on fees but otherwise they incorporated the comments that I had.

So Chief, what Town Council says and what Hank McNaughton's answers were was Mr. Naughton was that we He saw similar delays in delivery among other towns, but that your costs could substantially be in maintenance of older vehicles or trying to find replacement parts. Do you have any sense of what those costs are?

They were minimal. Again, and a lot of that is because we do have a mechanic on site So that obviously rectified it for us. And he couldn't even come up when we were doing the paperwork. We had everything processed that showed how long the delivery took, what the exact costs were, how much the cost increased from the truck that we purchased before and the delivery times before. So we had all of that which Hank said, you know was great. You should definitely qualify so to speak but as for that piece of it didn't seem like we were going to really be able to report very much and to Kenny's point I don't know what that's gonna do to the bottom line

which means there may be a situation where if you're part of the class, you actually get more because you're lumped into a group who has sort of an aggregate maintenance cost and you're just part of that calculation. Whereas if you were the direct plaintiff they're going to say show us you're gonna have to actually prove like what your damages were and if it's you know a thousand dollars yeah well that's different so Like I said, I don't know which way is the right way to go but I think we need that information before we make any decision on it.

And I think an equal purpose in pursuing whichever kind of litigation we ultimately end up pursuing is to rectify some of these problems going forward, to bring the manufacturers more into line of what's appropriate in terms of delivery and price and things like that. So the finding of collusion or antitrust violations may be as important to, I don't know if it's whether individual plaintiffs who might not have a huge monetary loss or the class. but it's a reasonable question.

And I will just note too that at some point in probably the near future that we may be also looking into the PFAS suit as well. Because at first, from what Hank was telling me I wasn't sure they were gonna qualify but then as we were kind of wrapping this up we started discussing it a little bit further. And I kind of had the mindset in two years time, in the capital, we're going to be asking for over north of $300,000 to purchase PFAS-free gear for every member of the department So if we could offset that with $100,000, sure it would make sense. But to Kenny's point, we don't know what that looks like but just so that it's on your radar at some point that will probably be coming up for discussion

So one of the things I understood from Mr. Naughton was that this proposal was because the class action would likely linger for a long time before it formed and actually moved forward. And his proposal was to gather enough plaintiffs. That's the right word, right? Gather enough plaintiff to jump start it and accelerate a settlement as opposed to wait on the circuitous path to building a class. I think that's what he was trying to tell us, is that right?

Well, it might be essentially the same. If you have enough plaintiffs, you could qualify as a class.

You create a class if those two timings coincide do you then automatically join the class or are you on the independent suit? with Napoli.

I just don't know how it works. You can always opt out of a class and go direct.

But, with this agreement, can you opt into a class?

Yes, that was my point about the double dipping where you have to make clear that if we do that they don't get 33% and the class lawyers don't give 33%. One or the other.

Well, all my questions were answered. I think Kenny's point is valid. It seems like we need a little bit more information about what we think the output might be and also the double dipping but I think if we got answers to those questions, I was satisfied with the answers that we received.

Okay, let's follow up with Hank and ask him those questions. Yeah, I assume that you would be the primary staff person investing time as a plaintiff. But we might want to also know what else we might be expected to do or pay for as a single plaintiff

So I did have a conversation with him, and he said the amount of staff time would be de minimis. He said three, 3 1⁄2 hours. And that the cost is... in the hundreds of dollars when you allocate it across.

I already did, there was a questionnaire that you need to fill out that we already finished. I think that's a big portion of it because that provides all the numbers and the times and all of that stuff, all the paperwork so i think a lot of that's already behind us anyway yeah

Okay. Well, let's find out about the difference of being an individual plaintiff or a member of a class. And we'll take it up again as soon as we can.

All right?

Thank you, Chief. Okay, well we're no longer ahead of time. Schedule, but we'll do the best we can. Our next agenda item is a policy subcommittee update. We have several policies that we're going to take a look at and I will turn it over to Kenny and Colette.

You're going to talk the most, so I'll just introduce it. So we have a handful of policies to go through. Three of them require vote. two of them are second reads, one was the first read and one is more conceptual. I guess we'll start with the HR board procedure on the COLA policy.

So I just want to do a little level setting before we start. Generally speaking on the policy, so just as a reminder all the policies scheduled for discussion were distributed as word documents to the board in the August 21 email and followed the same day by an email from Corey with a accompanying covering memoranda and that was specifically to give the board members extra time to look at them. So we had asked board members to submit questions before Labor Day so that we could then send them to town council, because a lot of these policies are very legalistic. in advance of the meeting given the technical nature of several of the policies. We received comments from one board member and those have been incorporated in the policies that were sent out. I received additional comments again today so there's going to be from same board member, there's a few more things we'll talk through. to discuss and vote the procedures for interaction with the Human Resources Board on COLA and policies.

Late breaking news, we will not be taking this up tonight on the agenda the HRB chair has a conflict there was a late change to his travel plans and we would really prefer to have him here for any discussions so that I think we're going to take up you know again another time So that's, that one done. Captured some more time. Okay so moving on to the next policy which is to discuss withholding of permits. So this is our second read on this policy so just again as a reminder, this is a policy guiding the board implementing a bylaw that's already been adopted by town meeting under Mass General Law So the board had previously discussed the withholding of permits in our meeting on June 8th, and I received lots and lots of comments and questions at that time. and so since then the policy subcommittee worked with town council to address questions in the policy.

So, the board received that information as I mentioned on August 21 with a request for comments by Friday. The policy was also circulated to permit issuing boards and department heads seeking feedback. We have received comments from the board of library trustees, they essentially didn't have comments but they appreciated being included in the process and we got some great comments from the NRC through the director, and those were incorporated into the memo in the policy which is redlined. I do expect we'll have additional feedback from other boards and so this will be a brief agenda item at the all board meeting not particularly to take feedback but for me to give a quick overview of what we're doing here and why and that we would like their feedback so that we can finish this. And, you know, we've still got other boards to hear from The memo shows that there's some minor modifications and cleanup in the memo.

One addition was a slight expansion of the definition of municipal charges, in response to feedback from the NRC So we expanded that to see that it was including but not limited to fines imposed under mass general law, certain section. and so really at this point I'm looking for more board comments and feedback while we're waiting for other department heads and boards We can get this. What I'd really like to do actually is if we get comments tonight, I'd like to get a cleaner version that I can then recirculate to the boards we have not heard from and it might be easier for them to give us feedback on that basis. so I think maybe Megan if we bring up the policy on the screen we can, if board members have comments or questions we can look at that as we do that and we have town council with us. Eric, thank you for coming back.

So I think one comment I did send to Eric today, let me find that. Let me see. Oh. So on the withholding, so under paragraph two, under the background there's a slight wording question. In the background right now it says the town adopts And I had a question to say, should that be adopted or should it be passed or enacted by law? So that's, I would see sort of a ministerial comment. and that's on the background of the policy which is on the screen there.

Right, the town doesn't really adopt its own bylaws it passes them or enacts them we adopt state and other statutory provisions. And so I've shared that with Eric.

The general laws actually refer to towns adopting bylaws and accepting provisions of general laws that are local acceptance statutes. That said, the word enact would be perfectly fine as well.

Okay. So that's one change that is going to happen in addition to what you've seen. Also, the procedure step five and the last sentence I got some feedback but that didn't seem like it read correctly so I wonder if we can go to procedure step 5 5, Megan. So it says let me see the last sentence says okay that the select board may waive a denial, suspension or revocation if it determines that the property owner its officers or stakeholders if any are members of their immediate family as defined by Mass General Law chapter blah blah blah has no direct or indirect business interest in the business or activity conducted in or on the property for which the applicant business is operating and the question was

should it be for which the applicant has been, an application has been filed. So there might be slight changes to that language there I don't know Eric if you had any feedback at this point or something we still want to work on?

So up to the redlined portion there, if you stop right at the word property, up to there this pretty closely tracks the statutory language. So maybe we can tweak it a little bit for clarity, but I wouldn't want to deviate too far from the statute since it's describing exactly what the statute says.

So if you take out the red line, would it be close enough?

Yes, I think so.

I think it's the redline language that's confusing

Collette, I actually had just a clarification for me question. This paragraph says that if you are a restaurant leasing space and the landlord hasn't paid their taxes. The restaurant can still receive its license, is that correct? Is that what this is meant to be? That the license for the restaurant wouldn't be withheld because the landlord hadn't paid their taxes. Is that the intent behind this paragraph 5?

I can't speak to the intent of it, but Eric, I think that basically allows that to happen. I don't know what your thoughts are on that?

Yes. Yeah, that's correct.

So if that's true... How would the business know to apply for a waiver? Are they going to apply and then their business is in good standing, they paid all of their fees. How would they find out that their license needs to apply for a waiver because the landlord? That seemed to me

So the property owner would be on the delinquency list, which would also identify the property. and so that would be then raised as an issue with the applicant at that point who would then have the opportunity to apply for, apply to the select board for a waiver.

So the tenant would get the letter as well as the property owner?

So here's how it would work in practice. I'm a restaurant who goes to do a tenant fit-up, because keep in mind you're applying for a permit or you're

You're already in business, you're applying for a renewal.

I was just going to say, or you're looking for a renewal. So we the board would have a list each of the departments would and we would verify whether they were on the list or not as part of our Inamal, Review. And we would then say you need to do a waiver. If it wasn't for renewal and they were seeking a building permit when as a for instance, the building they wouldn't be able to apply. They would get an immediate notice that a tax is due and that it would then necessitate them to seek the waiver.

And this, I also want to point out that this is actually what describes as actually kind of a reverse situation. It says the select board may waive or denial suspension or revocation if it turns that the property owner doesn't have a business interest in the business conducted on the property. So, in this case, if the restaurant had fines out due to the town and the owner of the property had no interest in that restaurant operation, the select board could still waive the denial for the property owner.

This doesn't refer to the restaurant?

Eric, why would the property owner need the license? The restaurant would need the licence.

That depends on what they're applying for I guess.

Yeah, the thing that confused me. So thank you for that interpretation because I read it the other way and assumed that the business, the tenant would receive a denial and then have to apply for revocation of the denial. There wasn't a period before the denial where the tenant could get their license I just, that paragraph confused me because the business could be operating completely fine within a building where the landlord is behind. and so the business is going to not get its food and beverage renewal, it's common victual renewal. And then we'd have to apply for a waiver. So that's a misinterpretation?

That is, because the restaurant in that situation wouldn't be on the delinquent list because they themselves are not behind in that hypothetical, are not beyond on payments to the town. So they wouldn't the problem is that a property owner because somebody at the property they own could end up on the delinquency list because of their tenants actions or you know uh failure to pay a fine to the town. So that's the situation this is intended to deal with

So this is restating the law, is that essentially what it is? Yes.

That is correct. This very closely tracks the statute.

So we can't really alter the language or we're altering the meaning.

Exactly.

Okay, so the next, are you done Kenny?

Sort of but not really. So we're gonna talk about this later with a bylaw review where we're going to say we shouldn't do these things because if the law changes then you have something that's out of date, that you may not be able to comply with because you'd be breaking the law. So does it make more sense here to say notwithstanding anything? To the contrary this select board waive a denial, suspension or revocation in accordance with whatever the site and mass law is.

I think that would provide greater flexibility and be a little simpler. As to the amount of detail you want to include in any policy, that is a policy decision. I generally do tend to favor the approach that you're suggesting though, Kenny. That creating inconsistencies with statutes if they are amended in the future can create an issue and in fact that raises one other topic I was going to bring up with respect to this policy under procedures section 1ai. This says, Treasurer, Collector shall periodically prepare and distribute to each licensing authority a delinquent charges list identifying any party that has not paid municipal charges owed to the town for a period of not less than 12 months.

That used to be part of the general laws, that 12 month period. that is currently in the town's bylaw which is why it is in this policy but that has been deleted from the general laws so it's a more stringent requirement that must be applied right now because it's in the Town Bylaws and in here but the general laws no longer require this.

So should we have this policy? Can you pause for a second? Yeah, I'll wait. We need to go through this policy one more time and slim it down for anything when it's referring to the law, just keep it referring to The Law or the Towns Bylaws and leave it at that. So if the town bylaw changes or the law changes We're not out of date because that's in step with what the Biological Review Committee are trying to do. We can put it in a live link, you know?

Yeah. That would sum this down considerably. I think that's doable.

Okay, so I wonder if given that maybe we should pause our discussion on this. We'll go back and slim this down and take out anything that's extraneous and just refer to the general law or the town bylaws sections link them and then we'll come back to this. We're making more progress and catching up on time. Then the next is the Abutter Lot Sale Program. So again, this is a second read of the abutter lot sale program and I do want to do a little level setting here to address some of the comments we have received. The direction the policy subcommittee was given was to develop a policy for guidance if the board wanted to consider the sale of town-owned land. periodically residents have approached the staff or the board seeking to purchase a piece of property adjacent to their land

that seems to them to be an orphan and untended plot which is uncured for, an eyesore or otherwise problematic to the resident. staff and the board have been unable to respond as the board does not have a policy on disposition of town-owned land. And that's not a very satisfying response for the residents, and the Board wanted to address that. This lack of a policy was identified when Policy Subcommittee was created in August 2023, but other more pressing policies took precedence. And so the Policy Sub Committee has only started to develop this policy over the past several months. The policy subcommittee was not given direction to create a list of properties and vet them for disposition or to facilitate a wholesale push to dispose of property, but rather to provide guidance to the board should we receive future requests.

the policy as drafted does not include a list of properties and any request for disposition of land would be carefully considered individually by the board and the policy states more than once that land needed for open space or any other public use would not be considered for disposition. The procedure includes a step to consult with town boards and departments prior to making a parcel available for sale. In the packet is the most recent draft of the policy, a memo with some questions and answers. And there's also included larger detail maps of I'm going to call it the universe of town-owned orphan properties. I'm sure that's not the right term for these, but that's how I'm looking at them. some of those properties will not fall under the program because of value and so we don't I think we should pass on those parcels

and some of the properties won't be considered for sale because we either already knew that there was some public interest in them or some interest from boards and departments for open space or other uses. And I think that what might be helpful is for once we have done or got feedback from other boards is for staff to create a memo to file, to document the feedback that we've had. but I don't think it's a good idea to include that feedback in which parcels have been identified to retain as part of the policy. So the exact same process has occurred with this policy as with withholding permits policy. The board previously discussed it, we got lots of comments and questions, we've worked through those questions with town council The board has got that information a few weeks ago. And we also circulated this policy, the first draft of this policy to other boards and departments for feedback

and I think that after we've had our discussion tonight, I really would like to clean up the policy and get it to another revised draft so we can recirculate that to boards and committees. Some of the feedback we got from the NRC was really thoughtful because the NRC identified, we have a number of policies we've been interested in. Can you exclude them? And town council had said, of course we can and that's the policy assumes that's case but if the reader can understand that We want to expand that in the policy. So there's definitely some expansions in the policies that talk about not disposing of land that we want to retain for certain purposes and we built a step into the procedure for that, and I'd like to circulate that to other departments. So the feedback we've had so far, as I mentioned Board of Library Trustees no comments but appreciated being included. The NRC identified parcels that were of interest to them that generated additional language

I've alerted school committee and as we discussed, I think in our first discussion and certainly at policy subcommittee there are a few partials that are adjacent to schools. There's a little super secret back pathway to Upham, there's a super secret path to Wellesley High School. We're looking for school committees feedback on that I think it's highly likely we'll get feedback from the Board of Public Works and Climate Action Committee, Trails will also have feedback. We know that there is some equipment that the Board Of Public Works has on some of these pieces of property So we're going to get more feedback. So as I mentioned, I think after this meeting, I'd really like to get an updated version draft number three so we can send a clean draft out to other boards and committees. I have had conversations. We did get some feedback from a member of the community who has shared that feedback with other boards

I've had some conversations with the chair of the NRC who also sits on the Chills Committee so that Chills committee can understand what we're trying to do here. I've reached out to wetlands, I'll attend their meeting next week so that i can answer questions live. I've spoken to school committee but we're still waiting for more feedback. So even with that Megan if you could bring up the policy some things that we have to discuss. Some questions that we had the last time, that have not quite been resolved because they're policy discussions and the first one is In the policy step two, it's drafted that the buyer is basically paying the town's legal fees because that's what we had initially envisioned. but that's a policy decision and maybe I wanted to confirm that is still the board's intention, that the buyer will pay the town's legal fees. And that's in policy step two. I don't know if the board has any comments

Collette, I had a question that was kind of larger than the policy piece which coming out of the responses we got The board isn't actually empowered to sell any town land or to transfer it without town meeting.

Which is in the policy.

Which I appreciate all the work that you did, and thank you for all the clarification. I came away confused about why we need a policy because if there's interest in a parcel of land then and others. nothing can happen until it's presented to town meeting. And so creating a policy sends a signal that we are actively interested in disposing of parcels of land and I think it raises the question of the $35,000 threshold which I think by the notes in here are not they're not kept current because the town owns them so we don't spend a lot of time appraising them and their value depends on

who's interested in buying it. Because if it's a little bit that's gonna put you into having a lot that's 5,000 square feet and you could build A home on it versus it just kind of rounds out the space near your sidewalk. It has different value markers and your taxes are going to change depending on what it does to your larger thing. so I just wasn't sure the utility of a policy since it's all subject to what a buyer wants to pay and brings to town meeting. That's one piece.

The second is... Can you just let me address, because I have trouble following extended long questions. The reason we're creating a policy is because we have been approached by residents who wanted to buy slivers of land beside their property, because they were problematic. They were unkempt and eyesore. and we can't respond to that. If the board doesn't want to create a policy, then we'll stop.

I just haven't seen any of those inquiries so I think that's... You've had repeated inquires from a resident on Stern Street? Have we received that?

I haven't seen...

This has been looking at the sale of town land, having a policy. It's been on the work plan for as long as I've worked for the select board office. examples of that are right-of-way where there was a cul de sac but then extended through and so like the owner doesn't own that component we've received those requests Stearns Road, there's a 1200 square foot sliver. We've received that request. That was part of the 16 Sterns because there were trees there that we ultimately paid to be removed because once the Sixteen Sterns lot was cleared and the wind direction was modified, became a hazard to the Buellers house. So we actually paid to have some I say paid, you know the Department of Public Work removed some trees and limbed them up for us. That was a request we received requests more recently I forget there was a path

are in adjoining land, but the owner actually owns both sides of it. And I said my standard answer is we don't address anything because we don�t have a policy to distribute them otherwise it becomes an arbitrary and the analysis of which parcels we'd be willing to sell.

I think that the reason we need a policy is because I'm not sure that a citizen could bring a citizens petition and be successful to town meeting. I think they'd need to come to us and say, we want to buy this piece of property. We did the policy to help us. think through that, deliberate what should we be considering? We need a procedure. We've got to talk to other boards. We're going to get feedback from other people at the end of the day it might come down to every time you evaluate this, the answer is no. I mean, I don't know that the answer will ever be yes. I just don't now and I think that and one of the reasons when we first had our first discussion you asked for, and it was part of the packet at that time but what kind of parcels are we talking about which is why the universe of orphan packets is in there be considered under the program because they're too, the land itself is worth too much. And in terms of we don't update the values of the land

I think we do on a regular basis. I think that the assessor does assessments of land, and we're waiting for feedback from the assessors on a regularly scheduled basis because Tom had asked the last time is every five years How can you appeal your assessment, essentially? And so we can get an answer on that. But I think if a resident or a business wants to talk about purchasing a piece of land, we can't help them right now If you want to stay in that position, then I've got plenty of other stuff to do.

I guess I'm just confused that we couldn't help them. made a direct inquiry to the Board of Selectmen about acquiring a parcel of land. I think we would be capable of navigating that myself. No, but we haven't... I've been on this board 10 years. I have not received an inquiry as a board member in the packets or anything that I'm aware of

well because they don't always come to the board but we need a process so that we're not handling one on you know one-offs and everything is is consistent and not arbitrary. And if it goes, because it has to go to town meeting there's preliminary work that has to be done before it gets to town meetings so we may as well agree on what that process before we take it to town meeting and have it in place when the next request comes around.

Or on the flip side, to Collette's point say this isn't something that we want to pursue and there is no disposition of land

Right. And I think it would end up that way, I think. Eric is there a risk to us considering dispositions individually without a policy?

You'd still be bound by kind of the same basic considerations in terms of whether a parcel has to go through a full bid process. or not and if not considering whether you want to present it with a select board wants to present at town meeting. I think this document is really intended to provide guidance for the board to kind of formalize that process because many towns do end up with these very small parcels that don't have value to the town itself but can be become unkempt, can become eyesores and are you know not generating tax revenue. That's another big part of this, is that getting these to be part of taxable parcels helps to generate revenue in the town and towns don't want to be leaving that tax revenue on the table by just letting it sit vacant.

I do think that this helps to formalize that process and create a uniform way of handling it.

OK, so before I go any further, does the board want to continue with this policy or not? Because we could get right back on time if we say no. I would. Yeah. OK. All right, so if I can't, I'm going to go through some specific questions and things that we have to go though tonight then I'll open up for questions to the board if I So I think, I didn't hear any objection to the buyer paying the town's legal fees so I'm going to move on from that. Policy step 3b So the town council had made some comments here about when an abutter owes the town any outstanding amounts. and the languages that the determination is made as of the date of the application, an abutter would also become ineligible if he or she becomes delinquent on municipal charges during the review period. Is the board comfortable with that language?

Yes, because by the time the review is completed if they're delinquent there's still delinquents.

Right okay all right so The another issue I thought we needed to discuss tonight is there were some questions, some broad questions from the board about the notification process. and the question was should we notify other abutters of a request to buy the land so that other abuttors have a chance to consider purchasing also. Town Council's response to that question, which was in the memo I think is that the town might want to develop a standard practice regarding notices but the town council has not recommending inserting that into the policy as it could provide a basis for another abutter attempting a legal challenge if they don't like our decision. and so this is a policy decision for the board but town council has said that they prefer to retain as much flexibility as possible for the Board and not create additional rules that could trip the Board up or provide basis for a challenge. That's our decision about the notification process

So I assumed notice would be provided with the warrant because if we have to, if the board determines that a transfer of land is appropriate, we will be providing the public with notice that there's a sale pending and that at town meeting there could be a challenger to that. So I guess there's two ways to look at it. We're already bound to provide notice globally that's one way to go, or we should proactively provide notice to preempt and ensure that we're maximizing the town's funds. I think I would prefer to maximize the towns' funds and provide Abutter notice that there is an active offer to acquire this land.

Any interested parties may submit comments or alternative bids within a set period of time.

So I think we could do that if you wanted to, but what I'm talking about now is what would be put in the policy and town councilors advising not to put that into policy but to develop a standard practice. And that may be the practice

The standard practice and a policy to me don't have a lot of space between them so I'd rather document it myself.

So I'm asking other members, do you want to end the policy or not in the policy based on what we've heard? And Eric if you want chime in here please go ahead.

I think you summed up my comments on that very well.

Sorry, where is the exact language?

So it is not in the policy right now. This was a question that was in the memo as to whether language should be inserted into the policy saying that the select board will provide notice to all abutters of the availability of an abutter lot. My response to that was I think that is a good practice. I think the Select Board should in fact provide notice to all abutters, but when you put that in the policy then you invite, if something's deficient with a notice for some reason of somebody who doesn't receive it or if somebody just doesn't like the decision that the board has made it's a rule then that you have created for yourself and if you haven't followed it, you've created the opportunity for somebody to challenge the board's decision. I agree with what you're saying.

Yeah, I do too. I think it's important to give notice but I don't think it should be in the policy to avoid just the situation Beth said. If you're putting something in a warrant for town meeting you don't want to have other bidders rise on the floor of town meeting and say I didn't have the opportunity to bid. They should all get notice but I don't think it should be in the policy.

Okay, so Tom, in the

Yeah, I'm fine with it. If the policy is to give us guidance about how to behave that's our touch point. So if it's not documented somewhere, we will take behaviors to get the highest and best price on any land that is available for sale

I would say our obligation is to maximize value, period. So I don't think we need to articulate all the steps we'll take to do that.

And I think it's something that staff can do a memo to file on with this, however they do their stuff. So that was one question. and I already talked about the fact that we have this statement that confirms its select board will consult with other relevant town departments. those were the things I really wanted to touch on with the board tonight. At this point, I wanted to get questions and other feedback you know we're working on...I'd like to get a clean version out to the other boards to look at this and be easier for them

Colette, this is for sale to non-municipal parties. Is that right? Correct.

Collette said this, but I think we should reiterate it. This is not the town actively saying you know we're open for business let's go sell land that's not what this is this is really a set of guidelines to look at properties and I think we should keep in perspective the, I don't know what the per acre price in Wellesley is right now but you're looking at somewhere south of 500 square feet of Land, even at a reasonable conservative valuation of one acre in town. So we are really talking about slivers of land here.

OK, all right. So the next policy is the indemnification policy. I'll pass that over to Kenny.

So we have an indemnification policy that dates back to July 2nd, 1990. I forgot to bring the napkin that was written on with me but it's time to redo it so we started over basically and just all of this is really dictated by Massachusetts law about what who can be defended, in what instances the town will defend a municipal officer. In what instances, you know, the town or be required to indemnify a municipal office and in what instances it may indemnify a town employee. What this really does is set out the process by which an employee would

I'm using employee generically here it could be you know elected or appointed board members as well but the process through which they would if they ever became subject to a lawsuit, what is the steps that we would go through to decide? Is the town going to defend the lawsuit which in certain cases were required to do. In other cases, we may not be required to defend the lawsuit but if the employee is found liable for something, we may be effectively footing the bill for whatever the liability is which was another way of saying indemnified. and then the other instance is just prescribed so but it's really the process through which we will make these determinations. This is very dense, so apologies.

So I have a question because it's been a really long time since I took torts. In your memo under, in the policy, under policy number two, indemnification of town employees We would indemnify an employee for an intentional tort? Can you explain to me how that might work?

We may indemnified an employee from intentional tort.

But do we even need to say that?

If we go to the original, what we had said earlier. We could scrap we could simply say, we will defend employees pursuant to X. We will indemnify them pursuante Y and we may indemnified pursuantes Z meaning list the mass general laws and then go into the procedure. And I am totally fine with that because nobody's reading this for general guidance on what's going on, like you're gonna pull this thing out a very bespoke situation and deal with it.

And we're getting rid of restating what the laws say I'm all for that approach

So I completely agree with that. Just to answer the more specific question of why you might indemnify an employee for an intentional tort, just mean the intent that's there is not that the employee intended to cause harm or do something wrong, but that they intended to take the action that was determined to be a tort. and the reason that the general laws allow for indemnification in this sort of situation is that governments typically employ a lot of different employee personnel, especially police officers and educators and others. who are put in situations where they regularly have to engage in conduct that somebody might allege is an intentional tort and it

The theory is it could be very hard to find qualified employees for those positions if you're not willing to protect them when they face those sorts of allegations.

I see, thank you. I like the idea of citing the law and putting a link this is really hard for people to understand but my other questions were answered

And my questions were answered and I think this one is really important that we get this done quickly because the old one that's on there, not very good. And I think it's really important to be get this approved. We've already gone through the policy subcommittee So do you think that we are in the position to approve this policy subject to slimming it down? I mean, maybe delegating final approval between Eric and Kenny who is working on this to reduce references to the law under the I think that makes

Since I don't think we need to revisit this one.

Yeah Do you want me make a motion? Yes, please so move to approve the indemnification policy as presented subject to final Edits, delegated to member Kenny Largess and Town Council Eric Russell to consolidate references to Mass General Law in the style I should just like to consolidate References to Mass. General Law

Second.

All in favor? Aye. OK, so the next policy is the minutes policy. So the minutes policy really has some straightforward amendments to reflect the practice we've been piloting this past year where the secretary reviews minutes and it also reflects the use of AI in drafting minutes, some minor cleanup. The one question that I received today is very similar. The policy in Procedure 1 restates CMR definition. It's the same question, do we want to leave that in or put in a link? And I'm happy to slim that down and just make that a link. Otherwise, I didn't get any questions on this and if people have questions or comments happy to take them.

My only question is the one hour is there any, and maybe it's for Eric getting all the edits sometimes the edits come late because the feedback goes late to the staff I know I have participated in that particular process but it seems like having the policy say you'll get it one hour before doesn't and I think we found as a board, it doesn't really help us be prepared to approve them if they're more than ministerial.

So is there a legal reason that they couldn't arrive a few hours, like three, four? I think it's open meeting law compliance so we need to post them. Well that's what I was just asking because

Eric, is there a reason we can't get the consolidated minutes with no notes about who made the edit more than an hour ahead of time?

I don't believe so. I think that a consolidated document, as long as it doesn't rise to the level of including the personal comments and rise to the level of a chain deliberation, essentially. I think that's fine. It's not unusual to have a staff person consolidate documents or edits from individuals and circulate that in advance of a meeting. I don't think the one hour limitation is a legal limitation.

But you were asking for... The people who made the comments.

No, I was asking that we don't restrict the policy to one hour before. Sometimes it is an hour before, and I'm going to say sometimes it's because I get my comments in late or someone else does. I don't think we have to lock ourselves into never getting things but for an hour before the meeting that was my I think earlier, if they're available is better for all of us board members.

But I heard you say something different than Eric. What Eric said was the consolidated minutes from staff.

That's what I said Assuming that it's the consolidated with no attribution. With no attributions, okay I just wanted to make sure you were saying the same thing. Because Colette was concerned about open meeting law and I think the open meeting is if our individual comments are all circulated in advance but I think Megan and Corey have been doing a good job collapsing them and putting forth you know group input for consideration at the meeting without saying this one thought this, this one though that but I do think as a group of five we've all had times where we just can't Read it an hour ahead or absorb all the input, and we end up deferring. But I'm assuming sometimes we could get them earlier if we didn't have the one-hour constraint.

Well, why don't we just strike that last clause from approximately to the end? And that leaves some flexibility.

And in practicality we have deferred sets of minutes when they're too complicated and that's no problem.

Okay, so can I make a motion to approve the Minutes Policy as amended?

Second.

All in favor? Aye.

And then the last one is the Marathon BIP policy, so this is really reflecting edits from our discussion at the retreat There's two small ministerial edits that I'm going to do in addition to that. The font is not our standard font and then at the very end of the policy, the approvals are not noted in this standard way we've adopted recently so Those are entirely ministerial, so I never received any other comments on it unless anyone has any questions.

I have one question and I think it's probably correct, and I didn't understand it. Under Schedule E Roman III Is this the correct schedule beginning July 1 of the preceding year? The Select Board will accept applications until September 1st.

It means the preceding year of the Year of the Marathon. So if it's marathon 2027, we start accepting applications July 1st, 2026 So if this policy as edited goes into effect, it will go in place in time for the marathon in April of 2028. So it would go into effect starting July 1st, 2027 when we'd open the application period.

So the point is to open the applications earlier?

Yes, so I know the proceeding year language sounds confusing. It's the preceding calendar year from the upcoming Boston Marathon which is actually the next calendar year for when we receive and review applications.

Okay, so thank you for that. And that's completely new? That is new.

That was Stephanie and myself being responsive to the board's discussion at the June 30th retreat about trying to shift the timeline four to five weeks earlier, to provide more flexibility and to give the board more time to review the submissions

Okay, so I did not have time today to talk to Stephanie about this. September 1st is often before Labor Day and so just given that schedule July one to September Could we shift that into like the Monday after Labor Day? Would that work? It just seems like...

Even Monday, I mean September 15th?

Well it depends on the year. It could be early, but like the Monday after Labor Day to me gives a week of that organizations have hit a normal business schedule. And I'm happy to delegate that to Stephanie, to evaluate It just seemed like it's in a real dead zone for a lot of organizations, operations July 1 to September 1. But it's not my mountain. I would do the Monday after Labor Day

I actually think it's better to have a date. I would say September 15th, as late as it can be this year.

I think an extra 14 days would not dramatically alter the review time or the consolidation of materials for Stephanie.

There may be another date in here that she'll need a few more days on because I think there's a September 15th in here and I'm happy to have delegate that.

Okay, so I'm going to move to approve the marathon bid policy as amended and delegate final minor edits to the timeline to staff.

Second.

All in favor? Aye. Can we release Eric at this point or do we need to? Oh, yes. Yes. Eric thank you.

Thank you very much, Eric. Appreciate your time.

Thanks. Have a good night.

Okay. All right.

So, So the next item on the agenda is the update in the debt management policy. Rachel, would you want to join us? Hi, Rachel.

So joining us is finance director Rachel DeRoche

so let me give a couple of introductory comments or just once you go. So as we had talked about several times in our work plan, we wanted to look at the are finance policies, and in particular talk about adding to the capital financing policy a debt management aspect to that. I think Rachel's memo really outlines what we've been considering and the data that you collected. So I think at this point, I'll just pass over to Rachel and present your memo

Thank you. Good evening, everyone. As Collette alluded to so you all received a memo. Just providing an update just to reiterate we and other capital financing policies. So the thought would be to expand that capital financing policy to also include a debt management component so again this is a driver of the Townwide Capital Planning Committee, Capcom and all of the potential capital projects in the pipeline. Similar to the capital financing policy, where we have some benchmarks like the capital spending ranges. Where we say between the 6.2 and 6.8% of the operating budgeted revenues. That's what we're targeting for capital budgets. It would be helpful to evaluate some metrics and so forth. I think we have a couple of questions here.

So one of them general fund debt service as a percentage of the total budget or total revenue budget. also included in your packet was some information from DLS Department of Local Services, their data banks. So we have comparable data from other communities as of FY25, FY26 data isn't quite available yet but this metrics, this percentage of general fund the general fund debt service as a percentage of your total budget that's something that DLS is already tracking so if we were to look at comparable communities. Well, where does Wellesley fall? So we fall just over 9%, 9.21%. of the total general fund debt service. If you look at, again other triple A rated communities because those are who we're going to use as our benchmark

you're going to see communities like Arlington and Belmont and Dedham, Needham. We have Watertown's an outlier but a lot of those communities Weston slightly below 9%, but a lot of communities are coming in around that 9% of their total general fund debt service. there are a few communities that again most communities already have a debt financing policy but some of them have billed that out to include a debt management component for example, Needham has a policy where they're currently using 10% as their benchmark. They're slightly below there for FY25 at 9.93%. Sudbury has an interesting debt service limit in their policy. They're saying their max would be 10%. they're targeting a range between 5% and 7%. So those are the decisions when it comes to this one metric.

What is our max percentage that we would be comfortable with? Again, we're going to talk about the establishing a capital stabilization fund. But I would envision setting this metric if we were to go with a 10%, for example, when we're looking at the future borrowing of capital projects, if we're going to be exceeding that 10% limit? Is there a threshold or is there a range that we'd want to maintain and for not able to do that would there be a capital stabilization reserve essentially to help kind of shave that peak? So I don't want to get ahead of ourselves but when thinking about a benchmark for total percentage of debt service, that's something we would consider. and then the other potential percentage we would want to consider is the outstanding debt as a percentage of equalized value. So that equalize value, that EQV what is that?

that measure provides a broader assessment of the town's overall debt burden and allows a town to monitor its debt position relative to the size and value of our tax base. So that comes right from Mass General Law Chapter 44, Section 10. Statutorily we can't exceed 5%. We're currently at 1.5% or for FY25, 1.15%. A lot of communities are hovering around that 2%, slightly above 2%. a benchmark of potentially 3% would be a more comfortable target that we'd want to consider. So some of these again, I'm calling them benchmarks. But some of these components we want to build out to include in the debt management policy to help be ranges and targets that we would be looking to as we're considering how we're going to finance all

and other capital projects that are on the horizon.

I did want to allude to jumping back... Rachel, can I just jump in and ask you a question? So I see the outstanding long-term debt as a percentage of equalized values for Foxborough in that same chart that you were looking at? But is that the only one we have to compare to? Am I missing other ones?

In the handout with the DLS data bank, we had filtered by the AAA rated communities. We're starting with Arlington, Belmont, Burlington, Dedham, then Foxborough, Framingham, Milton, Natick, Needham, Sudbury.

Right I just I don't see the numbers for them Oh, I was looking out here.

So one that the left hand... Well those are targets, oh I see it now, sorry. Yeah, the left-hand part's the data, the right-hand parts just some additional notes from reviewing policies.

Okay, now it makes much more sense Sands.

And I think just to chime in to what Rachel's saying is that we've been talking about the fact that we have so much capital on the horizon, and we've struggling with the idea that we can't afford it all. Now, how do you make a measure of what do you afford? What is an appropriate burden? And this has been something we've been talking about since for quite some time but it's been on our work are definitively on our work plan since January this year, possibly even before that. And so like any policy that we have tackled recently you know, the starting place is okay what do our peer towns do? So we get the peer towns from the HR department that these are our peer town and then spent a lot of time Googling, what are their policies? But what was really super helpful is DLS which is Department of Labor Local Services. has an incredible dashboard, a data dashboard.

And when you go to their landing page for the data dashboard in the bottom right I think there's a button for debt and so they've already done this work for us essentially it's very easy to pull down all this data because there that they provide it for us and I think it's in part to help us do things like this and so I think this really gives us real rational data to sort of start, and also in looking at the inner packet there's a links to some helpful data, but also municipal policies of the peer towns. I have read them all. They're really, really interesting. everyone's unique every town does it one thing but there are a lot of consistencies and the two measures that really came out as if you want to manage your debt these are the two measure. You know how much of your your debt over the assets that create the taxes income, that's one measure. By law it's 5%.

What I have seen, what Rachel has seen is that the most common benchmark that other towns use is below 3%. Boston has a pretty clear policy for that. We're pretty comfortable in this 1.15 range, and that's not outside our peers. And I didn't see any of our peer turns over 3%. Have we been above five? You know, it's funny. There's a table at the very back of the ACFER, the Consolidated Financial Statements. that has this table, it can really fluctuate the numbers. I don't know if you've been over five, but the numbers can fluctuate.

What happens if you go over five under Massachusetts law? They make you de-lever somehow.

That's a good question. I'd have to get back to you on that, to see what happens. Again we shouldn't be exceeding it. Let me get back to you on that. That's a really good question.

In our 10-year history, it shows the percentage of the 5% that we've used. It has gone from high 30% down to 18%. So they've never been at the 5%, but we've used up 2 thirds of it before. Yeah. And that was when the schools were financed, essentially. So that's one measure. The other measure is how much of your operating budget are you are you eating up with paying back? I'll leave that discussion more technically to to Rachel, but that is another measure that is often referred in other times policies and the policies that we've seen are 10% or lower. So keep it at 10% max. Some towns have a floor of 2%. So you're making sure you're investing in your assets, but I think that's really for smaller towns that have a harder time with this.

and then what we saw in some of the policies was, we're at 10% but we really want to be between five and seven. And so that's the discussion

Megan, do I remember correctly that years ago we were talking about cash capital and debt service keeping that total under 10%? We were using a 10% number.

Yeah, that's a good rough order of magnitude because that's of your operating budget, right? Exactly. The more you contribute to that, you're detracting from operational services.

So it's the debt portion of that that we're talking about here, so that we can keep enough capacity for operating in future capital.

And I think it's more appropriate for Rachel to speak to that.

That's correct, and that's why we would want to set that benchmark. I think the concern is that if we were in a given year to exceed the 10%. So again, that's where you want a reason why.

And the other thing is keep in mind on an annual basis your equalized valuation fluctuates right? there are certainly years where we gain tremendous value in terms of our equalizer and that goes to that fluctuation in terms the statistics. There's also years where we lose value. Last year is a good example of that, where the valuation in our commercial was down. and so again that fluctuate it'll be up this year based upon some of the work in sales etc. That occurs, and so just understanding just like Leibniz. On the EQV, it is much more it fluctuates more than your standard if you were just looking at your standard valuations for your taxes, right? And so I just raised that as

that might be how that fluctuates might play a factor because there's going to be 10 we're gonna be close to ten percent with some of the major debt exclusions that are coming down the lane in the next few years

So with some debt that you've already taken on, if your EQV goes down, your percentage goes up. Correct. And that you can't control? You just don't want to take on more than you think will exceed the percentage you want to hit, depending on what happens to the EQV.

I do have a spreadsheet, we didn't circulate it yet because I'm not ready for the discussion but you know we have a spread sheet of all 351 towns I wanted to start with our peers, but we can see where everybody is. We should share that and sometimes did exceed the 5%. And I think it's probably because the EQVs dropped and they were pushed out of compliance that way. But I don't know. I haven't audited this. I don' t know the reasons for it So just going back to what are we doing here? one of the discussions we've been having it ourselves, they definitely come up at Capcom about you know we're trying to plan out capital but shouldn't be at the same time be trying put some guardrails around how much is too much and give us some guidance on that front. And so these are two markers that I think are really important, and I think they do work really,

carefully, and an essential partner to this is the Stabilization Fund because there will be times when we might tip over a little bit. And we need the stabilization fund to help us you know, shave the peak anyway in any case you might want to do that but particularly if we're coming to a pinch point where you know we're starting to get up against these levels it's starting to become what we feel might be unaffordable for our residents So therefore, we want to shave it. I think there's three legs of the stool here. There's Capcom. There are these debt management policies and this is a stabilization fund. and they need to work together. And what I like about what Rachel had put together in the memo It really sets out some policy guidance that we need to think about.

I think we need to get some discussion here tonight to see what do we think about these percentages and you know then we can work it into the draft of the policy so that I think the next step is for us to see a draft policy if we think this is a good direction and these are even if we don't agree on the numbers right now we can put it in with them to be determined for the number But if we think this is a good direction, we can start working on the policy to let's see what that would look like and that it's an essential partner with the stabilization fund.

So I think the debt management policy makes a lot of sense. But one thing, this is going to tie into capital committee very much so right? So I think it would be important to model, assume say 10% is the number when you're looking at these proposals.

Yeah.

haven't modeled, like if we're saying 10% and you want to borrow X hundred millions of dollars...

Are we going to be at 30%? So, we started to kind of look at that in terms you know we had that table in the time and financial plan that says here's what these projects will do to your taxes in terms of like dollars and cents for the median and trying to look at that. And then saying, you pay off your debt so then you create capacity within the debt management policy where do these fall in terms of timing and how much of that capacity that you feed up are you eating up again? And so I do think we have to model that out, but I don't know if we could start until we got some direction from the board. But that's something that we'd certainly fold around with a little bit and I think that then it says, okay we're gonna pip it by three cents. Then we need three cents of capital shavings from the stabilization fund

So like I said, I think it's important that we do this but I really think it is important to fully understand the ramifications. And I don't think this is one we should rush into before we actually really think through. This is not selling $35,000 pieces of land. So I wanted to...I think it's a great idea. I just think we should proceed with caution.

Can I ask a clarification question? So on the general fund debt service, that's inside the levy debt, correct? That is... Or is that all debt?

That's excluded. We were looking at the other day, I believe it's excluded debt.

So it's additional debt on the taxpayer? Correct.

Which is why we're wanting to... be sensitive to that impact? Yep.

So, that would be to set a percentage at which point we would not go out for an override or debt exclusion. Is that right? I'm just trying to understand the decision. If we're at 10% and is it debt exclusion plus override or is it just debt exclusion?

so I think it's just debt exclusion.

Okay, so if we're at 10% debt exclusion now we're 9.21 after that point we would not go out for another debt exclusion right, so we're at 9.21

Or you would amend your policy to say for a period of time, you're willing to go above for these purposes.

And so I think you need to be cognizant of... So you're making a decision about debt exclusion? then you say, okay that either brings us to the limit or extends it. Do we wanna do that? And I think that you'd need to write the policy to see and like what we do right now for our reserves policy these are the targets these are the reasons we might want to exceed the targets. You have to write the policy to see, so say for example and I saw this in one policy, you want to generally make it at a 10% but if we have basically like a middle school or high school something like that We might exceed it, but we want to bring it back down in a period of time. And so you have done it for the reserves policy emergency buildup and emergency drawdown. You give yourself guidance with those situations.

because my brain's a little tired right now. How much, how large of project would it take to get us that other .8% to 10%?

Oh, I don't have that number. But speaking to what Kenny was saying, we would need to model that out.

Okay.

Yeah.

Because it doesn't feel like it would be a huge project.

Well, no, keep in mind your debt service is... you're not adding in 400 million or whatever, let's say 100 million. You're adding what the debt service for that particular year would be. But your EQV is likely gonna go up so I did just look to see when the last time our EQV dropped which was like 2012 So we've had gains, substantial gains. And based upon the next—based upon the investment that's coming down the pike I would anticipate we would continue to have gains which For good or for bad, either way you want to look at it creates that capacity.

And my second question is the state has the 5% number right? If we set a more conservative number and exceed it, is that more likely to impact our bond rating than leaving the 5% there and then continuing to manage prudently? just putting it in a policy and then making reasonable rational decisions to exceed your policy I think this board is fiscally prudent. I don't understand the trade-off there because I do believe in being fiscally prudent. I just don't know the value of setting a more conservative guideline

and then exceeding it when specific situations happen, our EQ falls or we have a crisis.

I just don't understand that trade off. Yeah, and I think we talked about this a little bit. Do you want to respond to that?

Well, I was just going to say too, I mean, we would be looking at these as benchmarks, not necessarily hard rules. So again, I think someone mentioned earlier if there's a situation that raises above these percentages, and then are we able to justify that and comfortably say then we will work to bring that percentage down? again I think it's a benchmark because having no target does lead you know we need something to help aid in the decision-making and how we're going to borrow all of these upcoming projects but again I would say was a benchmark.

This was one of the knock-on effects that I want to make sure we understand is it's similar to what Beth said. If you say your range is X and for 10 straight years, you're above X without a good reason, you might still be you might have just set yourself up for failure inadvertently.

I think a good discussion to have with Moody's and Bond Council is Is it better to have a conservative, like a 3%, and you give yourself in your policy rational reasons for exceeding that, and you do that from time to time. Is that better than being right up at 5%? Because I think being right but up at five percent might actually be detrimental. That's a good question. And so this helps us avoid the detrimental situation

I was going to say, I do think it is better to be conservative. We're in the position we're in with the reserves that we have because we were aggressively conservative six years ago and we came out of that first year of COVID so enormously better in terms of our fiscal health than any other municipality in Massachusetts. and it was all because we were conservative. We immediately managed our operating expenses, we projected accurately and carefully what we had to do to conform to what we knew the situation would be We assumed it was going to be long term. So I think that, you know the community I think expects to continue to see conservative projections and conservative self-limiting policies.

on our part, because once it reached $200 million people noticed and they're watching. and the only way we can send the right message is with conservative debt management policies. And I think setting the more conservative numbers.

I completely agree with that, but part of being smart fiscally is to make sure our bond rating stays where it is and we should obviously protect that as much as possible.

So I'm hearing that you want to model out what does this mean in terms of some of the bigger projects we have coming in the future? And I think, I have a sense of what that is. I think we should know that and if... I think the answer's gonna be important for us and we want to know what the impact of potentially exceeding our guideline might be in terms of the bond rating. And is it better to have a policy we exceed or no policy? And then they knock up at the 5% because we essentially don't limit ourselves.

I would also say Bond Council is going to know how to draft the policy to mitigate that problem, so speaking with them will be good.

We can run a draft by them?

Is that enough guidance for now?

It's enough for me. Rachel, is there anything else you want? OK. All right.

Thank you very much, Rachel. Appreciate it.

Do we want Rachel to stay around for the STM article discussion? Do we want to discuss this capital stabilization anymore when Rachel's here is my question? Yeah, let's take that first. Okay So Do you want me to talk about that a little bit? Yeah, go ahead. So we had talked about for quite some time the establishment of a capital stabilization fund and at the last meeting I think we all agreed that was probably one of the most important emergent things we have to do So we have a placeholder on the warrant to establish the capital stabilization fund. The proposal is to establish the fund right now, not to fund it and not to put money into the fund. I did not hear that from the board But I think if we're establishing the capital stabilization fund, we should still work on a policy even if we are not funding it at this point.

And so I wanted to get some feedback from the board in terms of what their thoughts are on the capital stabilization fund. Again, I think this is going to be very similar to our... I would recommend that we... establish a separate policy for the Capital Stabilization Fund. I think it's a different animal from our other reserves, and our other reserve is we have a very good policy that I think works so if you have a reserve policy you know we want to have our reserves at a certain level. We've established when we want them up, when we wanna draw them down for what reasons emergencies the whole thing that's done I think we need a separate policy for the capital stabilization fund but in a similar way we want How do and when do we want to fund it? How do you want to use it? This is a reserve we want. So, we want give ourselves some guidance with that

and I think it's in tandem with recommendations from Capcom, recommendations from the CFO. In terms of we're coming up to our debt management policy limits we'd like to apply the capital stabilization fund to meet those policies and so I think it's I think we need to develop a policy so that we can talk about that as we establish the fund. So, I wanted to get more feedback from the board on that process.

That's something I'm going to have to think about. I wasn't prepared to talk about a policy. Do you think maybe you could send us a couple of questions to think so we could prepare, just like the questions you were just asking? I'm mindful of the time. I know we have other things we want to get through, and I want to give everybody a little time to think about that. It makes sense to have a policy to guide what we do with it and when and how. But I mean, I don't know about anybody else.

So for me, thank you for doing all the thinking on this because I do think it's important for us to identify and define appropriate uses, appropriate funding levels when you withdraw. How we handle it? Do we count it as a form of free cash or do we count separated fund. I feel like it's premature for special town meeting because for me I would prefer we went to town meeting with a fully baked proposal that We're recommending this. This is how it fits in. This the role it plays in our financial picture. This how and when it's used, this is our perceived funding level, this is how we're going to get there and this is

counts or doesn't count against our available reserves. So for me, I think it's a valuable tool and a valuable resource. it's going to cause more questions at special town meeting that we're not ready for and an advisory where I feel very confident we will have a very strong offering at annual.

So I think there are some questions that, I mean, I think we should give ourselves the chance to answer the questions and see how you feel about it. I think if we can, we'll send some questions out to the board. I could even make a draft policy based on look this is what I think the policy should look like and here are the areas that I really think you need to focus on rather than sending your questions I could give you a draft policy to say, this is what it would look like. Here's where you got to focus. That's easy.

I strongly support the Capital Stabilization Fund. My sense from in our meetings with advisory leadership is that there is support for this as well. I think the need for this and the benefit is sufficiently obvious that I think we should make a strong attempt to go forward at special town meeting. I think going within this fiscal year, we have enough happening and there's been enough Testa, Ulfelder, Wellesley, Councilor the tools that we want to have in place to try to manage are successfully completing the capital projects that we need to address. And I think it's far better that they hear this

at special town meeting in advance of annual town meeting than that we wait.

and we can also say special town meeting that we are working on a policy so when a funding request comes to town meeting will have a lot more information on those areas.

So I support the idea of a capital stabilization fund for all the reasons everybody has said. I feel like this is, you said it exactly right Colette, this is an integral piece of what we're trying to do in terms of managing how much money we're spending, right? And so to bring it in pieces to a special town meeting I think is going it's going to cause more questions than we're gonna have answers too, like how does it fit into this? How you're gonna do a debt management policy. how will they all interact together? And unless we have that picture together, I don't think this is so important that I feel like we should get it hit it exactly right at the right time and I don't think rushing it right now is the right thing to do.

So I hear that, and I don't feel like we're rushing it because we've been talking about it for so long. What I do think is we need to get something more concrete in front of us so that we can you know deliberate on that and we've already spent We spent so much time drafting the original financial policy to give a good structure for it. And we use them all the time, so we understand how they work. I'd like to give this board a chance to see a draft policy they see a draft policy for debt management and capital stabilization, and get some feedback on what that looks like. And then decide after that how much more you want to see.

I really think the principle for this is very simple. It's no different than the battery storage at DMLP, it's shaving the peak. Yes, it works in concert with the other policies we're talking about, but I don't think it's integral to in the sense that it's complicated not to bring all of them completed as a package.

But I think if we don't have it today we are in no different position than we are otherwise. In the sense that if, if we borrow money and we think okay you know The debt load is too much right now. We're sitting on $40 million of cash that we could do exactly what we would do out of a capital stabilization fund, maybe three years from now that's not the case and it makes total sense. I'm just saying, I don't think it makes sense to push this forward when there is no actual reason right this second to do that.

So I think part of the reason that we should be doing it is CAPCOM's in its first year, and it's bringing a report to town meeting. And we're going to probably have on that report some recommendations. I think there's an integral part of it that we should be able to, and I'm going to quote one of the advisory board members from their last meeting. The select board needs to think of creative ways to use its reserves. This is it.

Let me put a very fine point on this. If we bring this to the special town meeting, at a time when the schools are gonna ask to take X million dollars out of free cash. This is going to be viewed as an attempt to reduce our free cash so that we don't pay for air conditioning using free cash. And that is going to start a fight that I don't think anybody wants.

but I also think it's incumbent on us to plan properly for what we have in our reserves and so.

I do not disagree with you at all, I'm just saying six months from now I think is a much more appropriate time to have the comprehensive discussion about this entire topic. I completely agree, months ago I said why don't we just take free cash and pay down our debt? Megan made a good point. Well, there's a way to do that and this is essentially it but I've been advocating for this for months so it's not that I'm not for this idea I just think now is the wrong time

To play devil's advocate to that, if we're asked at time meeting well what's your response to a reduction in free cash for one project that we haven't engaged in any planning for. We don't have a response to that because we haven t been able to come back with well, you know, we actually think there's an appropriate way to use free cash as an excess and it s a capital stabilization fund but we don't have anything in the warrant. We don't policy, we've got nothing to talk to you about. We can't respond to that. I think it's actually if that's the case is even more incumbent upon us to do the best we can to bring something to town meeting to be able to say, we actually think that there's better financial planning than drawing down free cash for one project when we have 400 million on the table. and several of them are important projects. We heard tonight, one of them has a lot of health and safety issues. And so I think that actually sharpens the case for us to be prepared for that discussion.

It also seems to me that those kinds of conversations might arise more when we're talking about funding The plan, then establishing it because we're not talking about establishing it. We're saying we want to put it into place so that when we're ready and we have a policy for how we wanna fund it, we will ask for that. Oh, that's what I meant. Not talking about funding it now, thank you. Yeah, I'm tired.

So... I personally feel not ready for this although I think it's a good idea I don't see the urgency of establishing something that's not defined, that's unfunded. because it actually doesn't do anything and it would be exactly the same to establish it and fund it at Annual Town Meeting. as a, you know, this is we're establishing it. We want to put this much money in it. This is our vision for it. to bring to town meeting something that they can recognize the vision for it and also fund it.

That's just how I would prefer that we do it, I don't think we are baked enough to fully explain and envision this at special town meeting. That's my personal opinion. I think, I do recognize Colette you have been thinking about this and working on it for a really long time so that you are I think in a different place than I am because we haven't as a group really delved into it a lot.

I do still think that we owe to town meeting if there's going to be a big discussion of using free cash, we owe them some understanding of our concepts also for using free-cash to stabilize long term debt for multiple projects. I think they owe them that courtesy

So is that why we're doing it now, because of the request for free cash for AC?

This has been on our work plan for more than a year. We were working on this and we had talked repeatedly about the need for this and last there our last meeting we all agreed this was one of the most important things we have to work on I don't understand why now it's not

I want to address the question of air conditioning because there are multiple reasons why free cash might not be the right way to fund this project and the question about funding may come at this special town meeting. If the school motion says design in construction, Town Meeting will be voting on that money now before we ever fund the capital stabilization fund. So I think what we should do My recommendation is to leave it in the warrant, discuss it again because we have another decision to make on what to put into motion and whether to move the motion. I understand Kenny and Beth's concerns, but I also think it is really important to put a stake in the ground. and say we are actively planning for the onslaught of big capital expenses.

I'm not sure I see a way to do that to town meeting without this article. and bringing it to establish and fund doesn't give us the time in between to respond to questions and change the policy. So I'm going to propose we leave it in the warrant and have a couple more discussions on it before we have to vote any motion language. advisory is going to take it up next week anyway.

I was just gonna say, just in terms of timing, knowing that the board would continue to have to deliberate on this We are presenting articles on the 16th which would be bylaw review, the rescinded and the supplemental. Supplementals. but I did ask for this to be at their, like the latest it could be which I believe is October 7th.

It's not coming up yet right and so we'll be better prepared when we go to advisory that's better because Colette will be here too Okay, so that's my proposal. Can we move on to discuss other articles? Okay, Megan the supplementals?

So the supplemental this is a transfer from the treasurer's budget to the police department's budget. To just capture the salary needed to fund Parking Clerk position, which we've pulled from treasurer and are putting into police department. I'll have the exact number for you all at... We'll have some draft articles, excuse me, motions for these quick ones that we have The other is the I'm just going to skip over bylaw review and come back to that one in a second, is the rescind debt. So we have the amount which is approximately $85,000 that we would be rescinding. All related, 85-851, that we Leibniz, and other members of the Board.

Warrant for your approval. But the By-law Review Committee did meet and very similar to the comments Kenny made the other night, we're trying to strike those things that are superfluous to the Mass General Law. So I'm going to turn it over, Kenny, to maybe hit the highlights on this one.

So the idea is it serves two purposes here, this amendment. one is it there's a big one of the threads that runs through all the bylaws is these Descriptions, I would call it of what Massachusetts law said at either currently or one point in time that is best log. It's changed our bylaws are actually wrong so People had expressed though, there's a real concern which people want to be able to read the bylaws and understand what they actually say and mean. So on balance, we've decided that the risk of having our bylaws be inaccurate outweighs the benefit True Clarity in the bylaws for a layman to understand. So what we're going to do is on the website,

put like a summary of whichever provision we're striking from the bylaws and relying simply on Massachusetts law. in a way that's dated and it'll say like, this is accurate as of X day. In one example that we found was the open meeting law. So articles two, 2A and three essentially restate Massachusetts open meeting law with a few exceptions. There's a few provisions that are Wellesley specific, and that's what you see in the amendment. Anything that is left is because it's wellesley-specific so In general, the idea is to bounce everything off mass law except where it's a Wellesley specific provision and keep that in the bylaws. move descriptive information to a website so people have access to this type of information, include hyperlinks in the bylaws themselves.

One thing that Casey had said was nobody actually requests hard copy of these bylaws. Some committees handed them, but almost universally people are accessing them online. That's the idea. And this also allows us, the By-law Review Committee to get in front of town meeting in a way to sort of present itself and say this is who we are doing and this is one example of how we're doing it, and to stress that this is not an attempt to have a town government study. It's to modify the bylaws to update them so any questions?

I just want to say, I watched your meetings and I'm torn between it being the ninth circle of hell and also being like really super interesting. So I thank you for doing that work.

You have to be really detail oriented for this one. Okay, are there any questions on the bylaw review committee article one?

I just want to note, are we going to need more than one piece of paper when we're done for the bylaws because it looks like we just got rid of a bunch.

Not for two, 2A and 3. It's going to be one paragraph, two paragraphs.

Some towns apparently don't make any reference. If it's Massachusetts law they just leave it out.

Okay, all right. So on to the warrant itself we have the draft article list and the draft warrant We have to add White Pond citizen petition is number 16.

So White Pond is in the warrant? It just wasn't in the, when I did the page. Oh yeah right it's not on Testa, Ulfelder, Articles, and I'm happy to share the screen real quick. We also have organized just for board discussion purposes the articles slightly differently this was something that we did towards the end of last year, and the board contemplated reconfiguring the articles to be more grouped. and so we may see a change for annual town meeting as well. So this is a slight variation from how we typically do things, so we have select board human resources, board of library trustees, planning board advisories, school committee and then citizens petitions.

and the only reason I have UK here is until we get this would when it goes to town meeting members will have information on those. It's just unclear to me whether it's borrowing or a majority vote with the application of pre-cash

Can I ask, do we know the status of the Human Resources Board articles? I mean, go ahead.

Those are both going forward at this point. They are. Okay.

One thing on Article 5 in the actual language. Sorry, we're going to open this can back up. It says to establish a capitalization fund blah, blah, and to determine whether an appropriation shall be made into the fund by transferring a sum of money from free cash available.

if you wanted, if the board want it. Let me just stop sharing this so I can share what Kenny's talking about.

Yeah, I think when we discussed this at first it wasn't clear to me whether the board wanted to fund or not. We didn't really get into that. We just talked about establishing it and I said it's up to the board if they want to fund it but that's not what I'm working on.

What I would do is put a semicolon after the word equipment at the end of the fourth line, take out the next phrase and leave in or to take any other action in relation thereto. so that we establish it, but don't move to fund it. I think that's the better message to send to town meeting.

We're not voting on this right now or punting on this one?

We're voting the warrant, to leave it in the warrant.

Okay.

But we have a decision later.

So can we say or take any other action in relation thereto other than making an appropriation?

Well, if we take it out, it wouldn't be in the four corners. Or just take out the whole thing.

Or take any other action in relation there too could mean funding it, couldn't it?

No, because we didn't put funding in it.

Yeah, but you were saying we're going to establish it and then we're gonna say we can take any other action in relation to establishing it which wouldn't I can't imagine funding. It wouldn't be action in relationship there too

can we take out or any other action in relation there too? It's not in every article though.

Could we just eliminate from including the act like put a period after future capital projects

but we're not going to do this. We've got the select board sitting here, we've agreed we're

Right, we're giving the community notice of our intention. And if our attention is not to seek funding, we shouldn't allow the language for seeking- It's what it says. Deleted that.

It's the standard language.

I deleted that sentence that said in to add funding.

It would be a motion, somebody else would make a motion to amend and we would be against it.

and I think that So would you have to be clear, Megan? If you were seeking funding and appropriation, you'd have to make that clear in the warrant article.

Yeah, there's no appropriation requested now. Yeah, if you take to determine whether an appropriation should be made out of it and your motion doesn't say that, you're not asking for an appropriations.

So the fact that it says for the purpose of funding future projects does not... Well, you have to identify the purpose.

No, no. It's establishing it for the purpose of funding future projects. Like there is no ulterior motive here I mean it would just be establishing

I think Tom's point is right. We're not going to fund it. Any other comments on the warrant itself?

All right, may we have a motion for the warrant?

Oops. I lost my motion language. Sorry.

Oh, I have one question. In Article 14 When we're asking for design and construction funds, do we say design and constructions funds? Because Article 14 says architectural and engineering services. It does not say design. and I wasn't sure whether that was clear enough.

Well, this language has been heavily vetted with the school committee and town council to be all inclusive for some of the options that have been considered?

Didn't the original one say design and construction?

No, I think that was the subsequent discussion.

Yeah, this is... I'm not going to touch it. I just didn't know... You do think it's fine for design because it's...

Okay.

That's all I wanted to know. Okay. It's fine

So move to approve the warrant for the November 9, 2026 special town meeting.

Second.

All in favor? Aye. OK.

I do have the things for you to sign.

Are there extensive comments on the minutes? I have no further comments. Can I ask one question?

So Stephanie is going to post it as opposed to... She just certified that she's posted on the website.

Okay. Which has been our standard, we have Casey the constable, yeah. I thought we had a constable.

Oh there's the constables nevermind.

Okay if they're not extensive comments on the minutes we can take them up now

I had one correction that there was just, I sent it to Corey. Let me see. So the only correction was on the edits of June 1626. It said Mopo, Capcom was not looking at the design phase for Mopoe. In the minutes it says construction, it should say design. Sorry, what line Collette? So line 425 and 61626. Capcom is looking at construction they're not looking at design

Any other changes? Okay, motion please. Oh.

Can we talk about the June 30th? Sure. before we were disbanding the task force. And I've made the comment twice and it didn't show up, so...

Hold on, let me just pull that one up, can I? That's okay, was June 30 though? under sections, is that three? Two or three?

Yeah.

Yeah, DE9 task force.

Honestly, I can't remember.

I think we agreed that they were a task force established to complete a specific assignment which they had done very well and that the the responsibilities had been designated to key committees and boards, so therefore there was no active work required of them right now and that so we were going to close out their responsibilities with the, and we had talked about because they've been so terrific finding other committees to use their time and talent. And one of the things Corey told us is that virtually all of them, I think maybe all of are already on other committees and task force but that we would

kind of keep them on our residents that we want to leverage in the future as opportunities come up.

The comment is in there, we didn't vote to disband them.

Well you can't vote because it was an executive director. But the comment is there. Did you see the revised draft? What language did you want to change?

I think it was consensus was reached to discontinue the task force. I mean, it's a logical

Yeah, but I just think that because you can't disband it, I think that's why the language is modified.

It's a working group that the executive director established.

It not a select board task force.

I actually think Corey recommended and agreed that the task force had completed its job. And he's the point person on it, right? Do I have that right?

He says a suggestion was made to disband the task force on the basis that its original mission was completed. and that implementation of the audit recommendation should now sit with individual town departments That's true. If we don't have the authority to disband it, why say we agreed to disban it?

Again, the minutes reflect what was said not what we have the authority or not to do. So if we agreed to that whether it was right or wrong, it should say it in the minutes.

Fine with me.

There is a transcript of this somewhere, so we should look back at that and say what did we say.

Okay, we'll hold June 30th.

I would say sometimes if we see something and sometimes people see things in the meetings that are incorrect we have not been including that in minutes because it then makes this record that people look back at and like, oh you said you'd do this thing or whatever it was. Or you said this thing which is incorrect. And so when something is factually incorrect because we don't have to have every statement, you get the general gist of the meaning. We've been trying not to do that because occasionally, not that often but occasionally those things do come up and if you don't correct it in the moment but you realize afterwards that was incorrect, but you get the general gist of the discussion. But you don t memorialize factually incorrect information.

So was the edit suggested just that there was consensus to disband the task force on the base? I mean, I'm fine making that edit.

It's fine. Right.

OK. So move to approve the minutes of June 2, 2026, June 16, 2028 June 30, 2036 and July 15, 2027 as amended. Second. All in favor? Aye.

I want to make a couple of comments on the chair's report because Tom and I had started to meet with the other board chairs. First of all, on the sustainability summit on the Sustainability Summit idea. Colette and I both had long talk with Lisa Ulney, Chair of the Climate Action Committee She indicated, she corrected a misunderstanding that at least I had and maybe others. That Climate Action does not intend to go to town meeting to reaffirm their mission It may have been a miscommunication, but they may be looking to amend the municipal sustainable building guidelines. We agreed to defer any kind of larger roundtable discussion on sustainability for now. and reevaluate if and when a clear need for the conversation arose. So Climate Action will continue with their work plan, and Kenny continues as their liaison

and we'll keep the board apprised of anything the board needs to know. Tom and I met with Planning Board Chair Mark Charney and Planning Director Rob Wachilla last week Rob indicated that he had contacted a few municipalities. We're following up on which municipalities those are, that had recently completed comprehensive plans and asked them asked them what the plans had cost as opposed to asking consultants what they charged and the STM article has reduced the amount requested from $400,000 to $350,000. Mark also said that in addition to the comprehensive plan, they intended to do some area studies but didn't give any details on what those might be. I asked them whether they were going to do a corridor study that we had discussed from Warren to River Street and the Newton Line.

Testa, given new development and all the challenges at that intersection. And both he and Rob made a note of that. I'm not sure it was on their radar but they which hasn't started.

No, but is that the same one?

I don't know what they were planning to do within whatever their Lower Falls study was Purview was. I don't know whether the traffic, the corridor was part of it or not but we raised it as an issue for various reasons. I also asked him whether he was thinking of doing area studies, whether they might be considered for specific analysis within the comprehensive plan but it's apparently a little too early to nail those down. and Tom and I will try to reestablish those monthly meetings with planning going forward. We met again with advisory chair Mark Benjamin and vice-chairs Mariana Vinicore and Jay Bach. They will have a session tomorrow on writing for the advisory report, it's a new kind of meeting for them.

, talk about STM Prep and their article for STM requesting a bylaw to allow digital delivery of their report, to ease time pressure from the mailing which is really and they will coordinate with Kenny to discuss their bylaw amendment with the By-Law Review Committee. Next week on the 16th, as Megan said they will consider select board articles except the capital stabilization plan. Testa, Ulfelder, Wellesley, Councilor Sullivan Woods. Megan will present the others and I don't know how many of us plan to go. I'm planning to go, I think Tom's planning to but we're not gonna have any deliberations so I don' t think we need to post a meeting and then the following week on the 23rd advisory we'll take up White Pond and the HR articles.

and on the 30th, they'll take up the citizen petition on air conditioning and planning. And on the sixth, they will take up capital stabilization. So that's I think the last night they're taking presentations Schools tonight is talking about track and field updates. I'm sure you've all seen the team room building was delivered, and they're connecting the hookups in the utilities D.P.W has apparently identified that the turf field will need to be replaced in the next few years, so Dave Cohen's gonna write a PPF for Capcom DPW is also working on the Sprague bathrooms and plans for the scoreboard are moving forward on Sprag. They're having extensive discussions on the mass core curriculum requirements which hasn't been finalized through the legislature yet, but which will change significantly requirements for graduation.

Adding world language, art, math and some other requirements and they're having their first discussion on the composition, charge and deliverables for what they are now calling the school facilities long-term planning. Long term plan. Testa, Ulfelder, Wellesley, Councilor and that's it. We'll hold a select board meeting on the 29th at 530 prior to the all-board. That's the only unusual meeting we have. We may need a meeting on 22nd, I know Colette is going to be away So if you could just hold that for now, that might be helpful. It's not ideal but we may have to do that. And with that, we'll move into Executive Session.

I request a motion to enter into Executive session to conduct strategy with respect to negotiations with the Wellesley Patrol Officers Association, Wellesleys Superior Officers, Wellesy Firefighters, IAFF Local 1795 Wellsley Free Library Staff Association, and Wellesley Free Libraries Supervisors Association.

Winter, Executive Session under Mass General Law Chapter 30A Subsection 21 A3 to conduct strategy with respect to negotiations with the Wellesley Patrol Officers Association, Wellesleys Superior Officers, Wellesy Firefighters, IAFF Local 1795. Wellsley Free Library Staff Association, Wellsley Freelibrary Supervisors Association and to invite Megan Jopp, Corey Testa Dolores Hamilton, Scott Whittemore and Steve Mortarelli, Jamie Jurgensen and Marla Robinson 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

Kenny, Collette, Beth, Tom and I vote aye as well. Thank you everybody and good night.